The must-see New Orleans art exhibit of the fall isn’t where you’d expect it. “Degenerate! Hitler’s War on Modern Art,” a collection of small avant-garde drawings, paintings and sculpture by modern European masters, can be found among the antique airplanes and tanks of the National World War II Museum.
The “Degenerate!” show may not cover war per se, but the exhibit simmers with the historical irony of the early Nazi era that led to the cataclysmic 1939-45 conflict. Specifically, it illuminates the time that Adolf Hitler produced one of the most popular art exhibits in history — a show that was meant to be a propaganda coup, but backfired spectacularly.
It was 1937, and the Nazis were envisioning their conquest of Europe. In the meantime, Der Führer, who’d once been an aspiring landscape painter, turned his attention to what he saw as the downfall of German art.
Hitler had come to believe that modernism was the wrong path. Many of the artists of the era sought to authentically portray the pointless horror of the First World War and the humiliating deprivation and desperation that followed. The art may have been honest, but it was the antithesis of the dreamy vision Hitler had for the fatherland…