During the latter stages of Germany's Weimar Republic (1918–1933), the Nazi party developed the idea of <em>Entartete Kunst</em> (literally ‘degenerate art’) as a propaganda tool.<br><br>The idea was first proposed by the physician and social critic Max Nordau in his book <em>Degeneration</em> (1892). Nordau vehemently opposed the modernist trend in Europe’s <em>fin de siècle</em> arts, viewing it as a ‘contempt for the traditional views of… morality’<sup>1</sup>. To denigrate the movement, he devised a theory linking modernism to mental illness, partly caused he said by the physical effects on the body from rapid urbanisation.<sup>2</sup><br><br>The Nazis took this a step further, arguing that contamination of racial purity was another factor in the supposed cases of insanity in modern art.<sup>3</sup><br><br>When in 1933 Hitler was appointed chancellor, modernist paintings and sculptures were banned from public museum collections. ‘Degenerate’ artists were forced from their jobs and sometimes even deprived of their right to paint. In contrast, the Nazis staged extravagant exhibitions to promote ideologically charged ‘Aryan’ paintings, mainly genre and landscape works of the classical tradition depicting masculine heroism and idyllic nature.<br><br>In 1937 in Munich, 650 out of more than 20,000 artworks confiscated from state-owned museums were exhibited at the <em>Entartete Kunst</em> exhibition. Modernist works by Emil Nolde, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, among others, were chaotically hung. Captions, such as ‘Nature as seen by sick minds!’<sup>4</sup>, linked expressionist art with genetic inferiority and mental illness, as proposed by Nordau. <br>Nazi-approved art, on the other hand, was displayed at the nearby <em>Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung</em> (Great German Art Exhibition)<sup>5</sup><br><br>In the end the propaganda backfired: interest in the degenerate exhibition far outstripped the latter.<br>