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Art Suppressed by the Nazis

Question

I sat here for hours reading each entry. I had no idea so many people not even researching the topic would be here. I am doing research on ART suppressed by the Nazi Regime. Any info would help and I am also looking for a Creative Project Idea. It can be anything from Poems to Scrapbooks anything that can relate to the holocaust. Please email me with ideas, thoughts, or concerns.

Harry W. Mazal OBE answers:

I refer to your recent comments included in the Guest Book of the Holocaust History Project:

...

Your note might more appropriately been directed to our "Questions" section Listed on our home page. By doing so your comments would reach the twenty- some-odd people in our organization that strive to answer questions such as yours. I have copied this reply to them in case any of them wish to add to my comments.

For research on art suppressed by the Nazi regime I would suggest looking for the following book in the library at your university:

"Degenerate Art" : The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany
Stephanie Baron (Editor)
c. 1991, Los Angeles County Museum of Art ( Los Angeles, CA) and Harry N. Abrams, Inc. (New York)
ISBN 0-8109-3653-4 (Abrams)

From the page on publishing information:

This book was published in conjunction with the exhibit " 'Degenerate Art' : The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany", which was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and funded in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment of the Arts. It received additional assistance from the Federal Republic of Germany, and an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. Lufthansa German Airlines provided major support for the transportation of the exhibition.

From the dust cover:

No sooner had the Nazis seized control of Germany in 1933 than they launched their relentless attacks on the avant-garde and their desecration of modern art.

By the fall of 1937 they had stripped 16,000 avant-garde works from the nations museums and sent 650 to Munich for a massive exhibition, *Entartete Kunst* (degenerate art, as they called this work). Among the artists thus castigated were towering figures of the art world: Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, Wilhelm Lembruck, and founders of German Expressionism: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Mark, Emil Nolde, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Provocative installation techniques were employed, some even reminiscent of famous avant-garde shows of the past.

Visitors jammed the galleries. Nearly 3 million viewers are estimated to have seen *Entartete Kunst* during its four year tour of Germany and Austria. [...]

Your librarian can probably obtain a copy through the university inter- library loan system should it not be available at .... If you are curious to see what the Nazis used to substitute what they called "Degenerate Art," you might also want to read:

Art of the Third Reich
Peter Adam
Phyllis Freeman (Editor)
c. 1992, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. (New York)
ISBN0-8109-1912-5

Nikolaus Pevsner's verdict about Nazi Art which states that "every word about it is too much" is, in my modest opinion, too kind an indictment. Yours sincerely, Harry W. Mazal OBE

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