closed building “violate” the bulky frame’s space. Additional disloca-
tion occurs in the traditional museum identification label, which
Ernst displaced into a cutaway part of the frame. Handwritten, it an-
nounces the work’s title (taken from a poem Ernst wrote before he
painted this), adding another note of irrational mystery.
As is true of many Surrealist works, the title,Two Children Are
Threatened by a Nightingale,is ambiguous and relates uneasily to
what the spectator sees. The viewer must struggle to decipher con-
nections between the image and words. When Surrealists (and
Dadaists and Metaphysical artists before them) used such titles, they
intended the seeming contradiction between title and picture to
throw the spectator off balance with all expectations challenged.
Much of the impact of Surrealist works begins with the viewer’s sud-
den awareness of the incongruity and absurdity of what the artist
pictured. These were precisely the qualities that subjected the
Dadaists and Surrealists to public condemnation and, in Germany
under Adolf Hitler (FIG. 35-48), to governmental persecution (see
“Degenerate Art,” above).Europe, 1920 to 1945 945A
lthough avant-garde artists often had to endure public ridicule
both in Europe and America (see “The Armory Show,” page
934), they suffered outright political persecution in Germany in the
1930s and 1940s. The most dramatic example of this abuse was the
infamous Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition that Adolf
Hitler (1889–1945) and the Nazis mounted in 1937.
Hitler aspired to become an artist himself and produced numer-
ous drawings and paintings. These works reflected his firm belief that
19th-century realistic genre painting represented the zenith of Aryan
art development. Accordingly, he denigrated anything that did not
conform to that standard—in particular, avant-garde art. Turning his
criticism into action, Hitler ordered the confiscation of more than
16,000 artworks he considered “degenerate.” To publicize his con-
demnation of this art, he directed his minister for public enlighten-
ment and propaganda, Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945), to organize a
massive exhibition of this “degenerate art.” Hitler defined it as works
that “insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form, or
simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill.”* The
term “degenerate” also had other specific connotations at the time.
The Nazis used it to designate supposedly inferior racial, sexual, and
moral types. Hitler’s order to Goebbels to target 20th-century avant-
garde art for inclusion in this exhibition aimed to impress on viewers
the general inferiority of the artists producing this work. To make this
point even more dramatically, Hitler mandated the organization of
another exhibition, the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great Ger-
man Art Exhibition), which ran concurrently and presented an ex-
tensive array of Nazi-approved conservative art.
Entartete Kunstopened in Munich on July 19, 1937, and included
more than 650 paintings, sculptures, prints, and books. The exhibition
was immensely popular. Roughly 20,000 viewers visited the show
daily. By the end of its four-month run, it had attracted more than two
million viewers, and nearly a million more viewed it as it traveled
through Germany and Austria. Among the 112 artists whose works
the Nazis presented for ridicule were Ernst Barlach, Max Beckmann,
Otto Dix, Max Ernst, George Grosz, Vassily Kandinsky, Ernst Kirchner,
Paul Klee, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Franz Marc, Emil Nolde, and Kurt
Schwitters. A memorable photograph (FIG. 35-48) recorded Hitler vis-
iting the exhibition, pausing in front of the Dada wall where the
organizers initially deliberately hung askew works by Schwitters,
Klee, and Kandinsky. No avant-garde or even modernist artist was
safe from Hitler’s attack. (Only six of the artists in the exhibition
were Jewish.) Indeed, despite his status as a charter member of the
Nazi Party, Emil Nolde received particularly harsh treatment. The
Nazis confiscated more than 1,000 of Nolde’s works from German
museums and included 27 of them in the exhibition, more than for
almost any other artist.
Clearly, artists needed considerable courage to defy tradition
and produce avant-garde art. Especially in Germany in the 1930s
and 1940s, in the face of Nazi persecution, commitment to the
avant-garde demanded a resoluteness that extended beyond issues of
aesthetics and beyond the confines of the art world. This persecution
exacted an immense toll on these artists. Kirchner, for example, re-
sponded to the stress of Nazi pressure by destroying all his wood-
blocks and burning many of his works. A year later, in 1938, he com-
mitted suicide. Beckmann and his wife fled to Amsterdam on the
exhibit’s opening day, never to return to their homeland. Although
Entartete Kunst was just a fragment of the tremendous destruction of
life and spirit Hitler and the Nazis wrought, Hitler’s insistence on
suppressing and discrediting this art dramatically demonstrates art’s
power to affect viewers.* Stephanie Barron,“Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi
Germany (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991), 19.Degenerate Art
ART AND SOCIETYImage not available due to copyright restrictions