The McMaster Museum of Art (MMA) has recently acquired a rare copy of the 1937 Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition guide at auction in Berlin. It is a chilling and revealing document of the most notorious exhibition of the 20th century, and has particular relevance as many of the persecuted artists are represented in the MMA collection. (The only other identified copy in a Canadian public collection is at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal.)

The Entartete Kunst exhibition was devised in the wake of a purge of German Expressionist and other ideologically unacceptable art by a Nazi committee under the direction of Joseph Goebbels, the Reichminister for “Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.” More than 16,000 works in total were removed from public and private collections.

Entartete Kunst, comprising more than 600 paintings, graphics and sculpture, was first mounted in Munich in 1937. Although it was intended to hold up modern art to derision and humiliation, perversely and inadvertently the Nazis had organized the first modern art blockbuster exhibition. It attracted more than 2 million visitors in Munich, and then another million visitors in the subsequent tour to twelve cities in Germany and Austria through 1941 (sixty-five towns and cities had requested the exhibition). Changes were made for each venue.

In March 1939, more than 4000 “degenerate” works deemed worthless, were destroyed in a public bonfire in Berlin, and in June 1939, another 125 works (some included in the Munich exhibition) were sent to auction in Lucerne, Switzerland.

The exhibition guide was published in late November 1937 for the first tour venue in Berlin. The MMA’s copy is visitor annotated and includes two period German news clippings.

On a related note, The McMaster Museum of Art is an active participant in the Canadian Holocaust-Era Research Project, now underway, to identify works seized during this period.