Degenerate Art on Trial: Paris Confronts the Nazi War on Modernism
In the spring of 2025, the Musée national Picasso-Paris has opened its doors to one of the most important and sobering exhibitions of the year: "Degenerate" Art: Modern Art on Trial under the Nazis. Running from February 18 to May 25, this groundbreaking show marks the first time in France that the infamous Nazi campaign against modern art has been explored in full.
The exhibition takes its title and premise from the 1937 Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) show, a propagandistic assault staged by the Nazi regime in Munich. Intended to ridicule and demonise avant-garde artists, the original exhibition featured over 600 works confiscated from German museums, hung in deliberately chaotic and insulting arrangements. Visitors were encouraged to mock what Hitler’s regime framed as “insane,” “Jewish,” “Bolshevist” distortions of traditional art.
Artists like Otto Dix, Paul Klee, Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner were among the hundreds of visionaries branded as threats to the Aryan cultural order. Their crime? Daring to break form, speak truth, and push the boundaries of beauty and identity. In total, over 20,000 works were seized - many sold off, lost, or destroyed. This was not just censorship - it was cultural violence.
The Paris exhibition does more than revisit the historical facts. It reclaims the voices that were nearly erased. Masterworks of Expressionism, Cubism, Dadaism, and early abstraction are presented not as objects of ridicule but as testimonies of resistance, innovation, and survival. The show also examines how some artists were forced into exile, silence, or poverty - while others continued to create in secret.
At a time when conversations around censorship, authoritarianism, and artistic freedom are again pressing, this exhibition resonates with painful immediacy. What happens when a regime decides what is acceptable to feel, to imagine, to express? What happens when creativity itself is criminalised?
At Cynefn, we see exhibitions like this not just as retrospectives, but as reminders. The fight to protect radical, emotional, boundary-breaking art is far from over. The works once labeled “degenerate” were not only brilliant - they were dangerous to those in power, because they saw too clearly.
