Art Calendar – Current Exhibitions in Germany

Built during the Third Reich as a monumental building in the service of Nazi cultural policy, the treatment of its own history has always been a particularly sensitive issue for the Munich House of Art. In July 2012 the museum celebrated a rather unpleasant anniversary: that of its official opening on July 18, 1937 and of the opening of the exhibition Degenerate Art in the nearby Hofgarten Arcades only one day later.

The exhibition is still regarded as a disgrace in the history of German museums. The exhibited works were defamed as “sick”, while the concurrent show, The First Greater German Art Exhibition, was presented as showing new German art, freed of all the alleged errors of modernism and pressed into a state-controlled corset – from now on the Führer decided what was art. Degenerate Art thus became the symbol for the Nazi concept of art, whose violent enforcement did not shrink from confiscations and book burnings.

The exhibition Histories in Conflict (Geschichten im Konflikt) now explores the role of the museum between its opening in 1937 and the Pablo Picasso exhibition in 1955, when the avant-garde again returned to the House of Art. The exhibition particularly explores the international context: for instance, the Paris World Fair of 1937, where the German Pavilion flaunted an eight meter model of the newly opened Munich museum, while the Spanish Pavilion showed Guernica, Picasso’s painted beacon of protest against the Spanish Civil War, in which the Wehrmacht had participated.

In the same way, Histories in Conflict confronts “degenerate art” with those works that took its place at the The First Greater German Art Exhibition. While the former were sold at bargain prices in foreign countries or destroyed, the latter enjoyed a very special patron. Presented on grids in the middle of the room, most of the works bear a clearly visible note on their backs: “Buyer: Adolf Hitler”.