Munich 1937: The Worst Art Exhibition in the World Quiz

Answer: Joseph Goebbels

In his diary for 30 June 1937 Goebbels recorded his idea for a large-scale exhibition of "degenerate" modern art, the "Entatarte Kunst".

A small exhibition going by this name had already been mounted in Dresden in 1933; this was comprised of ten sculptures, a few prints and drawings, and 42 oil paintings. These modern works were shown alongside "genuine" (i.e. Nazi approved) art by artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, Wilhelm Leibl and Hans Thoma.

On 30 June 1937, after reading Wolfgang Willrich's "Cleansing of the Art Temple", Goebbels decided to remove all modern art works from German museums and galleries - the "Art Temples". He tasked a team of five rabid Nazis led by Adolf Ziegler, President of the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts, to seize as many of these works as they could.

Answer: About 700

Over 5,230 works of art were seized in the initial search; of these, about 700 works were displayed in the exhibition. They were labelled with insulting texts and poorly hung. A further confiscation campaign in August brought the number of seized works to about 16,000.

The exhibition was staged to promote the belief that modernism was a conspiracy by people who hated German decency. These people were frequently identified as Jewish and/or Communist, even though only six of the 112 artists included were Jewish.

The opposing view is that taken altogether, the exhibition was an all-round introduction to contemporary German art; it featured some of the cornerstone works of German modernism, and nearly every German artist of note was included.

Answer: Stanley Spencer

Works by the English fugurative artist Stanley Spencer were not included in the exhibition, which was very much focused on German Expressionism, Dada and Bauhaus.

Looking at the incorrect answer options, Pablo Picasso had been living in Paris for many years when the Germans occupied the city in June 1940. The Nazis despised Picasso's artistic style so he stopped exhibiting. Despite his world-wide fame he was often harassed by the Gestapo. During one search of his flat an officer found a photograph of his painting "Guernica." "Did you do that?" the German asked Picasso. "No," he replied, "You did". A number of his works were included in the "Degenerate Art" exhibition.

The exhibition included a large number of works by the Expressionist artist Otto Dix - one of my personal favourites. He was one of the first artists to lose his job after the Nazis came to power in 1933. He was prohibited from exhibiting his work, and 260 of his paintings were confiscated from public collections. His paintings "The Trench" and "War Cripples" illustrate war and its casualties, and both were included in the Degenerate Art exhibition.

Bauhaus teacher Paul Klee's work is difficult to classify but very recognisable. He used many different media and a great variety of colour. Sadly he didn't survive the war.

Answer: None

Nolde mounted a sustained campaign to have his work removed from the exhibition, which was aided by the fact that his paintings were very popular, even with some high-ranking Nazis. This campaign was totally successful as all his works were removed. This led to petitions being circulated calling for the removal of works by other artists, such as Franz Marc. Goebbels wrote in his diary that if he were to remove the works by every artist that had been defended by someone then the exhibition would have to close.

Despte the success of Nolde's campaign, he was not allowed to paint - even in private - from 1941 onwards. However in this period he managed to produce hundreds of watercolours, which he hid - he called them the "Unpainted Pictures". Despite his political views, after the end of the war he was once again honoured, receiving the Pour le Mérite.

Answer: Bauhaus

Bauhaus (German for 'building house') was a hugely influential German art school that operated from 1919 to 1933. Its teaching approach concentrated on combining crafts and the fine arts, and it became famous for its approach to design, unifying artistic vision with the principles of mass production with an emphasis on function.

Sadly its modernist style was labelled as being "un-German" by the Nazis, who denounced it for its "degenerate art" and for being a front for communists and social liberals. The regime was determined to crack down on what it saw as foreign, probably Jewish, influences of "cosmopolitan modernism". In 1933 the school was temporarily closed by the Gestapo; upon its re-opening the school's faculty closed it down permanently.

The Degenerate Art exhibition in 1937 featured works by many of the school's ex-faculty and graduates, for example Klee, Kandinsky and Oskar Schlemmer. It was said that an artist's having attended the Bauhaus was an automatic mandate for their works to be included in the exhibition.

Many Bauhaus graduates left Germany, going to work in western Europe, the US, Canada and Israel. Its influence is still apparent in modern furniture and architecture, for example the International Style in the US.

Answer: Schwitters created his last work in the barn at Elterwater

Schwitters spent the last year of his life creating a collage, the "Merzbarn", in a disused barn at Elterwater, about five miles from Ambleside.

Dadaism originated in Switzerland in 1916 and rapidly spread to Berlin, Paris and New York. Dadaists created works across all media, including sound poetry, collage and photomontage (especially in Berlin), and the use of found objects and assemblage. The group was openly political, espousing pacifism and distributing anti-Weimar propaganda, so consequently there was a lot of work by Dadaist artists in the Degenerate Art exhibition. One piece in particular, Schwitters' collage "Merzbild", took the form of layers of tickets, receipts, letters, envelopes and postcards stuck to a backing, and was typical of his work.

In January 1937, on hearing that he was wanted for interview by the Gestapo, Schwitters fled to Norway, and thence to the Isle of Man, London and finally Ambleside in the Lake District. In March 1947 he decided to create a work at a disused barn at Cylinders Farm, Elterwater. He continued working on this until he died: on 7 January 1948 he received the news that he had been granted British citizenship, and on the following day he died from acute pulmonary edema and myocarditis in Kendal Hospital.

I was able to see the work in the barn about 18 years ago; it was in a sorry state, looking as though it was just going to be left there to decay. Fortunately, however, one entire wall was removed to the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle for safe keeping, leaving just the shell of the building. In 2011 the barn (but not the artwork inside it) was reconstructed in the front courtyard of the Royal Academy in London as part of its "Modern British Sculpture" exhibition.

Answer: Wearing silver armour and mounted on a horse

In "Der Bannertragar" ("The Standard Bearer") by Hubert Lanzinger, Hitler is shown wearing 15th-century steel armour and mounted on a black horse. Holding the banner, he gazes sternly into the distance. The armour looks as though it's slightly too big for him.

In his book "Culture in Nazi Germany" (2019), Michael H. Kater describes the painting as demonstrating "the ludicrous nature of original Nazi German art beyond common definitions of kitsch, and the depth of evil that lurked behind it". Sadly variations of this picture are still available and are in widespread use in extreme right-wing propaganda.

Answer: Just over two million

According to the Nazi newspaper "Volkischer Beobachter", the exhibition in Munich attracted 2,008,899 visitors. After Munich the exhibition toured Germany and Austria. About 500,000 visitors saw it in Berlin and about 150,000 in Vienna. These figures make it one of the most visited art exhibitions anywhere, ever.

The attendance figures for the show in Munich equates to about 14,900 visitors a day. Given the small size of the nine galleries in which the works were displayed, this indicates that the average visit was of short duration. It's probable that many visitors went just to register their attendance, paying ritual allegiance as good Nazis.

Answer: In 2010 it was dug up during excavations for a new train station in Berlin Belin.

Moll's elegant brass figure of "Tanzerin" ("The Dancer") was the only work by her in the exhibition. It disappeared after the exhibition was dismantled, but popped up again in 1941 as a prop in the film "Venus vor Gericht" ("Venus on Trial") as an example of the type of art traded by Jewish art dealers. It then vanished again, but it was eventually found in very poor condition in 2010 during excavations for a new train station in Berlin. After extensive restoration it is now exhibited again in the Neues Museum in Berlin.

Otherwise the vast majority of confiscated works were destroyed or lost - for example, on 29 March 1939 about 5,000 confiscated works were burned in the courtyard of Berlin's principal fire station.

In May 1938 a retroactive law was passed legalising the taking of works of art from public museums and selling them on the open market. In the summer of 1939 about 125 confiscated works were auctioned in Lucerne, where a van Gogh self-portrait went for $40,000 - well below estimate. The art dealers had a field day, as works by Chagall and Dix went for very low prices.

The Victoria and Albert Museum holds the only document detailing the full extent of the Nazis' systematic purging of German museums and public collections from 1937 onwards, the only known copy of a complete inventory of "degenerate art" seized.

Answer: False - the UK artistic community saw the Nazis' exhibition as attacking artistic freedom

The artistic community in the UK made a strong direct response to the Nazis' Degenerate Art exhibition by mounting the "Twentieth Century German Art" exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in London in 1938. It featured over 300 works by avant-garde and modernist artists whose art had been banned and confiscated by the Nazi regime, with the aim of celebrating these works and serving as a defense of artistic freedom.

The Degenerate Art exhibition is still remembered. In 2014 the Neue Galerie in New York staged "Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937", an exhibition of paintings and sculptures from the 1937 exhibition. These were accompanied by films and photographs of the original installations, promotional and propaganda materials, and some surviving Nazi-approved art from the Great German Art Exhibition, the official Nazi-approved exhibition set up to contrast with the modernist and avant-garde works the Nazis considered "degenerate".

The Weiner Holocaust Library celebrated the 80th anniversary of the Twentieth Century German Art exhibition in 1938 with a show featuring a small number of the original artworks from the exhibition, including works by Emil Nolde, and a series of lectures. Furthermore, the Museum of Modern Art in New York has established a digital resource that showcases artwork from the Degenerate Art exhibition.