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It’s a curiosity of art history that so many movements got their names according to a specific formula: Artists exhibit their work, art critics see said work, critics ridicule new style with an inventive insult that becomes the acknowledged term for the movement. For examples, look no further than Impressionism, Pointillism, Cubism, Fauvism, and Baroque. The Nazis fast-tracked this process, though, by mounting an exhibition in Munich in 1937 and giving it a derogatory title, all in one: Degenerate Art (or in German, Entartete Kunst). The term stuck for the duration of the Nazi regime, but German Expressionism, Die Brücke, and Der Blaue Reiter, to name a few styles dubbed as “degenerate,” all reclaimed their original identities after the Nazis were defeated.

In the early decades of the 20th century, German art flourished with a new, wild style. Audiences couldn’t get enough of the high-keyed colors, minimal details, and expressive lines. And the revival of older techniques, such as the woodcut, successfully blended the traditional with the new. During the 1910s and 1920s, museums opened departments devoted to contemporary art and, in the town of Halle, a new museum dedicated solely to modern art was founded.

The rise of the Nazi party in 1933 quickly brought this warm reception of the new to an end. Adolf Hitler, himself a failed art student, propagated the idea that classical art (and especially classical Greek and Roman art) was aligned with his views on the supremacy of the Aryan race. Renaissance masters were in; the cubic, streamlined architecture of the Bauhaus school (shut down by the Nazis in 1933) was out.

A manifesto was published in 1933 under the jurisdiction of Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, stating (among other things) that: “All works of a cosmopolitan or Bolshevist nature should be removed from German museums and collections, but first they should be exhibited to the public, who should be informed of the details of their acquisition, and then burned.”

And so artists producing what the Nazis considered “degenerate” were sanctioned; they were fired from teaching positions, forbidden to exhibit or sell their work, and occasionally even banned from making art. The Nazis purged 32 state museums across Germany and Austria of what they deemed to be inferior art, seizing around 16,000 artworks from public collections.

“An insult to German feeling”

The Nazis exhibited roughly 650 of these confiscated paintings, sculptures, prints, and books in 1937, with the intention of clarifying what types of artwork were unacceptable to the Reich for being, in their words, “an insult to German feeling” and “un-German.” While most of the displayed works were made by local modernists, a few international artists were included such as Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian.

The Degenerate Art show was an eclectic umbrella, extending over abstract and representational work by 112 different artists. The subjectively colored paintings of Die Brücke artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde were included, alongside socially critical works by Max Beckmann and Otto Dix and landscapes by Der Blaue Reiter cofounder August Macke.

Carefully crafted labels accompanied the artworks, describing why they were degenerate. “Which of these three drawings is the work of an inmate of a lunatic asylum?” read wall text near a group of works by Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, and others. The exhibition labels also listed the prices paid by public museums to acquire the individual artworks, in an attempt to anger a public who might feel that state funds could be better spent.

After a four-month run in Munich that drew over two million visitors, the Degenerate Art exhibition traveled to another 11 cities throughout Germany and Austria where it was seen by an additional one million viewers.

The Great German Art Exhibition

Though the Degenerate Art exhibition is the one better known today, the Nazis mounted two art shows simultaneously in 1937: one of Degenerate Art, the other of Great German Art. The Great German Art Exhibition opened first, one day earlier, to inaugurate Munich’s new House of German Art. The two shows were right across a park from each other.

“From now on we are going to wage a merciless war of destruction against the last remaining elements of cultural disintegration,” Hitler announced at the opening of the Great German Art Exhibition, the first of eight annual shows at that museum that attempted to showcase what the Nazis considered the highest national artistic accomplishments.

In the end, though, so-called “Degenerate Art” won—it’s no longer the term used to describe the primary color–rich paintings of Nolde, Kokoschka, and Kirchner. And Munich’s House of German Art is now the Haus der Kunst, a contemporary art museum featuring precisely what the Nazis despised. “Haus der Kunst became an important venue for featuring avant-garde works,” the museum explains of its history on its website, “and thus a counterbalance to its defamatory stance during the Third Reich.”

Even in 1937, when there was free admission to both of the Nazi-sponsored art exhibitions, the proof was in the numbers: Five times as many people went to see the incendiary display of artwork they weren’t supposed to like.

After the Degenerate Art exhibition tour ended, the Nazis sold whatever paintings they could through a Swiss auction house to raise money for their war efforts. Works were bought by museums and private collectors across the globe, and in this way, too, the artworks had the last laugh; they are admired in museums and galleries the world over.