Has any polit­i­cal par­ty in West­ern his­to­ry had as vexed a rela­tion­ship with art as the Ger­man Nation­al Social­ists? We’ve long known, of course, that their uses of and opin­ions on art con­sti­tut­ed the least of the Nazi par­ty’s prob­lems. Still, the artis­tic pro­cliv­i­ties of Hitler and com­pa­ny com­pel us, per­haps because they seem to promise a win­dow into the mind­set that result­ed in such ulti­mate inhu­man­i­ty. We can learn about the Nazis from the art they liked, but we can learn just as much (or more) from the art they dis­liked — or even that which they sup­pressed out­right.

Cur­rent events have brought these sub­jects back to mind; this week, accord­ing to The New York Times, “Ger­man author­i­ties described how they dis­cov­ered 1,400 or so works dur­ing a rou­tine tax inves­ti­ga­tion, includ­ing ones by Matisse, Cha­gall, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picas­so and a host of oth­er mas­ters,” most or all pre­vi­ous­ly unknown or pre­sumed lost amid all the flight from Nazi Ger­many. Hitler him­self, more a fan of racial­ly charged Utopi­an real­ism, would­n’t have approved of most of these new­ly redis­cov­ered paint­ings and draw­ings.

In fact, he may well have thrown them into 1937’s Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion. Four years after it came to pow­er,” writes the BBC’s Lucy Burns, “the Nazi par­ty put on two art exhi­bi­tions in Munich. The Great Ger­man Art Exhi­bi­tion [the Große Deutsche Kun­stausstel­lung] was designed to show works that Hitler approved of — depict­ing stat­uesque blonde nudes along with ide­alised sol­diers and land­scapes. The sec­ond exhi­bi­tion, just down the road, showed the oth­er side of Ger­man art — mod­ern, abstract, non-rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al — or as the Nazis saw it, ‘degen­er­ate.’ ” This Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion (Die Ausstel­lung “Entartete Kun­st”), the much more pop­u­lar of the two, fea­tured Paul Klee, Oskar Kokosch­ka, Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, Max Beck­mann, Emil Nolde and George Grosz. There the Nazis quar­an­tined these con­fis­cat­ed abstract, expres­sion­is­tic, and often Jew­ish works of art, those that, accord­ing to the Führer, “insult Ger­man feel­ing, or destroy or con­fuse nat­ur­al form or sim­ply reveal an absence of ade­quate man­u­al and artis­tic skill” and “can­not be under­stood in them­selves but need some pre­ten­tious instruc­tion book to jus­ti­fy their exis­tence.” And if that sounds rigid, you should see how that Nazis dealt with jazz.

Note: For more on this sub­ject, you can watch the 1993 doc­u­men­tary Degen­er­ate Art.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

The Nazis’ 10 Con­trol-Freak Rules for Jazz Per­form­ers: A Strange List from World War II

Joseph Stal­in, a Life­long Edi­tor, Wield­ed a Big, Blue, Dan­ger­ous Pen­cil

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

One hun­dred years ago, Amer­i­ca had only just begun talk­ing about “avant garde” art. Before the famous “Armory Show,” no one was even using the term; after it, Unit­ed States’ art-watch­ers had many rea­sons to. It’s what they saw on dis­play at the exhi­bi­tion, mount­ed by two dozen artists entire­ly with­out pub­lic fund­ing. Prop­er­ly called The Inter­na­tion­al Exhi­bi­tion of Mod­ern Art, the show got its pop­u­lar name by start­ing out in the 69th Reg­i­ment Armory on Lex­ing­ton Avenue in New York. It then moved to Chica­go and Boston, pro­vok­ing shock, dis­missal, and some­times even appre­ci­a­tion across the East Coast and Mid­west. A lit­tle Van Gogh, Gau­guin, Cezanne, Picas­so, Matisse, and Duchamp can do that to you.

Or at least, they do that to you if you live in 1913 and have nev­er seen such bold destruc­tion and rein­ven­tion of visu­al art’s estab­lished forms. To mark the Armory Show’s cen­ten­ni­al, the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go has recre­at­ed its view­ing expe­ri­ence on the web. There you can explore the gal­leries as Chicagoans actu­al­ly saw them a cen­tu­ry ago, albeit in black-and-white. The site also pro­vides much in the way of con­text, offer­ing arti­cles on the exhi­bi­tion’s gen­e­sis, pro­gram notes, lega­cy, and more. You can learn more about the impact of the Armory Show in this recent NPR piece, which quotes Muse­um of Mod­ern Art cura­tor Leah Dick­er­man on the sub­ject: “It’s this moment in time, 100 years ago, in which the foun­da­tions of cul­tur­al prac­tice were total­ly reordered in as great a way as we have seen. And that this marks a reorder­ing of the rules of art-mak­ing — it’s as big as we’ve seen since the Renais­sance.”

via @coudal

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Icon­ic Artists at Work: Rare Videos of Picas­so, Matisse, Kandin­sky, Renoir, Mon­et, Pol­lock & More

Free: The Guggen­heim Puts 65 Mod­ern Art Books Online

Down­load Hun­dreds of Free Art Cat­a­logs from The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

MoMA Puts Pol­lock, Rothko & de Koon­ing on Your iPad

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.