Painting a Death Sentence

From The Wall Street Journal-

“I know, therefore, that when the Volk passes through these galleries it will recognize in me its own spokesman and counselor,” declared Adolf Hitler with the opening of the “Great German Art Exhibition” on July 18, 1937, in Munich. The presentation, selected by his Nazi associate Heinrich Hoffmann, was loaded with conventional paintings and sculpture, including mythological scenes and portraits of “pure” Aryans.

Opening the next day, also in Munich, was a second show mocking modern art. “Entartete Kunst”—“Degenerate Art”—had been conceived by Third Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels and organized by Adolf Ziegler to show 650 contemporary paintings and sculptures, picked from the thousands of works Nazi forces had seized from 32 German museums, some only days earlier. In his public remarks about the exhibition, Hitler added that these modern “so-called artists” could be treated for “disorders” or as “a matter for a criminal court.”
More here-

http://www.wsj.com/articles/painting-a-death-sentence-1461358060