“Degenerate” Art. A French/German Cross-History

In conjunction with the exhibition ““Degenerate” Art. Le procès de l’art moderne sous le nazisme” on view at the Musée national Picasso-Paris from February 18 to May 25, 2025, and the Répertoire des acteurs du marché de l’art en France sous l’Occupation (RAMA) program of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art, the Musée national Picasso-Paris, the Institut national d’histoire de l’art, the Musée d’art et d’histoire du judaïsme, the German Center for Art History (DFK Paris) have organized an international colloquium on this theme in Paris on March 27 and 28, 2025.

The Nazi term “degenerate art” refers to a public campaign of exclusion, defamation and destruc-tion of modern art, spanning more than a decade. The term “degeneracy” appeared at the end of the 18th century in various disciplines (natural history, medicine, anthropology, art history, etc.) until it crystallized at the heart of the National Socialist “worldview”, and served as a vehicle for the deployment of racist and anti-Semitic theories, particularly in the field of art history.

During the campaign against “degenerate art”, some 20,000 modern works were seized by the National Socialist regime from German public collections and removed from museums. After the enactment of the “Law on the Confiscation of the Products of Degenerate Art” in May 1938, it be-came clear that these works would not be returned to their original repositories.

Destruction took place in May 1936 at the Berlin Nationalgalerie, the first institution to acquire a Cézanne painting, where forty-four canvases were reduced to ashes in the boiler room of the former Kronprinzen-Palais; and around 5,000 works were burnt in the courtyard of Berlin’s main railway station on March 30, 1939, as “restant non exploitable”, according to a terminology specific to the language of the Third Reich.

A significant proportion of the so-called “degenerate” works, considered “exploitable”, were sold at the sale organized by the Fischer gallery in Lucerne on June 30, 1939, and above all via four dealers who handled some 9,000 works – Hildebrand Gurlitt, Karl Bucholz, Ferdinand Möller, Bernhard Böhmer – and who themselves relied on a network of numerous intermediaries.

The attack on modern art culminated in the defamatory “Entartete “Kunst”” [Degenerate “Art”] exhibition, held in Munich in 1937, which included over 600 works confiscated by the Nazis, by a hun-dred artists, from Otto Dix to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, from Wassily Kandinsky to Emil Nolde, from Paul Klee to Max Beckmann, from Otto Freundlich to Kurt Schwitters. This propaganda event was part of a series of exhibitions that began in 1933 (Dresden, Mannheim, Karlsruhe, etc.) and continued in Germany and Austria until 1944.

The symposium drawed on recent research and encourages the participation of young researchers. In particular, it aimed to explore the echoes of the “degenerate” art campaign in France, the parallels between the French and German situations, the repercussions on artists and gallerists in France, and the positions of French critics and museum curators.