2023-09-24 15:23:58
Among the 567 works by the 112 artists brought together by the Entartete Kunst or Degenerate Art, the name given to the exhibition held in Munich in 1937 and from which the expression adopted by the Nazi regime in Germany derived to describe virtually all modern art and ban it in favor of what they considered “heroic art”there were paintings by Vasili Kandinsky.
That exhibition was “curated” by Adolf Hitler, since many of the epigraphs of the works were his authorship and pointed out the “obscenity, madness, blasphemy and blackness (Verniggerung)” of the style that was banned, considered “not German” by its Jewish and Bolshevik imprint. In addition, the paintings were hung crooked and insults to the artists were written on the walls.. Among the “degenerate” artists, then, was the Russian painter who was born in Moscow and had positioned himself among the avant-garde artists that Nazism would hate with all its might.
In light of the history of 20th century art, that exhibition would have been the dream of any museum and the corpus of artists, the envy of any collection. However, the exhibition that opened in Munich four years following the Führer came to power was very disappointing. the Great Exhibition of German Art that opened on the same street and at the same time. Faced with this aesthetic that did seem to represent that German spirit, that monumental commitment that brought together modern, abstract, avant-garde and, therefore, degenerate art, was a great pedagogical example of what not to do. Instead of censoring, at least on this occasion since they were later destroyed and exiled, paintings and painters, the regime showed what was “disgusting” and “aberrant product of the minds of Jews and Bolsheviks.”
Kandinsky had been in Munich since the beginning of the 20th century, when he left Russia and his law career to dedicate himself to painting full time. In 1917 he returned to Russia and participated in several cultural projects for the October Revolution, but he fell out and returned to Germany, but it was short-lived: In 1931 the Nazis began persecuting the Bauhaus artists, among many. A few years later he went to live with his third wife in France. He died in 1944 knowing that Hitler thought his works looked like those of an 8-year-old boy.
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