News Art Blog

For all the ugliness of Nazism in thought and deed, it’s striking to consider just how much they contemplated the arts. From the failed painter Adolf Hitler to the failed architect Albert Speer to the failed art collector Herman Göring, the Nazis spent an inordinate amount of time focused on what art was good and what art was bad. But “bad” wasn’t strong enough a term. “Degenerate art” irked them so much they actually staged an entire art exhibit around art they deemed a sign of degenerate morals, mental illness, and, of course, Judaism. The exhibit, titled Entartete Kunstin German, marked the end of Europe as the center of modern art and spread both the artists and their ideas around the world in a cultural diaspora of unprecedented proportions, thus accelerating a process that might have taken decades otherwise (if at all). Did the Nazis inadvertently globalize modern art? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Did the Nazis Inadvertently Globalize ModernArt?"


[Image: Nazi Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels views the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich, Germany, in 1937. Image source.]