Compliant Art: Art and Politics in the National Socialist Era

The art of the early 20th-century avant-garde–decried and suppressed by the National Socialists as degenerate art –has been widely studied and exhibited to the public in recent decades. The art favored by the Nazis–realistic paintings of fair-haired maidens and pale, strong bodies–silently disappeared into warehouses after 1945, rarely resurfacing in public exhibitions in Germany or abroad. Nazi art was intimately connected to the regime’s ideology and propaganda; it was supposed to stabilize the system, hearten in difficult times and communicate values such as a fighting spirit, family and tradition. Compliant Art: Art and Politics in the National Socialist Era, a rare study of the official art of the time, documents the period’s conflicts, juxtaposing works that conformed to Nazi ideology with those by persecuted artists, and investigates what happened to the good, compliant artists after the end of the war.