The Picasso Historical Museum Show of Degenerate Art of the Nazis

Paris. One of the most murky episodes in art history, the sample of Degenerated art That the Nazis set up in 1937 in Munich, is partially reproduced by the Picasso Museum in Paris from tomorrow.

There are about 60 cadres and avant -garde sculptures, or simply differentexamples of the Artistic corruption that, in the eyes of the Nazis, Germany and Europe invaded in the first decades of the century.

An odyssey

For the historic exhibition, which will be open until May 25, the museum has important donations, such as Metropolis, by George Grosz (1916-17), of the Thyssen Museum in Madrid, an expressionist vision of the chaos of a great city.

Or the painting Book, fruit and mandolin (1924), by Pablo Picasso, a work that had a unique itinerary: before World War II it was the only painting of the Spanish painter hung in a German museum, the National Museum of Berlin.

When the Nazis came to power, in 1933, an official campaign of cleaning of the arts, according to the criteria of the führer, Adolf Hitler, and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.

That campaign was to ridicule and get out of the public collections the works of about 1,400 artists considered Degeneratesmostly Germans.

More than 20 thousand works were thus removed from museums. About 5 thousand were destroyedexplains the commissioner of the exhibition, Johan Popelard.

Picasso’s painting was removed from the museum and stored in a safe box from the Thyssen bank until 1939. The day after the war broke out, on September 2, 1939, the work was sold by a quarter of its value to a private collector .

The work remained hidden, in the German territory. Finally, he was hung again, in the National Museum of Munich, in 1971.

Phenomenal success

That same city chose the Nazis to ride in 1937 that art exhibition degenerate (degenerate). They were about 700 works by German artists, such as Otto Dix, or foreigners, such as Vincent Van Gogh or Marc Chagall.

The sample was mounted as a mockery and a warning; The truth is that it had a phenomenal success: more than 2 million visitors over just over four months. After Munich she was walked through other German cities.

The Picasso Museum exhibition shows fragments of the time.

There are many serious faces, you can feel the opposition. People say almost nothingwrote German artist Hannah Hoch when he visited the exhibition, in September of that year.

Hitler chose to laugh at the cameras, while walking through the sample rooms.

The Picasso Museum exhibition opens with the names of the 1,400 vilified, dismissed or killed artists, such as Otto Freundlich, who died in the sobibor concentration camp.

Under the list, four sculptures Degenerates which were found during the works of a subway line in Berlin in 2010.

In a way are two exhibitions in one: we try to make one about the masterpieces of German art of the first half of the twentieth century, and another about this history of degenerate artexplains the commissioner.

The German painter George Grosz wrote to his friend Felix Weil in 1933: “Future generations will later contemplate my paintings as we contemplate today the immortal scenes of Goya atrocities: ‘I saw him and lived; That was my Germany, that was the truth. ”