modern art

Here, it twists into an inevitable jab at an ostensibly liberal Modern art world, still in fact dominated by unexamined white supremacy.

The subject — bathers — is as foundational to Modern art as it gets, conjuring Paul Cézanne.

The Nazis held that German society had become diseased by the advent of modern art — meaning not just works that questioned or contradicted Nazi policy, but any kind of art bearing the hallmarks of modernity: visually distorted Expressionist paintings, atonal music unfettered by a central key, edifices of the Dada movement that defied aesthetic logic.

In 1930, the Nazi Party chief in Thuringia and state Minister of Education and the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, issued orders to remove 70 Expressionist paintings from the Schloss Weimar museum, fire the director of another museum for displaying modern art in its exhibitions, and ban all pacifist or antiwar books and films, including Erich Maria Remarque’s legendary World War I novel “All Quiet on the Western Front.”

The sources of modern art, according to social critic Max Nordau, were decadent, corrupted societies whose artists, afflicted with “degeneration” as a form of mental illness, could only produce work reflecting their degenerate selves.