Art, that great troublemaker, the striking parallel between degenerate Art and advanced American art

This is a documentary made in 1993 by David Grugin about the exhibibion of what they considered to be the most disgusting, grotesque and  pathetic examples of  ‘Entartete Kunst’ or ‘Degenerate Art’.
It emphasizes 2 things : Art is a great troublemaker and true artists see far beyond the present and surface of things.
And it reveals a lot about Hitler’s psyche. A subject always skipped as if Hitler having reached the summum of inhumanity was no more a person.
It shows also much about the atmosphere of those times.
It’s one of the best documentary I have ever seen.


After having seen that, I recently read of an exhibition taken place in the Georgia Museum of Art : Art Interrupted.
In 1946, J. LeRoy Davidson at the U.S. State Department put together a traveling exhibition of contemporary American paintings known as Advancing American Art. Intended to foster goodwill among the United States, Europe and Latin America, the exhibition demonstrated the power of democracy to foster great art, but the result was not what the organizers had hoped. Provoked by the press, members of the U.S. Congress and President Harry Truman deemed the art in the show un-American. By 1948, the works had been auctioned off to buyers across the nation, Davidson forced to resign, his position abolished and the entire project a laughingstock in the media.

Louis Guglielmi, Subway exit, 1946