Entartete Kunst and the Fascist Appropriation of Modernism

Introduction

A well-known 1937 photograph captures Adolf Hitler visiting Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”), the notorious exhibition that opened in Munich and later traveled through Germany and Austria. Adolf Ziegler, a prominent Nazi painter and cultural official, stands beside him. The word Dada appears on the walls, invoking the modernist anti-art movement that began in Zurich in 1916, while the name of Dada artist George Grosz is displayed nearby. The artists whose work the regime classified as “degenerate” included the Expressionist Paul Klee, who taught at the Bauhaus before the Nazis forced the school to close; the Dadaist and later Surrealist Max Ernst; Marc Chagall; Wassily Kandinsky; and other major figures of modern art, such as Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, Kurt Schwitters, and Piet Mondrian.

Without this history, the scene is startling: Hitler appears to be touring an exhibition of Dadaist, Surrealist, abstract, Expressionist, and, more broadly, modernist art alongside Nazi officials and Ziegler, whose own work was far removed from the century’s avant-garde movements. Was Hitler, then, a modernist in matters of art—someone who championed the avant-garde of his era? Why was he there? More fundamentally, why were the Nazis so interested in art, and why did they exhibit the very forms they condemned? Why did they not simply destroy every work they considered un-German?

Stephanie Barron explains that staging Entartete Kunst enabled the regime to mobilize popular incomprehension of modern art, present its hostility as a public mandate, and warn all modernists that their work would no longer be tolerated in Germany.¹ Yet propaganda alone does not exhaust the exhibition’s significance. Entartete Kunst also illuminates the relationship among fascist aesthetics, political myth, and the modernist forms that fascism sought simultaneously to suppress and appropriate.

The Nazis opened the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (“Great German Art Exhibition”) almost simultaneously to define “true German art” against the art that modernists had supposedly “degenerated.” Strikingly, Entartete Kunst attracted more than two million visitors—over three times the audience of the Great German Art Exhibition.² This disparity does not necessarily indicate public admiration for modernism; it demonstrates the power of the modernist spectacle even when presented through ridicule and coercion.

This essay examines official Nazi aesthetics and their relation to Italian Futurism and fascist appropriations of antiquity. “Art produced under fascism” is often more precise than “fascist art,” because fascism did not establish a single, internally consistent artistic form. In Germany and Italy, much officially approved art relied on imitations of Greek or Roman models. Futurism presents a different but related problem. It began as an avant-garde movement whose artists celebrated destruction, industrialization, mechanization, speed, and a dynamic future liberated from inherited culture and history. Tracing the movement from Futurism to Entartete Kunst reveals how fascism’s repudiation of modernism remained entangled with modernism’s techniques, energies, and institutions.

Ziegler and Breker: Heil Hellenism

The Nazis seized thousands of modernist works so that selected pieces could be displayed as evidence of artistic “degeneration.” The conflict between Hitler and Surrealists, Dadaists, abstract artists, and Expressionists had already become explicit when he denounced modernists as “fools, liars, or criminals who belong in insane asylums or prisons.” Hitler then placed Ziegler in charge of a Munich exhibition that would supposedly reveal the character of “true German art.” Jonathan Petropoulos describes Ziegler’s accommodation with the regime and the ideological function of his painting:

Both his career and art make Ziegler representative of Nazi Germany: his career serves as a prototypic case of finding accommodation with the new rulers, and his art captured in a difficult-to-describe way a mind-set and style so common at this time. Ziegler’s canvases have been included in nearly all exhibitions about Nazi, fascist, and totalitarian aesthetics.³

Ziegler populated his paintings with figures presented as “racially pure.” The regime celebrated these works, reproduced them as postcards, and distributed them nationwide.⁴ His 1937 triptych The Judgment of Paris offers a revealing example of what the Nazis promoted as “true German art.”⁵

The triptych depicts the mythological Judgment of Paris: three nude, idealized female figures rendered in a smooth, statuesque style that evokes classical sculpture rather than lived bodies. The painting constructs an ideal of so-called “Aryan beauty” through unmistakable allusions to ancient Greece. Its limited perspective and statuesque figures make spatial depth secondary to the display of supposedly perfected bodies. Time is likewise suspended. As the sections that follow argue, this removal of historical time was central to the Nazi attempt to present racial myth as eternal rather than politically manufactured.

In November 1936, Nazi Minister of Education Bernhard Rust called Ziegler’s work “an incomparably beautiful masterpiece of Classical Hellenism.”⁶ That year, Ziegler replaced Eugen Hönig as president of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts. Six months later, Hitler ordered him to oversee the “purging [of] modern artworks from the galleries,” a project that prepared the ground for Entartete Kunst.⁷ Why was an artist whose work imitated ancient Greek forms appointed to represent “true German art”? How could an imitation of Greece become the authentic expression of Germanness?

The same question arises in the sculpture of Arno Breker, the regime’s favored sculptor.⁸

Works by Arno Breker: Apollo and Daphne (1940) and Prometheus II (1936–37).

Breker produced heroic, idealized figures modeled on classical sculpture. Nazi critic Robert Scholz argued that his work inaugurated “a new politically determined epoch” and embodied both “the intended rejuvenation of the world” and the political idea of National Socialism.⁹ Another contemporary account claimed that Breker’s sculptures “glorified the racial struggle” and became “symbolic stone piles of Aryan beliefs.”¹⁰

These examples clarify why the regime labeled modernist movements “degenerate” and condemned their practitioners as “fools” and “liars.” Hitler’s “true German art” was expected to reproduce an idealized classical body and oppose the distorted human figures of Expressionism, the anti-mimetic strategies of Surrealism and abstraction, and the institutional provocations of Dada. Hitler also rejected Futurism, despite its later connections to Italian fascism. To understand the regime’s investment in the supposedly authentic German artwork, we must therefore ask how Nazi aesthetics related to myth. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay “The Nazi Myth” provides a crucial point of departure.

Living Myth

Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy argue that, after the decline of Christianity’s unifying authority in Europe, modern culture became haunted by the problem of imitation. Newly consolidated nation-states required a “subject of identification”: an image through which a national collectivity could recognize itself. Germany, in this account, appeared to lack such an identity. German nationalism therefore emerged through an “appropriation of the means of identification,” with Greek antiquity serving as an indispensable model.¹¹

This appropriation produced what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy call the Nazi “will to art”: the political effort to fashion a collective subject and harmonize politics through aesthetics. The result was National Socialism’s construction of itself as a “living myth.”¹² Art did not merely illustrate an existing political identity; it helped manufacture the identity that the regime demanded.

The project was caught in a “double bind.” On the one hand, the Nazis believed they had no model other than Greece. On the other hand, they could not simply imitate Greece, because other European cultures had already appropriated classical antiquity and Germany’s nationalist project demanded distinction and originality. National Socialism attempted to resolve this bind by presenting itself not as an imitation but as the reappearance of a timeless myth. In this respect, the Nazi myth echoed the German Romantic desire, articulated by Schelling at the end of the eighteenth century, for a “new mythology.”¹³

Ziegler’s and Breker’s work might suggest that this project failed to discover any form beyond classical imitation. Yet Hitler’s own statements reveal how the regime sought to redefine imitation as racial authenticity. In his speech opening the Great German Art Exhibition, Hitler complained that art had been treated as an international communal experience, thereby severing it from its allegedly integral relationship to an ethnic group.¹⁴ He continued:

Until the moment when National Socialism took power, there existed in Germany a so-called “modern art”—that is, to be sure, almost every year another one, as the very meaning of this word indicates. National Socialist Germany, however, wants again a “German Art,” and this art shall and will be of eternal value, as are all truly creative values of a people.¹⁵

Hitler displaced artistic universality with an ethnic conception of “the people” and demanded an art of eternal value. The paradox is decisive: the art presented as eternally German was at the same time an imitation of Greek forms.

For Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, the Nazis sought to reawaken “the power of myth” against what they regarded as “the inconsistency of the abstract universals.”¹⁶ Hitler objected that modernism produced something new each year; Nazi art, by contrast, was to be stabilized.¹⁷ Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy therefore describe Nazism as the “construction and conformation of its vision of the world.”¹⁸ Art was not to vibrate, mutate, or pass among genres. Through simplification and stabilization, it was to appear eternal.

This effort to simplify artistic complexity helps explain Richard Burt’s deliberately provocative description of Entartete Kunst as both a postmodern performance and an avant-garde exhibition:

As a total work of art, the Nazi exhibition was itself already a postmodern performance: its politics were negotiated as the audience moved through it, determining what and why certain kinds of “art” are degenerate. From this perspective, the Nazi exhibition may be regarded as itself avant-garde rather than as the antithesis to avant-garde. One might go so far as to say that the Nazis outstripped the avant-garde in mounting a postmodern performative exhibition.¹⁹

Eternalizing Art

For Hitler, “art is not founded on time, but only on peoples.”²⁰ This formulation helps explain why Ziegler and Breker could depict classical Greek bodies as the perfection of the German “race.” By dismissing historical time and grounding art in the Volk, Nazism attempted to escape its double bind. The imitation of Greece could be recast as the return of an eternal racial essence rather than acknowledged as a historical act of appropriation.

Hitler insisted that German art would possess “eternal value” and that art, as the expression of a people’s being, would become “an eternal monument.”²¹ In the Nazi reading of antiquity described by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, the Greeks were the great Aryans because they had produced myth as art. The claim offered a second justification for Nazi classicism: by imitating the Greeks, Nazi artists were supposedly recovering the original unity of art, myth, and people.

The artist consequently acquired a Romantic political function. “The artist does not create for the artist,” Hitler declared; “like everyone else, he creates for the people.”²² The artist was imagined as the herald of a mythical art arising from, and simultaneously producing, the people who would identify with it. This position also recalls Giambattista Vico’s account of Homeric poetry as a collective image of reality rather than the autonomous creation of an individual imagination.²³ In both cases, representation was understood as the work of a people and as a model for its future.

Demummifying Myth

Nazism imagined myth as something mummified in the past but still alive, waiting to be rediscovered. The regime presented National Socialism itself as the secure site in which that myth had survived across the centuries. The “demummification” and rebirth of myth were, of course, imaginative and ideological constructions. Yet fascism treated its own political order as though it had always existed in latent form.

Demummifying myth required what Walter Benjamin called the “aestheticization of politics.” Nazism sought a feeling of totality capable of mobilizing the masses for war—the activity in which, Benjamin argued, all efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate.²⁴ The aestheticized nation was therefore not simply a community unified by art. It was a political body organized for violence.

Totality and the Futurist Alternative

How could Hitler reject artistic universality while attempting to produce national totality? Georges Bataille argued that myth cannot be assimilated to the scattered fragments of a dissociated group; it belongs to total existence and gives that existence tangible expression.²⁵ In Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s terms, this totality depended on creating a subject with which the nation could identify. Myth would be “demummified” at the moment this totality became perceptible. The problem concerned not only Nazism but fascism more broadly. Was Entartete Kunst itself a step toward producing that totalized national subject?

Although Hitler condemned Futurism,²⁶ the Italian Futurists proposed their own artistic formula for totality. Unlike Nazi classicism, which depended on the reproduction of Hellenic forms, Futurism sought to render the dynamic environment itself. In the “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting,” Umberto Boccioni declared: “To paint a human figure you must not paint it; you must render the whole of its surrounding atmosphere.” The Futurists attempted to reconcile Nietzsche’s opposition between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. In a world where “all things move, all things run, all things are rapidly changing,” the artist was to capture the movement of everyday life and stabilize it within the artwork.²⁷

In his manifesto of Futurist sculpture, Boccioni again emphasized environment and called for a “sculpture of environment.”²⁸ His Unique Forms of Continuity in Space materialized this ambition.²⁹

Boccioni further argued that, to perceive the new beauty of a Futurist painting, the soul had to be purified and the eye freed from the veil of atavism and culture so that nature, rather than the museum, could become its standard.³⁰ Boccioni died in 1916 and was not a fascist activist in the later institutional sense. Nevertheless, his vocabulary of purification anticipated themes that fascism would appropriate. His art also acquired a mythical tendency through its emphasis on nature over culture, its rejection of institutions, and its desire to “re-enter into life.”³¹

The collective energy, experiential totality, and destructive force of Boccioni’s painting are visible in the works reproduced below.³²

Marinetti and War: Toward the Aestheticization of Politics

Boccioni announced the “death of space.” The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, a lifelong fascist and supporter of Mussolini, also attacked conventional time.³³ For Marinetti, “art can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.” He called for total destruction: “Set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums!” Beauty existed only in struggle and war. Libraries and archives had to be destroyed because they organized and preserved the past, while Futurism directed its desire toward a mechanized future.

Benjamin cites Marinetti’s account of the beauty of war to illustrate how fascism aestheticized politics through mechanized violence.³⁴

Marinetti declared that “war is beautiful” because it subjugates machinery, metalizes the human body, and transforms gunfire, smoke, and destruction into an aesthetic spectacle.³⁵

In Marinetti’s manifesto, cruelty, violence, death, and destruction become immanent to everyday life. Futurism acquires a ritual quality: it looks only toward the future because it repudiates the past, taking the Romantic desire for a “myth of the future” to an extreme. Although Marinetti does not invoke myth explicitly, his imagined future turns every individual into an artist of destruction. A shared experience of violence produces the totality through which, in Bataille’s terms, myth can be realized.³⁶

Marinetti rejects history for reasons radically different from Benjamin’s critique of history as the record of the victors.³⁷ His aim is to replace the past with a mythically constituted future that will itself become history for later generations. In calling for war, he becomes the perpetrator of the historical violence he celebrates. The past must die so that a new pathway of Futurist historicization can appear.

Futurism does not simply replace history with the future. It collapses the distinction between them: historical time and futurity converge into a single totality. Archives and libraries represent the finitude and organization of time; Marinetti rejects them in favor of artistic eternalization, from which living myth is supposed to emerge. Nazi classicism and Futurism pursued this aim in different ways. The Nazis imitated Hellenic forms, whereas the Futurists initially created an original avant-garde language. Yet this formal originality does not make Futurism politically superior. After the First World War and Mussolini’s rise, many Futurists embraced fascism, turned toward Roman models, and abandoned much of their earlier style.

From Futurism to Roman Imitation

The Futurist painter Mario Sironi, who committed himself to fascism after the First World War, was among the artists who turned insistently toward ancient Roman motifs. He promoted mural painting as “social painting par excellence.” “Fascism is a style of life,” Sironi declared; “it is life itself for Italians.” His claim positioned fascism as an omnipresent force within the Italian Volk and presented mural painting as an instrument through which myth could be demummified.

Sironi, like Hitler, proclaimed the death of the individualist conception of “art for art’s sake.” His manifesto gave art a quasi-religious function: art would once again become “a perfect instrument of spiritual direction,” as it had supposedly been in the greatest civilizations. Through murals, a fascist style would arise with which the new civilization could identify.³⁸ Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s problem of identification was thus explicit in Italian fascist aesthetics.

Yet Sironi’s “authentic fascist art” ultimately imitated Rome. Rather than releasing a myth from historical confinement, it revived Roman imperial ideals and projected them onto fascist Italy. Sironi recognized this lineage when he wrote that “the art of pagan and Christian Rome is closer to us than the Greek.”³⁹ His statement treats fascism as an eternal disposition binding ancient Rome to Mussolini’s regime.

Mario Sironi, Justice, Law and Truth (1936–37).

Sironi did not explicitly remove time from painting as Marinetti, Boccioni, and Hitler had done. Nevertheless, he placed fascist and Roman art on the same temporal plane. In his account, fascism’s future resided in the living myth of ancient Rome, which mural painting would place on the walls of Italian public life.⁴⁰ By transmitting myth into the public sphere and making it available to the Volk, the mural became an instrument for the aestheticization of politics and the eternalization of art.

Nazism as a Dadaist Experiment

From Marinetti and Boccioni to Sironi, Ziegler, and Hitler, fascist aesthetics sought to produce a “living myth” through its continuous projection into public life. The eternalization of art reinforced the aestheticization of politics. Fascism attempted to dehistoricize art by removing it from historical time, yet its double bind made imitation unavoidable. It responded by presenting imitation as eternal recurrence: the art it produced was said to embody an omnipresent myth extending from Homer, Greece, and Rome to twentieth-century Germany and Italy.

Before their incorporation into fascism, the Futurists pursued eternalization by refusing history, the archive, and conventional time. Boccioni’s work remained formally avant-garde and would later fall under Hitler’s condemnation. The Futurists tried to dehistoricize modernity through modern art itself: they could not escape the modernity they denounced. Hitler encountered a related contradiction. He could not escape the avant-garde while staging an exhibition designed to condemn it.

In this limited and deliberately provocative sense, Hitler’s exhibition strategy can be read as avant-garde—even “Dadaist.” The regime used the institution of the art exhibition to construct an anti-art exhibition, appropriating modernism’s tools against modernism. Burt identifies the crucial political difference while keeping this structural entanglement in view:

Dada seeks to break down bourgeois institutions of art and thus might be seen as the radical antithesis of the Nazis. One might try to differentiate between Dada’s desire to turn art into politics and the Nazis’ attempt to aestheticize politics.⁴¹

Dada’s political aim was radically opposed to fascism. It attacked bourgeois institutions and conventional aesthetic forms, whereas fascism mobilized aesthetics to consolidate authority and violence. Yet Dada’s de-aestheticized anti-art still operated within the field of aesthetics, just as Nazi anti-modernism remained dependent on modern art. The two cannot be equated politically or ethically, but their antagonism places them in a dialectical relationship. The visual echo between the official Entartete Kunst poster and a Bauhaus design by Kandinsky makes that dependence especially visible.⁴²

Official poster for the Nazi Entartete Kunst exhibition.

A Bauhaus exhibition design by Wassily Kandinsky.

The similarity does not “prove” that Nazism was Dada. It demonstrates that the Nazi exhibition needed modernism’s visual language in order to make its own anti-modernist statement. Nazi art relied on the modern art it condemned. Dada, too, depended on the institutions and conventions it sought to overturn, yet it remained a modern phenomenon. The phrase “Dadaist experiment” should therefore be understood as a critical description of appropriation and institutional performance, not as a claim of political equivalence.

Degenerate Art as Camp

We can now return to the essay’s central metaphor. Hitler assembled modern art because the regime needed it to define and stage its own aesthetic ideals. The campaign was not directed solely against Jewish artists: although Nazi propaganda portrayed modernism as a “Jewish-Bolshevik” conspiracy, only six of the 112 artists represented in the Munich exhibition were Jewish. The exhibition nevertheless mobilized antisemitic language and racial theory to attack the modernist field as a whole.

Emil Nolde is an especially revealing case. His Expressionist representations of Jesus were condemned for distorting the idealized “Aryan” body, even though Nolde himself had supported National Socialism. Hitler’s 1921 claim that he could imagine Christ only as blond and blue-eyed, and the devil only with “a Jewish grimace,” shows how the regime projected its racial mythology backward into Christianity.⁴³ In this fantasy, even Christ became retrospectively assimilated to National Socialism.

Fascism, and Nazism in particular, attempted to seize history by eternalizing art. It sacrificed historical difference to the convergence of history and myth. Yet the project culminated in catastrophe. Alfred Baeumler’s own warning is telling: “The activity of the historian should never be the activity of a creator of myths.”⁴⁴ The exhibition was integral to this creation of myth because modernism was the one artistic formation Nazism could not simply imitate: Nazi aesthetics were already modern in their techniques of mass spectacle, institutional control, and political mobilization.

The seizure of modern art offered Nazism an illusory wholeness. In Lacanian terms, the regime encountered modernism as a gestalt: like the infant in the mirror stage, it saw in the external image a completeness that it could not possess on its own.⁴⁵ But the analogy must remain limited. The historical result was not merely an aesthetic contradiction; it was the violent destruction, dispossession, exile, and murder through which the Nazi state pursued racial and political domination.

The Munich exhibition displayed roughly 740 works by around 120 artists.⁴⁶ The wider purge was far larger. The surviving Nazi inventory held by the Victoria and Albert Museum records the confiscation of more than 16,000 works, while other historical tallies exceed 20,000.⁴⁷⁴⁸ The seizures included especially large bodies of work by Nolde, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Max Beckmann, alongside works by Alexander Archipenko, Chagall, James Ensor, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh.⁴⁹

In 1938, many targeted artists were forbidden to work or exhibit. Some confiscated works were sold through German dealers and exported to raise foreign currency; others disappeared or were destroyed. The exhibition traveled through German and Austrian cities, while many artists went into internal or international exile. In March 1939, the Propaganda Ministry burned roughly 5,000 works in Berlin; earlier scholarship cited a lower figure of about 4,000.⁵⁰⁵¹

It is in a specific metaphorical sense—not as an equivalence between artworks and the human victims of Nazi concentration camps—that Entartete Kunst can be understood as a camp: a mechanism of classification, confinement, humiliation, dispossession, and destruction directed at modern art. The regime placed modernism in a figurative camp even as its own aesthetic identity depended on it. Nazi art therefore staged its own contradiction. To secure its existence, it attempted to destroy one of the conditions that made that existence intelligible.

A work by Arno Breker discarded in a backyard in 1945.

Works Cited

Adam, Peter. Art of the Third Reich. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992.

Baeumler, Alfred. Das mythische Weltalter: Bachofens romantische Deutung des Altertums. Munich: C. H. Beck.

Barron, Stephanie, ed. “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991.

Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2007.

Burt, Richard. The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism and the Public Sphere. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

Grosshans, Henry. Hitler and the Artists. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1983.

Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. “The Nazi Myth.” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 2 (Winter 1990): 291–312.

Mali, Joseph. The Rehabilitation of Myth: Vico’s New Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Museum of Modern Art. “Works from Degenerate Art.” Accessed August 10, 2026. https://www.moma.org/slideshows/221/2878.

Petropoulos, Jonathan. Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Rainey, Lawrence, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds. Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.

Steigmann-Gall, Richard. The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Victoria and Albert Museum. “Entartete Kunst: The Nazis’ Inventory of ‘Degenerate Art.’” Updated June 10, 2026. https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/entartete-kunst-the-nazis-inventory-of-degenerate-art.

Zavrel, B. John. Arno Breker: His Art and Life. New York: West-Art, 1985.