ART : Expert Scoffs at Linking Nazi Acts, Current U.S. Arts Assault : ‘We do not live in that kind of repressive society where people’s lives are in danger because they make art,’ says a historian who lived through Hitler’s crackdown on ‘degenerative’ works.

Some observers have attempted to draw parallels between recent political assaults on federal arts funding and Adolf Hitler’s devastating purge of modern art in Germany during the ‘30s. But art historian Irmeli Desenberg flatly rejects any such comparisons. Born and raised in Germany, she experienced Naziism firsthand.

“We do not live in that kind of repressive society where people’s lives are in danger because they make art that is not approved of by the general public,” Desenberg said during a lecture Saturday at the Newport Harbor Art Museum.

The subject of Desenberg’s talk was “Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany” at the L.A. County Museum of Art. The show reassembles several artworks that the Nazis stripped from state-funded museums and then exhibited in Munich in July, 1937, to show citizens what sort of art they should condemn.

The exhibit includes 175 paintings, sculptures and graphics by Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky and others. The Nazis scorned the works because they were made by Jews, ostensibly mocked Christianity, had anti-military themes, or were abstract (the Nazis were obsessed with homogeneity).

Desenberg, who saw the original exhibit in Munich, agrees that arts supporters must fight against clamps on free expression. But, she added, America of the 1990s is not Germany of the 1930s, where millions of Jews and others were exterminated.

A white-haired, bright-eyed 74-year-old retired Cal State Fullerton art history professor, Desenberg recalled that Mannheim, the industrial town where she grew up, was economically depressed but culturally active.

“At 6, I saw (the legendary Russian ballerina) Anna Pavlova,” she said. “Can you imagine? That’s pretty young. . . . And we listened to jazz. I had a friend who had a big record collection and he’d invite us to tea and we’d listen to his records.”

Mannheim had a state-supported orchestra, repertory theater and museum devoted to the collection and exhibition of current day masters including Beckmann, Chagall and Edvard Munch, Desenberg said. But then, when she was a young adult, she witnessed the cultural purge that resulted in the confiscation of 16,000 artworks from throughout Germany, and forced many well-respected artists, musicians, writers and filmmakers from their jobs and into exile.

“Hitler’s cultural minister systematically helped collect art from museums and galleries. It was a slow process, but the art disappeared bit by bit. Galleries were closed immediately, though, because many of them belonged to Jews.”

She saw “Degenerate Art” while vacationing in Munich. The exhibit had been installed haphazardly in an abandoned building across a park from the “Great German Art Exhibition,” a show of Nazi-approved artworks.

“The show was hung higgledy-piggledy,” said Desenberg, who was 20 at the time and who emigrated to the United States a year later. Paintings were crammed together, placed one on top of another. “You couldn’t see them well.”

According to L.A. County Museum curators, most visitors were unfamiliar with and wary of avant-garde art and derided the works, just as the Nazis hoped they would. Desenberg confirmed that contemporary art of the time was not readily accepted, particularly German Expressionism, which reflected a society in “great, great trouble.” Viewers quietly shuffled through “without much comment.”

She recalls being nonetheless horrified by Hitler’s roundup. “You were astonished to see the work of the artists who had become so famous in the ‘20s and ‘30s as being ‘degenerate.’ “I also remember that admission was free,” she said, “and the Gestapo photographed everyone who went in. Nothing happened as a result of these mug shots, but it was such an atmosphere of fear. Everything that was unusual made you scared--and rightfully so. You never knew what the end would be.”