Canonizing Hitler’s “degenerate art” in three American exhibitions, 1939–1942

In 1957, the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) mounted German Art of the Twentieth Century. With 178 works by forty-two artists, it was the largest exhibition of modern German art held to date at an American institution. Billed as the “most comprehensive survey [of German art] ever presented in this country,”1 the exhibition was, however, weighted heavily toward expressionism (a shifting artistic category but defined by this time as works produced by members of the pre-World War I artists’ groups Brücke and Blaue Reiter as well as stylistically related works created during and after the war). Comprising almost half the checklist of the MoMA show,2 expressionism had clearly attained a foothold in the canon that other modes of German modernism such as Neue Sachlichkeit and Dada had yet to achieve. Indeed, the publication in the same year of several scholarly books on German expressionism – the first in English – offered clear proof of expressionism’s now-canonical status in the United States.3