Cantor revisits 1937 degeneracy, censorship

With increasingly complicated issues of censorship and freedom of expression reverberating around the globe - from the suppression of artist Ai Weiwei to the protests against "Innocence of Muslims" in the Arab world - a glance back toward "Degenerate Art," the notorious 1937 Munich exhibition presented by the Nazis, seems as on point as ever.

"A War on Modern Art: The 75th Anniversary of the Degenerate Art Exhibition" at Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University may not include any of the exact pieces displayed at the original show, artworks that were attacked as "un-German," immoral and undesirable by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels. Instead, it presents a small, focused selection of 19 prints, watercolors and books by modernists included in the 1937 exhibition of 650 works, drawing mainly on the Cantor Center's permanent collection.

"It's kind of strange, I think, to quote, unquote commemorate something as horrible as this exhibition," says curator Hilarie Faberman by phone from Stanford. "But on the other hand, there were very much issues of censorship and degeneracy in art, continuing through the '80s and '90s."

The sensation created by the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe came quickly to mind. "In other words, censorship is very much an issue that's alive in our society."

"A War on Modern Art" includes watercolors by Wassily Kandinsky and Conrad Felixmuller, as well as a 1921 self-portrait by Oskar Kokoschka, two lithographs depicting the poor from Otto Dix's 1924 "Hunger!" portfolio, a linoleum cut of a young woman by Christian Rohlfs and two inward-looking prints by Lovis Corinth. The visually dense "Madhouse," "The Yawners" and "Lovers II" by Max Beckmann are part of the same portfolio of prints, some of which were shown in the 1937 exhibition.

"The ideas the artists are working with here are similar," Faberman says. "I think what offended the Nazis about those were the style of the prints and the way space is condensed. You've got all the mentally ill people in the print, which were considered disgusting and dissolute, like anyone who wasn't a part of this pure Aryan ideal - Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, the physically challenged. Hitler used the show as a tool to show what they thought was sickness in society and how the culture needed to be purified."

Abstract art was considered the offensive purview of the elite, while some more-realistic artists, such as Dix and George Grosz, were attacked by the Nazis for their leftist leanings and unidealized, ugly imagery.

Working off the idea for "A War on Modern Art" from one of her assistants, Mariko Chang, and looking into the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's noted 1991 restaging of the original exhibition, Faberman never before had a chance to sit down and read about the 1937 show.

"It is astounding to see what was in the original exhibit," she says now. "Almost everything we consider important to understanding modern art was labeled as degenerate."

Through Feb. 24. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday; until 8 p.m. Thursday. Free. Marie Stauffer Sigall Gallery, Lomita Drive at Museum Way, Stanford. museum.stanford.edu.

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Cantor revisits 1937 degeneracy, censorship