COVER STORY : Hitler’s Sordid Little Art Show : How a footnote to the Third Reich’s brutal history became LACMA’s ‘Degenerate Art--The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany’

“Works of art” that are not capable of being understood in themselves but need some pretentious instruction book to justify their existence--until at long last they find someone sufficiently browbeaten to endure such stupid or impudent twaddle with patience--will never again find their way to the German people.

--Adolf Hitler, 1937.

Adolf Hitler’s foray into the art world didn’t end with his failed career as a painter. He also was a collector--of the most diabolical sort--whose “holdings” by such artists as Van Gogh, Picasso, Chagall, Kandinsky and Beckmann were confiscated from public museums. He organized some of those works in a massive exhibition seen by more than 3 million people, though surprisingly little has been known about the fuhrer’s blockbuster.

Until now. The vision and persistence of a museum curator have resulted in an unprecedented reconstruction of the notorious exhibition, shedding light on Hitler’s dubious attempt at curating not only art, but indeed an entire society.

When the National Socialists assumed power in Germany in 1933, Hitler seized his chance to create a utopia for a superior race. No aspect of German society would escape his gaze--least of all the nation’s culture, which he believed had fallen under subversive influence and had to be mercilessly purified.

Recognizing the arts as a powerful teaching tool, Hitler appointed Joseph Goebbels as minister for enlightenment and propaganda and led a purge of Germany’s literature, music, film and visual arts to rid them of any influence that might be contrary to Nazi ideals.

As early as 1929--and with little more than xenophobia and racism as their guides--the Nazis had disrupted unapproved performances and set exhibitions on fire. When Hitler took charge, they stepped up their efforts and solidified a vision of what the arts should be. Artists of all descriptions were to be in the service of the state, and their work would project a unified image of pure German beauty, respectability and loyalty to Hitler’s cause. Those who didn’t conform could expect to be publicly castigated and forbidden to work.

Germany’s art museums were an especially hard case, however, because those that had been in the forefront of the international avant-garde were loath to exchange progressive, individually expressive art for Hitler’s passionless stereotypes. Finally, in 1937, an order went out to confiscate innovative modern art from public museums. The messy stuff was un-German “garbage,” a waste of taxpayers’ money, and it had no place in an obsessively homogeneous land. Abstractions, art made by Jews, religious and anti-military themes, art from the Bauhaus, “denigrations” of women and rural life, styles inspired by primitive art--all of it had to go.

In raids on 32 museums, the fuhrer’s henchmen rounded up more than 16,000 offending artworks. To make sure that everyone got the point, 650 examples by 112 artists were ridiculed in a disheveled exhibition of “Entartete Kunst” or “Degenerate Art” that opened on July 19, 1937, at Munich’s Archeological Institute. This “educational” exercise was pointedly installed just across the park from a show of officially approved art at the sumptuous new House of German Art, at whose opening Hitler threatened that the degenerate works “will never again find their way to the German people.”

“Degenerate Art” packed in more than 3 million viewers as it traveled around Germany--in Munich alone it attracted more than twice as many visitors as the official art show--and the exhibition lives in infamy. In the art world’s litany of catastrophes--treasures stolen, destroyed or ripped from context--only the Russian purge of the avant-garde compares with the Nazis’ zeal to control culture, and the Russians couldn’t match Hitler’s mania for rooting out, denouncing and destroying or exploiting everything that didn’t extol Aryan ideals.

The vilified artworks were dispersed or destroyed, while details of the show were lost in musty archives and fading memories--if not in modern Germany’s shame.

That sordid footnote is transformed into a full chapter of modern art history in “Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany,” a landmark exhibition that opens Feb. 17 and runs through May 12 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The exhibition presents 175 works from the 1937 show in an expansive sociopolitical and cultural context. The art is displayed with all due dignity, but vintage film footage, books, music, photographs and explanatory text immerse it in an atmosphere of zealous censorship. (A related series of performances, exhibits and lectures will be held around town. See Page 89).

Since its conception, the LACMA show appeared to be an art world coup. At the very least, it is the largest examination of Hitler’s exhibition ever and the only such exhibition in America. Three relatively small shows were done in 1987, in Dusseldorf, Munich and Berlin. The 50-year anniversary also triggered a spate of German publications on the subject, but no one attempted to present a big picture.

“Degenerate Art” is still a sensitive topic, and not only in Germany. There is no corporate support for LACMA’s exhibition, and funding appeared to be a major obstacle for awhile. But the National Endowment for the Arts eventually came through with $175,000 and the National Endowment for the Humanities contributed $350,000. Additional funds came from the German government, while Lufthansa German Airlines provided support for transportation of the exhibition. Related educational programs are financed in part by the Nathan Cummings Foundation and sponsored by the Goethe-Institut, Los Angeles. (The only other engagement for the exhibition is at the Art Institute of Chicago, June 22 to Sept. 8.)

The long-awaited show is a marvel of scholarship and detective work by Stephanie Barron, the museum’s curator of 20th-Century art, who has been thinking about the exhibition for nearly a decade and working on it with German colleagues for about three years.

Looking back on the enormous task, Barron said she was prodded into action in the early ‘80s while organizing the 1983 exhibition, “German Expressionist Sculpture.” Finding references to sculpture that the Nazis had confiscated and destroyed--works that should have been in her show--she displayed a “Degenerate Art” brochure in the sculpture exhibition.

The 32-page booklet--which couples Nazi invective with illustrations of “degenerate” works--was appallingly instructive. “It tipped me off to what might be done,” Barron said, but the brochure didn’t tell the whole story of the show. There was no checklist of works displayed and the illustrations didn’t necessarily match what was exhibited in Munich. Far from a scholarly catalogue, the didactic political publication misidentified some works and drew invidious comparisons between, say, paintings by celebrated modern artists and art of the insane. Published at the end of the Munich engagement, the brochure accompanied a traveling version of the exhibition which changed composition from one venue to another.

With these vagaries in mind, Barron knew that any serious examination of the “Degenerate Art” show would require an enormous amount of research and that the necessary documentation might not exist. There were reports that the Nazis had burned vast quantities of art and they were known to have sold many works. Hundreds of other pieces had simply disappeared during World War II and its aftermath.

The first breakthrough came in 1987, when Barron was working on a fellowship in Germany. It was the 50th-anniversary of Hitler’s infamous show and several scholars were at work on the subject. Following a lead, she discovered that photographs of the Munich exhibition had come to light in the archive of the National Gallery in East Berlin. Better than that, they were installation photographs that documented the exhibition room by room, she said, her eyes shining brightly with the memory of the astonishing discovery.

Armed with photographic documentation, she was off and running with the help of German colleagues. The team included Annegret Janda, the now-retired head of the National Gallery archive in East Berlin; Mario-Andreas von Luttichau, a curator of the Kunstmuseum in Bonn; Andreas Huneke, an art historian in Potsdam, and Christoph Zuschlag, a graduate student at the University of Heidelberg. But tracking down 650 works by 112 artists was no easy task. For every well known work that had made its way to a museum collection, there were several that were unknown or lost. Confusion between the Nazis’ wholesale confiscations and the varying content of the traveling exhibition presented further complications, Barron said.

There was only one good book, “Art Dictatorship in the Third Reich” by Paul Ortwin Rave, but it helped. So did the July 27, 1937, issue of the German newspaper Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, in which critic Bruno E. Werner walked readers through part of the show, Barron said. In addition, she poured over catalogues of individual artists’ works, consulted German museums that had lost the works and chased every lead that came her way.

After two years, the team had located about 200 of the original 650 works, but some owners deemed their treasures too fragile or valuable to travel. “You’re dealing with a checklist that can only get smaller,” Barron said. “If someone says no, there is no substitute.”

She ended up with 175 works. All the paintings now on view were in the 1937 exhibition, but a few sculptures are shown in bronze because the wood versions exhibited in Munich didn’t survive, she said. In the case of prints, it was impossible to tell exactly what impression of an edition had been shown, so she had to settle for the right image.

With the art in hand, all that remained was to tack up an approximation of the 1937 show, right?

Wrong. Dead wrong.

“Once the detective work was done, we were left with what we could locate and what survived. It was a core but not enough for an exhibition,” Barron said. Furthermore, she had no desire to re-create the notorious exhibition that had crammed modern masterpieces into Munich’s Archeological Institute and surrounded them with derisive graffiti, including notes about how much of the taxpayers’ money had been wasted on them. Museums and collectors wouldn’t be likely to lend art to such a show--even if it were done to denigrate the Nazis.

“I didn’t want to play up the theatrical side. It’s so easy to do and I think it’s so wrong. There’s nothing to be gained from a reconstruction except sensationalism,” she said. “The question was how to make an exhibition out of a show that was presented for the denigration and defamation of artists, and for the condemnation and excoriation of museum directors and curators. I had to figure out how to do an exhibition without falling into the same traps. It wasn’t enough to reconstruct the show; I needed to surround the art with a big context.”

She turned to architect Frank Gehry, a friend and “a problem-solver” who has designed such important LACMA exhibitions as “The Avant-Garde in Russia, 1910-1930.” He agreed to add “Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany” to his already overloaded schedule. During talks with Gehry, Barron decided to save the art for the end of the show and lead into it with a rich context. Visitors would take an educational, mood-setting tour before facing the art that Hitler loved to hate. Those who want a bit of guidance may rent an audio tour of the show that Barron calls “an oral collage.” Instead of the usual museum director’s taped guide, this one includes artists’ quotes, historians’ insights and period music.

Viewers enter through a corridor whose walls are covered with quotes and photographs of “artists and writers whose fates were altered radically by the Nazis,” Barron said. Unlike the 1937 exhibition, the artists are allowed to speak for themselves, and visitors learn that they were not only deprived of dignified opportunities to show their art, they were dismissed from their jobs at universities and museums.

Sculptor Ernst Barlach is quoted as saying, “My little boat is sinking fast. The louder the Heils roar, instead of cheering and raising my arm in Roman attitudes, the more I pull my hat down over my eyes.” His statement comes from 1933, the year the National Socialists won control of Germany and Hitler gained authority to act without the consent of the Reichstag.

“I left because of Hitler. He is a painter too, you know, and there didn’t seem to be room for both of us in Germany,” George Grosz wrote in 1942, after becoming a citizen of the United States.

“This is a story about people, not institutions,” Barron said, and the show follows that human approach. Removing the anonymity of a cultural atrocity, the exhibition names names, dates and places to bring the story alive.

Arriving at the first gallery, visitors encounter four aspects of “Degenerate Art” and its milieu:

A 22-foot-long scale model of the 1937 exhibition re-creates a series of long, narrow rooms in Munich’s Archeological Institute. Model maker Eric Marable has split the rooms and raised the model so that visitors can walk through the galleries and see tiny reproductions of the art at eye level. Thrilled with the effect, Barron explained that the model was an extraordinary design challenge, in part because the only photographs of the missing artworks were shot from different angles. Jim Drobka, who designed the exhibition graphics and catalogue, turned the higgledy-piggledy assortment of photographs into mini-reproductions.

Accompanying the model is a display of the brochure and some postcards made for the 1937 show, as well as vintage footage of the well-attended event in a film by Julian Bryan.

* A section on the “Great German Art Exhibition,” which was meant to discredit degenerate art, includes explanatory text, photographs, vintage film footage and vitrines containing the exhibition catalogue and Nazi-approved books. The documentary film by Erwin Leiser takes viewers through part of the show, as well as a bizarre parade that celebrated the opening with floats and dancing goddesses. “I hope people understand that this is real footage and not a bad movie,” Barron said.

* Photo-and-text panels spell out the fate of the six most important German museums that collected and showed modern art, in the cities of Berlin, Halle, Frankfurt, Essen, Mannheim and Hannover. Among the horror stories of discharged museum directors and decimated collections, no case is more striking than that of Vincent Van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Gachet.”

The painting was donated in 1912 to the State Art Institute and Gallery in Frankfurt and snatched up by the Nazis in 1937, along with more than 700 artworks in the museum’s collection. Recognized as an “exploitable” item, the melancholy portrait of Van Gogh’s physician was not exhibited in “Degenerate Art.” Instead, it was sold privately for an unknown sum to Siegfried Kramarsky who emigrated to the United States. At his death, in 1961, Kramarsky was a New York banker and philanthropist who had put his art collection in a trust.

The portrait was loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1984, but it went on the auction block last May at Christie’s New York. In a sale that turned out to be the precipitous peak before the fall of the art market, Japanese businessman Ryoei Saito bought “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” for $82.5 million, still a record auction price for any work of art.

* Another set of photographs, text and ephemera tells the story of an auction of 125 confiscated works presented by the Galerie Fischer in Lucerne, Switzerland. The gallery still exists and the proprietors allowed Barron access to its archive--including sales receipts, shipping documents and the auctioneer’s annotated catalogue. For the first time, a scholar was able to reconstruct the sale, which was boycotted by parts of the art world but proved irresistible to some dealers and collectors.

Thousands of “degenerate” works that were considered “internationally exploitable” were sold surreptitiously for foreign currency after the museum raids. “We hope, at least to make some money from this garbage,” Goebbels said. The Galerie Fischer auction on June 30, 1939, was a political hot potato because it put the process out in the open. Skeptics had reason to doubt claims that auction proceeds would go to the denuded museums for acquisitions. Potential bidders’ arguments about saving modern artworks were countered by revulsion over contributing funds to Nazi coffers.

Probably because of the controversy, the auction was not a great financial success. A Van Gogh self-portrait commanded the top price of about $40,000, but that was about $8,000 below estimate. Thirty-eight of the 125 pieces did not sell, and some works went for as little as $5 or $10. Sale proceeds totaled about $115,000--well below auctions of similar works by the same artists held around the same time in London, Paris and New York. Some people bid secretly, but most buyers attended, Barron said. Among them were dealer Pierre Matisse, who bought his father’s painting, “Bathers With a Turtle,” for Joseph Pulitzer Jr., who was in Switzerland on his honeymoon.

All this background material might seem more than sufficient to set the stage, but there’s more: three satellite galleries devoted to other Nazi-censored arts. In one room, a 30-minute loop presents excerpts of Expressionist and abstract films. The literature gallery offers about 40 examples of Nazi writing and condemned books, along with Leiser’s documentary film of German book burnings as theatrical occasions complete with live orchestras. In the music room, visitors are reminded of a “Degenerate Music” show in Weimar that was a counterpart to “Degenerate Art.” Listening posts provide samples of Nazi-approved classical music and kitsch, along with “degenerate” jazz and modern music--all on a compact disc produced by the museum.

When visitors finally approach the art, they find seven galleries displaying works in the order that they were presented in Munich but in far more dignified surroundings. Among the vividly colored, emotionally charged paintings on view are Max Beckmann’s “Descent From the Cross,” Marc Chagall’s “Purim,” Otto Dix’s “Portrait of the Jeweler Karl Krall” Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s “Self-Portrait as Soldier,” George Grosz’s “Metropolis” and an entire room of Emil Nolde’s work. Sculptures include Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s 6-foot bronze, “Large Kneeling Woman” and Rudolf Belling’s 3-foot abstraction, “Triad.”

The final gallery is chock-full of 75 graphics by such Expressionist masters as Beckmann, Dix, Grosz, Oskar Kokoschka and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, plus Bauhaus instructors Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Johannes Itten and Wassily Kandinsky.

Public response to the ground-breaking show remains to be seen, but cultural commentators are likely to draw comparisons between Hitler’s cultural repression and the conservative climate in America that has put issues of censorship and government sponsorship of the arts in the news for the past two years.

“I began this exhibition five years ago when I had no idea of current events,” said Barron, who has chosen to maintain a historian’s distance from topical issues. “I think it’s a provocative show. I know it’s a provocative topic. The fact that the exhibition raises a lot of issues is important to me, but parallels that might be drawn are not for us (at the museum) to draw.” It’s more appropriate for the museum and the exhibittion to be “a catalyst for a healthy and vigorous discussion of these issues,” she said.

Suzanne Muchnic writes about art for The Times.