The Regeneration of ‘Degenerate Art’ – NYTimes.com http://feedly.com/k/1lOklSe
By FRANCIS X. CLINES
April 24, 2014
Even on the coolest mornings, the long and patient lines of people outside the Neue Galerie, a small gem of a New York museum, have testified to the unintended consequences of Adolf Hitler’s dictatorial tastes in art. “As for the degenerate artists,” the Nazi leader decreed as he rose to power, “I forbid them to force their so-called experiences upon the public.” He targeted them as criminals — modern masters like Otto Dix, Max Beckmann and George Grosz — and obsessively purged them from sight.
Almost eight decades later, the public’s eagerness to view the suppressed art is palpable among those awaiting admission to the Neue Galerie’s exhibition of “Entartete Kunst” — Degenerate Art — a vivid recreation of the fascist times suffered by Germany’s avant-garde artists as they were pilloried and driven to ground during World War II. There is heartbreak flashing about the walls of the show signaled by the empty frames of masterworks that were seized and never reappeared from the war’s ashes; by the stricken self-portrait of a painter driven to suicide; by the proud stare into eternity from another who painted himself as a bold “degenerate” indeed. Art’s triumph is on display as well in some 20 works recovered after the Nazis fell and now free for all to see, as their creators intended.
The exhibition begins with a wall-size photo of Hitler’s crowded, much-publicized 1937 show of condemned art — a pop propaganda stratagem to excoriate Jews and Bolsheviks as cultural aesthetes threatening the nation. The photo of obedient Berliners scowling over the “degenerates” contrasts with another of crowds of Jews in Vienna desperately trying to flee Hitler.
Business is brisk at the museum as throngs — inspired in part by headlines about a cache of 1,200 artworks from the Nazi-era crackdown recently found hidden in Germany and a recent movie about that time, “The Monuments Men” — file in from Fifth Avenue to look back upon extraordinary relics of those apocalyptic days.
“The crowds!” said Carol Goldman, a museum docent, appreciating curious visitors after explaining to a group how truly un-degenerate the art was and will always be. “People are receptive; they are moved.”
One visitor had a question: “If the artists’ works became worthless in Germany, why didn’t Western countries buy them up?”
Ms. Goldman explained there was no easy way to do that, especially with four German art dealers authorized to monopolize the regime’s confiscation policy — a policy that only made modern German art more prized elsewhere, as at the Neue Galerie. “There’s the conundrum,” Ms. Goldman said of Hitler’s mark on the art world.
