page_title: Degenerate Art Exhibition
section_title: Subsequent events
hierarchical_section_title: Degenerate Art Exhibition / Subsequent events
caption_attribution_description: For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Entartete Kunst, Ausstellung der NSDAP im Haus der Kunst am Königsplatz Information added by Wikimedia users.English: Entartete Kunst, Ausstellung der NSDAP im Haus der Kunst am Königsplatz, 1938. Publisher Berek, Berlin. Editor Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei.
context_page_description: The Degenerate Art Exhibition was an art exhibition organized by Adolf Ziegler and the Nazi Party in Munich from 19 July to 30 November 1937. The exhibition presented 650 works of art, confiscated from German museums, and was staged in counterpoint to the concurrent Great German Art Exhibition. The day before the exhibition started, Hitler delivered a speech declaring "merciless war" on cultural disintegration, attacking "chatterboxes, dilettantes and art swindlers". Degenerate art was defined as works that "insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill". One million people attended the exhibition in its first six weeks. A U.S. critic commented "there are probably plenty of people—art lovers—in Boston, who will side with Hitler in this particular purge".
context_section_description: Another Degenerate Art Exhibition was hosted a few months later in Berlin, and later in Leipzig, Düsseldorf, Weimar, Halle, Vienna and Salzburg, to be seen by another million or so people. Many works were later sold off, although interested buyers were scarce and prices dropped drastically with the addition of such a large quantity of works to the art market: Goebbels wrote of them changing hands between U.S. collectors for "ten cents a kilo", although some "foreign exchange ... will go into the pot for war expenses, and after the war will be devoted to the purchase of art." Almost 5,000 were burned on 20 March 1939.
  In 1991, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art staged a forensic reproduction of the exhibition.
  300 of the exhibited works were apparently purchased or otherwise appropriated by art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt who had reported them destroyed by bombardments; however, they resurfaced when details of the Gurlitt Collection which had been inherited by his son Cornelius were made known in 2013. Cornelius Gurlitt left the collection to the Museum of Fine Arts Bern in Switzerland which in November 2017 exhibited a number of them in an exhibition entitled "Gurlitt: Status Report: Degenerate Art - Confiscated and Sold".
  In 2014, the Neue Galerie New York staged Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, an exhibition bringing together paintings and sculptures from the 1937 exhibition along with films and photos of the original installations, promotional and propaganda materials and some surviving Nazi-approved art from the official exhibition set up to contrast with the modernist and avant-garde works the Nazis considered "degenerate".
  The Museum of Modern Art has now established a digital exhibit that showcases artwork from the Degenerate Art Exhibition. MoMA highlights a collection of work that were deemed as "degenerate art" and removed from German state-owned museums by the Nazi government.
caption: Entartete Kunst, poster for the 1938 exhibition
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