From "degenerate art" to "looted art": developments and consequences of National Socialist Cultural Policy

This article aims to explain the genesis, dynamics and contradictions of National Socialist policy on art in 1937-38. Degenerate art points to the extremes of a state-run campaign against modern art that was part of a broader attempt to impose the National Socialist conception of art by force. Exhibitions of degenerate art became a fixed feature of ideological, anticommunist and anti-semitic propaganda. Goebbels organized the 'Entartete Kunst' exhibition where the theme of degenerate art was chosen as the subject of a propaganda show. 'The art of decay since 1910' removed from German museums represented a terrible loss and destruction of German culture