Art Review: ‘Degenerate Art’ Exhibition at the Neue Galerie New York
FINANCIAL TIMES
By Ariella Budick
NEW YORK---Among the many imponderables of the Neue Galerie’s splendid Degenerate Art exhibition is an uncanny sense of repeating a forgotten ritual. The show and its excellent catalogue sharpen plenty of questions and refuse simplistic answers. What, for instance, was degenerate art? The term was popularised by a doctor and rabbi’s son: Max Nordau published the bestseller Entartung (Degeneration) in 1892-93, diagnosing the condition as a mental illness caused by the traumas of modernisation. He prescribed a three-step treatment: “Characterisation of leading degenerates as mentally diseased; unmasking and stigmatising their imitators as enemies to society; cautioning the public against the lies of these parasites.” The Nazis later refined Nordau’s formulation by giving it a racial origin. [link]
By Ariella Budick
 |
| ‘Eternal Wanderers’, 1919, by Lasar Segall |
