ART

By ROBERT HUGHES

Among all the efforts to clamp state censorship on art in the 20th century, one symbolic event stands out. It is "Entartete Kunst," the Nazis' show of "degenerate art," the purpose of which was to ridicule Modernism. Even when Stalin launched his terror against the Russian avant-garde in the 1930s, it never occurred to his apparatchiks to hold a big show of the art he loathed. But this was precisely what Hitler did in the summer of 1937 in Munich, contrasting it with another exhibition -- reverently installed in the neoclassical halls of the new House of German Art -- of the art he approved.

The second show was called the "Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung" (Great German Art Exhibition), and much of it was handpicked by the Fuhrer himself. In his opening speech, he promised that "cliques of chatterers, dilettantes, and art forgers will be picked up and liquidated."

Over there, across the park, one saw the works of Max Beckmann, Max Ernst, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka and others. The viewer could imagine what demons stood behind them: the creeping Jew, the scheming Bolshevik, the Negro with his thick lips and saxophone, the slavering pervert. In here it was all David and the Apollo Belvedere, noble simplicity and calm grandeur as $ interpreted by such heirs of Michelangelo and Polyclitus as Hitler's favorite sculptor Arno Breker and his court painter Adolf Ziegler. What kind of Germany, the two shows asked, do you want?

"Entartete Kunst" was the first traveling blockbuster show of the 20th century. It went to several venues in Germany and Austria and was seen by the staggering total of nearly 3 million people, a larger box office than any art exhibition before or since. (By comparison, the Museum of Modern Art's Picasso retrospective drew 1.1 million four decades later.) It contained some 650 paintings, sculptures and prints by just about every Modernist artist of consequence in Germany and Austria; it was a huge, random anthology of the achievements of German Expressionism. Everything came from German museums, since the idea was to show how the official public culture of Germany had been infiltrated by Modernism. At the end of the show, whatever seemed salable was auctioned by the Fischer Gallery in Switzerland. Minor or unsalable works were destroyed. The whole affair was an elaborate purification rite, art's equivalent to book burning.

Yet although "Entartete Kunst" is still an archsymbol of cultural repression, it remains vague in detail. The catalog was a mere brochure, and only a few photos of the actual installation seem to have survived. What, exactly, was in the show? Below the obvious surface of anti-Semitic and anti- Modernist stereotypes, what did it actually represent? How did it fit into the larger programs of Nazism, and why was it so popular?

These questions, and others, are now raised and answered by an altogether fascinating reconstruction of "Entartete Kunst," which opened last week at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant- Garde in Nazi Germany" is the result of five years of patient detective work led by art historian Stephanie Barron, whose specialty is the art and cultural politics of Germany in the '20s and '30s. With the help of photographs that had lain unconsulted since the end of World War II in the archives of the National Gallery in Berlin, Barron was able to reconstruct not only the contents of the show, work by work, but also their hanging on the walls of the Archaeological Institute that far-off summer.

Although some of the 650 works have disappeared and others remain unidentifiable, Barron was able to borrow some 180 items that were in the original show. Among them are numerous masterpieces of the period, such as Kirchner's piercing image of castration anxiety, Self-Portrait as Soldier, 1915, and Beckmann's Still Life with Musical Instruments, 1926, perhaps the greatest of his still-life paintings, now seen for the first time in the U.S.

This pictorial core is preceded by a scale model of the original installation in Munich (an astonishing piece of detective work in itself), complete with the Nazis' derogatory slogans ("Revelation of the Jewish racial soul," "The ideal -- cretin and whore," and so forth) written around them. The museum has also produced voluminous samplings of other aspects of the Nazi program of culture as total propaganda. There are vitrines of banned books and Nazi catalogs, and tape loops of old newsreels of cultural parades in Munich: triumphal processions of kitsch, with huge papier-mache Greek heads borne by people dressed as Rhine Maidens and warriors of the Teutoburg Forest. There are screenings of films whose display is still illegal in Germany, such as Hitlerjunge Quex, 1933, and Jud Suss, 1940. One can listen to a duet from Act I of Lohengrin, conducted by the young Nazi virtuoso Herbert von Karajan, or to SS marches.

Short of summoning the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to belt out the Horst Wessel Song in the Hollywood Bowl, the museum has spared no efforts to sample the culture of the time as vividly as possible for an audience to whom the Third Reich is, at most, a remote and unwelcome memory. And the catalog, with its essays by Barron and other hands, German scholars as well as American ones, is certain to remain the definitive study of Nazi cultural repression for many years to come.

This is a neatly timed show. Issues of censorship and political art resound in the American air as they have not since the 1930s. "Degenerate Art" may remind a few people (at least those who have not been utterly blinkered by their own sanctimony) how toxic a sense of political "correctness" can be once it is injected into the social arteries and corrupts the language that flows in them. In America today the free speech of culture has at least as much to fear from the academic lefties as from the religious Fundamentalists or the loony right, which was certainly not the case in Germany in 1937. For American artists today, censorship or repression usually means not getting a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Jesse Helms may be a bigot, but he is not Dr. Goebbels, and one can only imagine what the ghosts of George Grosz or Beckmann, exiled to America, might say to those who think he is.

The difference between the attitudes behind "Entartete Kunst" and those of America's cultural puritanisms is vast and crucial. No American has ever got away with the suggestion that art, along with literature, music, drama and film, should conform to a state-enforced ideology. The popularity of "Entartete Kunst" sprang from a common ground of bewilderment, the feeling that advanced art, in the 1930s as in the 1980s, had lost contact with the man in the street. It was seen as an index and even, in some obscure way, a cause of the sense of social "decay" on which Nazism harped.

America has never been short of paranoids who fantasized some "essential," ideal American society, undermined by "outsiders." But they had no totalitarian frame through which this romantic pessimism could be magnified, whereas Hitler invented one. Anti-Semitism was only part of the demonology of the "Entartete Kunst" show. In fact, only half a dozen Jewish artists, the best-known of whom was Marc Chagall, were included in it.

What seems to have been of far greater appeal to the German audience was the diffused threat of general pathology, of an incurable strangeness that was Modernism itself. Entartet, as Barron stresses, was at root "a biological term, defining a plant or animal that has so changed that it no longer belongs to its species." But today the work shown in "Entartete Kunst" strikes us as classic. It has become part of the legend, the official culture of the 20th century. No doubt some folks will get more thrills from the show's documents of Nazi kitsch than from the once "shocking" works of Kokoschka and Kirchner. Still, "Degenerate Art" is a brave and necessary effort.