Nordau

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.

Nordau, who had declared that composer Richard Wagner — perhaps the Nazis’ most venerated cultural icon — possessed a “greater abundance of degeneration than all the degenerates put together with whom we have hitherto become acquainted,” would no doubt have disagreed.

Nazi architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg later pushed Nordau’s theory of degeneration further down the slippery slope, arguing that it was not social conditioning that produced such despicable degenerates, but race, and in particular race-mixing.

While Nordau’s distaste for Wagner – whose operas were embraced by Hitler with quasi-religious fervor – was not “racial” in nature and may have been inflated by the composer’s notorious antisemitism, questions over what qualified as degenerate art illustrated how nebulous the concept was.

One of the big books of 1892 was “Degeneration,” whose author, Max Nordau, was Hungarian but lived most of his life in Paris.