In “The Rabbi,” Marc Chagall placed a sassy rabbi in a vivid yellow and green space as he takes a pinch of snuff. His dark gaze challenges, engaged in a metaphoric parable. It is self-critique, myth, provoking. “Degenerate Art,” an exhibition at the Musée Picasso in Paris, tells how the Nazis dragged this luminously yellow canvas through the streets of Mannheim, with the tag, “Taxpayer, you should know how your money was spent.” It is chilling, the philistine, ideological and disgust all wrapped up in a familiar package.
The Nazis pillaged museums as part of their merciless war on “degenerates and decadents,” on the “mentally ill,” Jewish-Bolshevists “who brought in the modern. Their criteria was not aesthetic, but propagandist, against anyone “trying to insult German feeing or destroy of confuse natural forms.” Railing against cultural disintegration, they created an exhibition, “Degenerate Art, Entartete Kunst,” in 1937 of 650 works, sent it on parade so Germans – over 2 million in total, 20k a day – could spit and be disgusted as they learned to revile what would become mainstream modern art.
You can’t walk through this show without hearing “WOKE’ as a synonym for “Degenerate.” Trump, our new chief aesthetic critic, denounces literature, art, thought with a bludgeon-like precision. Germans Klee, Kirchner, Nolde, Kurt Schwitters, along with Picasso, Kandinsky and Chagall were the targets of the Nazis. Today Trump carries out DEI purges, such as his and Hegseth’s Naval Academy removal of Maya Angelou, Einstein, Kendi. It screams loud and clear that these cultural wars are meant to make foreign and other a part of the body politic. And guess what – Holocaust studies are part of that purge.
