While modern styles of art were prohibited, the Nazis promoted paintings and sculptures that were traditional in manner and that exalted the "blood and soil" values of racial purity, militarism, and obedience.

[2] The term Entartung (or "degeneracy") had gained currency in Germany by the late 19th century when the critic and author Max Nordau devised the theory presented in his 1892 book Degeneration.

Explaining the painterliness of Impressionism as the sign of a diseased visual cortex, he decried modern degeneracy while praising traditional German culture.

Belief in a Germanic spirit—defined as mystical, rural, moral, bearing ancient wisdom, and noble in the face of a tragic destiny—existed long before the rise of the Nazis; Richard Wagner explored such ideas in his writings.

Its nature and its works) and Kunst und Rasse (Art and Race), the latter published in 1928, in which he argued that only racially pure artists could produce a healthy art which upheld timeless ideals of classical beauty, while racially mixed modern artists produced disordered artworks and monstrous depictions of the human form.

Jahrhunderts (Myth of the Twentieth Century), published in 1933, which became a best-seller in Germany and made Rosenberg the Party's leading ideological spokesman.

It was the birthplace of Expressionism in painting and sculpture, of the atonal musical compositions of Arnold Schoenberg, and the jazz-influenced work of Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill.

[9] Artistic rejection of traditional authority, intimately linked to the Industrial Revolution, the individualistic values of the Age of Enlightenment and the advance of democracy as the preferred form of government, was exhilarating to some.

It unsparingly depicts four badly disfigured veterans of the First World War, then a familiar sight on Berlin's streets, rendered in caricatured style.

Such was true to Hitler even though only Liebermann, Meidner, Freundlich, and Marc Chagall, among those who made significant contributions to the German modernist movement, were Jewish.

[19] By his order, 70 mostly Expressionist paintings were removed from the permanent exhibition of the Weimar Schlossmuseum in 1930, and the director of the König Albert Museum in Zwickau, Hildebrand Gurlitt, was dismissed for displaying modern art.

Only in Stalin's Soviet Union, where Socialist Realism was the mandatory style, had a modern state shown such concern with regulation of the arts.

"[29] However, a faction led by Alfred Rosenberg despised the Expressionists, and the result was a bitter ideological dispute, which was settled only in September 1934, when Hitler declared that there would be no place for modernist experimentation in the Reich.

The work of the Expressionist painter Emil Nolde, a committed member of the Nazi party, continued to be debated even after he was ordered to cease artistic activity in 1936.

[31] For many modernist artists, such as Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Oskar Schlemmer, it was not until June 1937 that they surrendered any hope that their work would be tolerated by the authorities.

[32] Although books by Franz Kafka could no longer be bought by 1939, works by ideologically suspect authors such as Hermann Hesse and Hans Fallada were widely read.

These works were then to be presented to the public in an exhibit intended to incite further revulsion against the "perverse Jewish spirit" penetrating German culture.

[38] The Entartete Kunst exhibit, featuring over 650 paintings, sculptures, prints, and books from the collections of 32 German museums, premiered in Munich on 19 July 1937, and remained on view until 30 November, before traveling to 11 other cities in Germany and Austria.

[42] The cover featured the exhibition title—with the word "Kunst", meaning art, in scare quotes—superimposed on an image of Otto Freundlich's sculpture Der Neue Mensch.

This exhibition, held at the palatial Haus der deutschen Kunst (House of German Art), displayed the work of officially approved artists such as Arno Breker and Adolf Wissel.

At the end of four months Entartete Kunst had attracted over two million visitors, nearly three and a half times the number that visited the nearby Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung.

Paul Klee spent his years in exile in Switzerland, yet was unable to obtain Swiss citizenship because of his status as a degenerate artist.

[51][52] A large amount of "degenerate art" by Picasso, Dalí, Ernst, Klee, Léger and Miró was destroyed in a bonfire on the night of 27 July 1942, in the gardens of the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris.

In 2010, as work began to extend an underground line from Alexanderplatz through the historic city centre to the Brandenburg Gate, a number of sculptures from the degenerate art exhibition were unearthed in the cellar of a private house close to the "Rote Rathaus".

These included, for example, the bronze cubist-style statue of a female dancer by the artist Marg Moll, and are on display at the Neues Museum.

Copies were made available to other libraries and research organisations at the time, and much of the information was subsequently incorporated into a database maintained by the Freie Universität Berlin.

[64] Two copies of an earlier version of Volume 1 (A–G) also survive in the German Federal Archives in Berlin, and one of these is annotated to show the fate of individual artworks.

[67] Neil Levi, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, suggested that the branding of art as "degenerate" was only partly an aesthetic aim of the Nazis.

[69][70] In the 1964 film The Train, a German Army colonel attempts to steal hundreds of "degenerate" paintings from Paris before it is liberated during World War II.