L'Art "dégénéré" : Le procès de l'art moderne sous le nazisme

Exhibition at the Musée Picasso, Paris, 18 February - 25 May 2025

Organised in Munich in 1937 by the Nazi regime, the propaganda exhibition ‘Entartete Kunst’ brought together more than 600 works of avant-garde art in a deliberately degrading scenography. The political and cultural context led to the confiscation of over 20,000 works of art, including those by Marc Chagall, Vincent Van Gogh and Pablo Picasso, considered a symbol of the ‘degenerate artist’.

Through reproductions of emblematic works, including those by Wassily Kandinsky, Otto Dix, Paul Klee and Max Beckmann, and rare archives, this catalogue traces the history of the 1937 exhibition. It examines the use of the nineteenth-century concept of ‘degeneration’, which became a central tool of the racist and anti-Semitic ideology of National Socialism, and its impact on the history of art. Richly illustrated and documented, the book offers an in-depth reading of the issues at stake in the exhibition and traces the trajectories of the persecuted works. It also puts the mechanisms of propaganda and cultural spoliation into perspective, while examining their contemporary resonance.