Crowds flock to Neue Galerie in N.Y. to see art condemned as ‘degenerate’ by Nazis in 1937

 

In March, shortly after the Neue Galerie in New York opened its exhibition “Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937,” lines were forming outside the ornate Fifth Avenue mansion the museum calls home. The gallery recently announced a two-month extension of the show — through Sept. 1 — in response to record-breaking attendance. Visits to the exhibition have been twice the gallery’s average over the past few years, and the catalogue is selling at four times the usual rate.

 

The exhibition explores one of the most notorious chapters in art history, the exhibition of “Degenerate Art” organized by the Nazis in Munich in 1937 to mock modernist trends in art and further their anti-Semitic and anti-communist ideology. Like a larger exhibition in Los Angeles in 1991, the Neue Galerie show features some of the work that was in the original Nazi-organized show. The subject is fascinating, but so, too, is the strange, and ongoing, cultural rebranding project that it furthers: A label that was once used to discredit art has become a gold standard for authenticity, emotional depth and high quality.

 

In the mid-1990s, for example, the Decca recording label had considerable critical success with a series of CDs — branded as “Entartete Musik” — devoted to the music of composers the Nazis considered degenerate. And late last year, when a reclusive German art collector named Cornelius Gurlitt was discovered in possession of an astonishing trove of art, including works by “degenerate” artists such as Otto Dix, Franz Marc and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, part of the fascination undoubtedly had to do with the status given these artists by the murderous philistines who hated their work.

 

There is something more here than mere lingering fascination with the Nazis. There is nostalgia, too, for a way of looking at art that is confident in its judgment. “Degenerate Art” seems to invite visitors to do what is all but impossible at any exhibition of contemporary art today: travel quickly from the surface of the work, its subject and style, to judgment about its larger cultural and political worth. In an age of almost universal confusion about the direction and status of art, the Neue Galerie offers an alluring invitation: Here, perhaps, we might enjoy an oasis of moral clarity about the connection between art and politics.

 

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