Amazon.com
When the National Socialists came to power in Germany in the early 1930s, one of their most vigorous campaigns was against modernist and avant-garde art. Some 650 works by such renowned artists as Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall, Otto Dix, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee were removed from German museums and assembled in a traveling exhibition that the Nazis called "Degenerate Art." Fifty years later, the L.A. County Museum of Art reconstructed the notorious exhibition. This catalogue not only recreates the original show, but contains exhaustively researched essays on such topics as the Nazi ideals of beauty and resistance efforts by some German museums. Biographical information is available for each persecuted artist as well as rare photographs, and there is a room by room survey of and guide to the 1939 exhibition with a new English translation. Artistic expression is still under attack by such groups as the NEA, making this book strikingly relevant today.
From Library Journal
Recently seen in Los Angeles and traveling to Chicago, "Degenerate Art" is an exhibit attempting to re-present works still available from the 1937 exhibit of the same name mounted by the Nazis--an exhibit that redefined the aesthetics behind modern art. Though this book, which accompanies the exhibition, contains 150 pages of reproductions and biographies of the artists, it is not merely an exhibition catalog. It is a history book that attempts to put those works in the context of the original show and further place that exhibition in the context of the Nazis' overall attempts to control "German" attitudes by redefining cultural models. Documents (the floorplan of the exhibition, the original catalog with translation) and essays on events antecedent and tangential to the notorious show form a now particularly relevant history of government-valued artistic merit. An essential work on art and political manipulation for art and history collections.
- Eric Bryant, "Li brary Journal"
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Eric Bryant, "Li brary Journal"
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
