Degenerate Art was the Nazi label for modern art they deemed corrupt. Learn how the 1937 Munich exhibition weaponized 700 works and why scholars say it could happen again.
On July 19, 1937, an exhibition opened in Munich in the arcade of the Hofgarten. The walls were painted with slogans: "Revelation of the Jewish Racial Soul," "Deliberate Sabotage of the Armed Forces," "Nature as Seen by Sick Minds." The artworks were hung crooked, crowded together, and labeled with mocking captions giving the artist's name, the museum that had owned the work, and the purchase price paid by that museum, implying that public money had been wasted on garbage. Over 700 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by about 100 artists were on display: Otto Dix, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Vassily Kandinsky, Emil Nolde, Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall. The exhibition was called Entartete Kunst, "Degenerate Art," and it attracted two million visitors in four months. It was the most visited art exhibition of the 20th century, and it was designed to make the public hate modern art. Read the V&A's account at V&A.
Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) was the Nazi regime's classification of modern art as corrupt, un-German, and morally degenerate. The campaign ran from 1933, when Hitler came to power, until 1945, when the regime fell. It involved the systematic confiscation of over 16,000 works from German museums, the public humiliation of artists, the destruction of thousands of artworks, and the 1937 Munich exhibition that became the template for state-sponsored cultural suppression. The campaign targeted Expressionism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, abstraction, and any art that did not conform to the Nazi ideal of "healthy" German art. More than 1,400 artists were abused, dismissed from teaching positions, banned from exhibiting, forced into exile, or murdered.
This entry covers what Degenerate Art was, how the campaign unfolded, which artists were targeted, and why scholars in 2026 are drawing parallels between the Nazi attack on modernism and contemporary trends.
The term "degenerate" (entartet) was not invented by the Nazis. It emerged in the 19th century from the fields of natural history, medicine, and anthropology, where it described a supposed decline from a natural or healthy state. The Nazi regime adopted the term and applied it to art, arguing that modern art was a symptom of racial and moral decay. The argument was that Jewish artists, Bolsheviks, and their sympathizers had infiltrated German cultural institutions and promoted art that was deliberately destructive, ugly, and anti-German. This was a false narrative. Most of the artists targeted were not Jewish. Many were German nationalists or had served in World War I. But the classification was not about facts. It was about providing a pseudo-scientific justification for suppressing modernism.
The campaign defined "degenerate" broadly. Any art that was abstract, distorted, emotionally intense, or critical of war was suspect. Expressionism was the primary target, because its distorted forms and raw emotional content could be presented as evidence of mental illness or racial corruption. But the campaign also targeted works by artists who were not modernists in any radical sense, including paintings by Vincent van Gogh, whose work was confiscated from German museums. The criterion was not the style alone but whether the art served the Nazi vision of a healthy German culture.
A 2025 article in Revista de Filologia Alemana examined how the concept of "degenerate art" was instrumentalized to discredit, criminalize, and censor German avant-garde artists, especially those who were Jewish. The article compared the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition with the concurrent Great German Art Exhibition at the House of German Art in Munich, showing how the two exhibitions were designed as antagonistic pairs: one showing what the regime approved, the other showing what it condemned. Read the article at UCM Revistas.
After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, the regime organized so-called "condemnation exhibitions" (Schandausstellungen) across Germany. These had titles like Schreckenskammer (Chamber of Terror), Kunst im Dienste der Zersetzung (Art in the Service of Subversion), and Entartete Kunst. They denounced modern art as an attack on the German people and a symptom of cultural decline associated with liberal democracy and the Versailles Treaty. Many of the artworks displayed in these early exhibitions were later confiscated in 1937 and shown in the Munich exhibition.
On June 30, 1937, Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister for Propaganda, authorized Adolf Ziegler, director of the Reich Chamber for Culture, to select and confiscate paintings and sculptures from public collections for a major exhibition on "degenerate art." Ziegler assembled a commission that included Wolfgang Willrich, whose book Die Sauberung des Kunsttempels (The Cleansing of the Temple of Art) had provided the blueprint for the selection. Willrich's book was a vicious attack on modernist artists and the art establishment, with a list of artists to be targeted. The commission visited museums across Germany and confiscated works with extraordinary speed. The Entartete Kunst exhibition opened in Munich on July 19, 1937, less than three weeks after the commission began its work.
The exhibition showed over 700 works by around 100 artists. After closing in Munich in November 1937, it toured Germany and Austria for four years, gradually shrinking in scale. Meanwhile, the confiscation campaign continued. The V&A holds the only known copy of the complete inventory of confiscated works, a 482-page document created by Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda. It records the confiscation of more than 16,000 works from German museums, organized alphabetically by city, institution, and artist. The inventory is an indispensable resource for provenance researchers tracking the dispersal and destruction of the looted objects.
Some confiscated works were sold abroad to raise foreign currency. Others were destroyed. On March 20, 1939, the regime burned approximately 5,000 confiscated works in a bonfire at the Berlin fire department's main training center. Works by Dix, Nolde, Klee, and others were lost. Some survived in private collections or were hidden by museum staff who refused to hand them over.
Kirchner was a founding member of Die Brucke, the German Expressionist group. His work was featured prominently in the 1937 exhibition. In 1937, 639 of his works were removed from German museums. Kirchner, living in Switzerland since 1917, destroyed many of his remaining works and took his own life in June 1938. His Street, Berlin (1913, Museum of Modern Art, New York) shows the distorted figures and acidic colors that the Nazis condemned as degenerate.
Dix was targeted for his anti-war paintings, which depicted the gruesome reality of trench warfare and the physically and psychologically crippled veterans it produced. The Nazis denounced these works as an attack on the honor of German soldiers. Dix was dismissed from his teaching position at the Dresden Academy in 1933. His The Trench (1920-1923, destroyed) was one of the most controversial paintings in the Weimar Republic and was confiscated and likely destroyed during the campaign. His War Cripples (1920, destroyed) was shown in the 1937 exhibition.
Nolde was a member of the Nazi Party, but his Expressionist paintings were still classified as degenerate. 1,052 of his works were removed from museums, the largest number for any artist. He was prohibited from painting, even in private, during the Nazi period. Despite this, he produced a series of small watercolors in secret, which he called the "Unpainted Pictures." Nolde's case is particularly ironic because he had supported the regime and expected his work to be embraced as German art.
Chagall, a Jewish artist, was represented in the 1937 exhibition by paintings that the Nazis labeled as evidence of "Jewish racial soul." A 2025 exhibition at the Musee national Picasso in Paris, the first in France devoted to "degenerate" art, displayed works by Chagall alongside those by Jankel Adler, Ludwig Meidner, Hanns Katz, and Otto Freundlich, who was murdered in 1943. The exhibition highlighted the particular violence directed at Jewish artists. Read about the exhibition at Musee Picasso Paris.
Klee's abstract and whimsical paintings were confiscated as examples of "insane" art. 102 of his works were removed from German museums. Klee had already left Germany in 1933, returning to his native Switzerland. His Twittering Machine (1922, MoMA) is one of the works that would have been classified as degenerate, with its surreal birds and skeletal figure.
In May 2026, The Art Newspaper published a commentary by art historian John-Paul Stonard titled "Degenerate art all over again?" Stonard, whose book The Worst Exhibition in the World: Degenerate Art, 1937 was published in 2026, argued that the vilification of modern art did not end in 1937 and that anti-modern attitudes continue into the 21st century. He noted that the Entartete Kunst exhibition was, paradoxically, the first survey of modern German art, and that the works on display lost none of their power for being pilloried. Censorship amplified the message of freedom and individuality that the art carried. Stonard wrote: "Ten years before Entartete Kunst such things seemed just as impossible as they do now. Nobody in 1926 had the slightest idea that just over a decade later such violence would be done to an entire cultural world." Read the article at The Art Newspaper.
The Degenerate Art campaign targeted the entire spectrum of modern German art, including Expressionism, Dadaism, Cubism, and Surrealism. It was the mirror image of the state-mandated Socialist Realism in the Soviet Union, which also suppressed modernism but from a different ideological direction. The campaign's use of pseudo-scientific language about "degeneracy" connects to the broader history of iconoclasm and the destruction of art for political purposes. The V&A's inventory of confiscated works is a key resource for provenance research. For more on art and political suppression, read our post on art and politics.
Many works confiscated in the 1937 campaign are now in museum collections worldwide, having been sold abroad or hidden during the war. The Museum of Modern Art in New York holds works by Kirchner, Klee, and Chagall that were once in German museums. The Kunstmuseum Basel holds a significant collection of German Expressionist works that entered Switzerland through the art trade. The Brucke-Museum in Berlin, opened in 1964, holds works by Die Brucke artists. The V&A in London holds the complete inventory of confiscated works, which is available for research. The Musee national Picasso in Paris mounted the first French exhibition on "degenerate" art in 2025.
If you want to understand Degenerate Art, start at the V&A to see the inventory that documents the full scale of the confiscation, then visit the Brucke-Museum in Berlin for the Expressionist works that were targeted, and look for the works at MoMA that survived the campaign by being sold abroad. You will see how a state tried to destroy an entire artistic culture, and how the art survived because it was too powerful to kill. For more on the relationship between art and political power, read our entries on Socialist Realism and Expressionism, or explore our post on art and protest.
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