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Hitler’s War on Art and the Legacy of Mocking Artists
“My five-year old could have made that!”
How many times have you heard this from some dismissive museum attendee or under a social media post? It’s a tale as old as time, viewers without context or background information or just their own biases declaring a work of art as useless or wrong. Have you ever wondered where that judgemental impulse comes from? Would you be surprised to know that it is a form of social and cultural control?
Sometimes that control is as casual as something being considered “cringe,” or as formal as the deliberate actions of a Fascist government.
For context: In 1937, Nazi soldiers were ordered by Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels to raid the museums and galleries of Germany, seizing any art that didn’t conform with SS ideals of what art should be. World-renowned artists that had contributed to budding art movements had their masterpieces stripped from public view and transported to warehouses in what was meant to inspire nationwide laughter at these artists who dared to create work that was not meant to glorify the Third Reich. See also: North Korea.
The “Entartete Kunst” (literally translated as “degenerate art”) was an art show designed to mock the contributions of abstract artists, most of whom were Jewish. Before the rise of fascism…
