"Judge for Yourselves!"-The "Degenerate Art" Exhibition as Political Spectacle

Abstract

Volk, come and judge for yourselves!I Thus Adolf Ziegler, National Socialist president of the Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts, opens the 1937 Munich exhibition Degenerate Art. What they could 'judge for themselves is clear enough-a quickly assembled selection of over six hundred modernist works of art seized from museums throughout Germany. Just what kind of an event Ziegler invites the German Volk to take part in has proven, however, a little more difficult to decipher. Although the exhibition can clearly be classified as a species of propagandathe fascist art form nonpareil-when critics turn their attention to Degenerate Art they tend to forget they are examining propaganda and concentrate instead on what the Nazis do, or fail to do, as curators of an exhibition of modernist art. As such, Degenerate Art is judged extraordinarily incompetent: the pictures are hung too closely together; works are incorrectly attributed and labeled; groupings meant to represent a single artistic movement (say Dadaism) include works from quite unrelated movements (like Der Blaue Reiter); quotations from artists and critics are displayed without regard for either their accuracy or their original contexts. Through this flurry of corrections postwar art historians express their desire to overcome the past. Yet reprimanding these art-historical errors does not help us understand the spectacle and function of Degenerate Art. Whatever else they reveal about the function of modernist art in Nazi propaganda, the mistakes must also be seen as integral to the exhibition, displays by the National Socialist state of its power to exercise its will with impunity. Casual errors flaunt the speed with which this state was able to expropriate works from museums all over Germany so as to erect the exhibition in less than three weeks. Furthermore, the main targets of the exhibition are precisely those critics, dealers, and museum directors who claim to comprehend this