President Trump’s latest attack is on the Smithsonian Institution, which he excoriates for exhibits that demonstrate “improper ideology.”

I’ve spent forty years teaching and writing history, and those words first brought to mind the Nazi “Degenerate Art” exhibition in 1937 Munich.

In that exhibition, the “degenerate” artists included Paul Klee, Otto Dix, Wasily Kandinsky, foreigners like Grant Wood, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian.

The Degenerate Art received a showing that year, but so did properly ideological Nazi art, dominated by great nude sculptures that celebrated Aryan beauty. They were in another gallery, far grander, gallery.

Two million Germans ultimately attended the Degenerate Art exhibition. About 600,000 attended Hitler’s Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung—“Great German Art Exposition.”

If you’re in the mood for Aryan nudes, they were inert in the Great German Art Exposition. They are far less so in the first ten minutes of Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympica,” the filmmaker’s tribute 1936 Berlin Olympics–what we Americans remember as the Jesse Owens Olympics.

But not even Jesse Owens nor Paul Klee could stop the immense, and immensely seductive, power of fascism. It was simply too late.

And it might well be today.


In the links: An excerpt from “Olympia;” a long-ago lesson plan on modern art from AGHS that includes some of the “Degenerates.”