122 J.-A. PEMBERTON
history of religion at the Imperial University of Tokyo, stated that he
opposed the text of the concluding statement (which had been read
out by George Oprescu, a professor of art history at the University of
Bucharest and a former secretary of the ICIC, immediately following
Madariaga’s concluding argument), and asked that his opposition to it
be registered.^131
Just one day before the Paris conversation concerning freedom of
expression commenced, an especially brutal assault on culture was pub-
licly launched in Germany. July 19 saw the opening of a large-scale
exhibition in Germany under the heading of Degenerate art (that is,
Entartete Kunst—an expression which, Jeanne-Marie Portevin records,
Kandinsky and his wife found ‘diabolique’), at the Archäologisches
Institut of Munich’s Hofgarten.^132 Since 1933, exhibitions referred to
as Chambers of Artistic Horror (Schreckenskammer der Kunst) had been
held throughout the Reich in order to show to the German people the
‘products of the “German cultural ruin”’.^133 However, the Munich exhi-
bition, which ran until November 30, was on a much vaster scale than
the previous exhibitions (all of which the Degenerate art exhibition now
absorbed), perhaps reflecting the fact that the Reich’s artistic policy had
been executed less briskly than had been its policy on literature.^134
Following a decree by Goebbels on June 30, 1937, a confiscation
commission had proceeded to confiscate an estimated seventeen thou-
sand paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints, representing the work of
fourteen thousand artists, from collections throughout the country.^135
Portevin notes that the seven hundred works finally selected for display
(^131) Ibid., 7, 197.
(^132) Nina Kandinsky, n.d., quoted in Jeanne-Marie Portevin, ‘Purification esthétique,’
in Télérama hors série: Kandinsky—Rétrospective au Centre Pompidou (2009), 39, and
Portevin, ‘Purification esthétique,’ 38–9.
(^133) Portevin, ‘Purification esthétique,’ 38. See also Jacqueline Strecker, ‘“Degenerate”
Art,’ in Jacqueline Strecker, ed., The Mad Square: Modernity in German Art 1910– 37
(Sydney: Thames & Hudson, 2011), 275. Exhibition catalogue.
(^134) Palmier, Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America, 719.
For the opening and closing dates of the Degenerate art exhibition, see Uwe Fleckner, ‘In
the Twilight of Power: The Contradictions of Art Politics in National Socialist Germany,’
in Strecker, ed., The Mad Square: Modernity in German Art 1910– 37 , 255.
(^135) Portevin, ‘Purification esthétique,’ 38–39. See also Fleckner, ‘In the Twilight of
Power: The Contradictions of Art Politics in National Socialist Germany,’ 259.