Volume 41, Number 8 · April 21, 1994
The Nazis' Theater of Seduction
By Willibald Sauerländer
'Degenerate Art': The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany
by Stephanie Barron et al
Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Abrams, 423 pp., $75.00
The Art of the Third Reich
by Peter Adam
Abrams, 332 pp., $45.00
Artists Under Vichy: A Case of Prejudice and Persecution
by Michèle C. Cone
Princeton University Press, 264 pp., $35.00
In the history of Western civilization, denunciations of the arts as 'immoral' and 'corrupting' date back to Socrates. But the fear of moral degeneration that haunted Hitler and many of his German contemporaries was a specifically modern obsession, one that first appeared only in the second half of the nineteenth century. Its origins lay in the concurrent emergence of the aesthetic cult of 'decadence' and the scientific—or pseudoscientific—concept of 'degeneration.' At about the same time that artists and writers were exploring the relationship between morbidity, disease, and artistic creation, the concept of degeneration became a central issue in medicine, the theory of evolution, and racial anthropology, where it was thought to lead to the extinction of a species or at least to the ruin of its strength and vigor.
Review, 3691 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |