Will the Concept of Degenerate Art Besmirch Our Country’s Soul-Stirring Art?
As anti-D.E.I. rears its ugly head, our world-renowned museums with countless precious artworks may be in peril
The exhibition, Degenerate art. Modern art on trial under the Nazis at the Musée National Picasso Paris, with work originally shown in Munich in 1937, is perfectly suited for these dystopian times. The show—containing modernist artworks that Hitler and the Nazis judged as, “produced by ‘idiots,’ the ‘mentally ill,’ ‘criminals’, ‘speculators,’ ‘Jews’ and ‘Bolsheviks’”—echoes the Trump administration’s debasement of the progressive visual and performing arts that many of us have enjoyed. With Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) closing on May 25, it is valuable to discuss how its theme and art pieces are relevant to our world today.
The original Munich exhibition, which traveled to many German and Austrian cities, and was attended by more than two million visitors, featured 650 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings and books by 100 artists, confiscated by the Hitler regime. With its intent to disdain the work on exhibit, the Nazis presumed that the exhibition would, “… pave the way for a ‘healthy’ art in the image of the German race.”
The display, with the inclusion of stellar modernists including Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, George Grosz, Vassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, André Masson, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, was a blatant political attack on culture. It revealed Hitler’s revenge against the modern art world, which had earlier rejected his own artistic efforts.
Issues raised by the Musée National Picasso exhibition present a cautionary tale for the condition of the arts in our country today and in the future. Does the Trump administration’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion and its forays into cultural dictatorship portend a similar fate for our contemporary culture? Will some of the artwork in Washington D.C.’s esteemed Smithsonian Institution, which is owned and operated by our federal government, undergo a similar fate as that included in the Degenerate Art exhibition?
While some of the Smithsonian’s 17 D.C.-area museums, including the National Air and Space Museum, are not particularly identified with liberalism, others are likely already offending President Trump and his minions. These include the Museum of African American History and Culture, the Museum of the American Indian, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The latter is currently exhibiting “Osgemeos: Endless Story” (through August 3, 2025) by Brazilian twins Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo, who are known for their distinctive graffiti style.
When I visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) a few years ago, I toured its extensive historical display. That installation detailed in words and images several centuries of forced transport of Africans to the United States and to European countries. It also related how slaves ultimately claimed their own freedom, while helping to define our country’s ideals of liberty, justice and democracy. Yet this lucidly told story in words, images and installations is history that Trump would like to erase.
A current exhibition at NMAAHC, “In Slavery's Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World” (through June 8, 2025), describes how slavery helped shape our world today. Yet, considering Trump’s effort to eradicate D.E.I. and his seizing of the Chairmanship of Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Performing Arts Center, his administration might prohibit similar shows at the NMAAHC in the future, if it even allows the museum to remain open. (The National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian have closed their offices supporting work by racial minorities, after Trump was inaugurated.)
Similar future oppression might affect the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. With three facilities, one on Washington D.C.’s National Mall and two others in New York City and Maryland, “The National Museum of the American Indian was established by Congress to rectify our nation’s historical amnesia about the role of Native Nations in the making of modern America,” according to the museum's website.
Indeed, the Indigenous peoples' role in helping to create our country is dramatically different from the mythological narrative of Manifest Destiny, which served as a rationale to strip Native Americans of the land they had occupied for millennia, along with their culture.
With the belief that the United States had the God-given right to expand westward, the draconian concept of “Manifest Destiny” was even in play during colonial times, years before the term was created in 1845. Using any means necessary, including military force, explorers and settlers believed that they were “destined” to control our entire continent. Yet high school history classes barely teach how Manifest Destiny was not the word of God, but the seizure by force of Indigenous land by settlers.
“Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations” will be on view at The National Museum of the American Indian, D.C. venue, presumably until January 2028. The exhibition focuses on the unfortunate circumstance that, while most Americans learn about our Founding Fathers, we are told very little about the plight of the Indigenous people who were forced to relinquish millions of acres of lands to the United States. Approximately 368 treaties were negotiated and signed by U.S. commissioners and tribal leaders from 1777 to 1868; yet our government did not recognize or honor most of those treaties.
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, also on the National Mall, owns and exhibits contemporary and modern work by hundreds of prominent artists from the U.S., Europe, Asia and beyond, much of it from the 20th century. Numerous surreal, abstract and in-your-face artworks are on view, pieces that would likely have greatly offended Hitler, and no doubt offend President Trump. Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2)” (1912) is a cubist-futurist inspired painting, conveying motion by a nude rather than presenting the nude in its traditional repose. The painting was one of the most controversial artworks at the New York Armory Show of 1913, with one critic calling it “an explosion in a shingle factory.”
Another provocative artwork at the Hirshhorn is André Masson’s “Legend” (1945), a surreal and cubist painting by the artist most closely associated with automatic drawing and altered states of consciousness. Among numerous other artists represented at the Hirshhorn are Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and Alice Neel. The latter is known for paintings expressing her commitment to social justice and civil rights, and also for her portraits of counter-culture people from the 1920s right up until her death in 1984.
I grew up in the New York City suburbs. The city afforded me the continual availability of museums, concerts and Broadway shows. I never doubted that art of all types, including exhibitions and performances that reflect our ever-changing, diverse world, would always be accessible. Yet today I worry that many of the art forms that I love might soon be besmirched or seized by the current administration.
(Marcel Duchamp, “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2,” 1912, oil on canvas, below.)
