ABSTRACT
In this, of course, Hitler was far from alone. In 1893 Max Nordan had written a book called Entartung (Degeneracy) which condemned out ofhand all the Impressionists as 'degenerate painters'. The term caught on, and became the standard for all such art. After 1918 the 'degenerates' began to find a degree of official acceptance. The Berlin National Gallery opened a New Wing in 1919 in the now deserted Crown-Prince Palace in which contemporary material was shown, and this soon became a model for exhibitions elsewhere. In Weimar, the Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius, gathered together an amazing array of artists and designers. Nevertheless, the undercurrent of extreme criticism was always present, finding particularly virulent expression in a 1928 book by Paul Schultze-Naumberg called Art and Race in which pictures of modem paintings were paired with medical photographs of deformity and disease. This was followed by Alfred Rosenberg's Myth 0/ the Twentieth Century (1930) which characterised German expressionist art as 'syphilitic, infantile and mestizo', and which became one ofthe founding texts ofwhat passed for Nazi thought.
