German Degenerate Art Guide 1937. This is a first edition of the guide accompanying the 1937 art exhibition in Munich which mocked “degenerate art” in Germany. It is an exhibition guide titled “Entartete, Kunst, Ausftellungsfuhrer”, which means “Degenerate Art Exhibition Guide”, and the exhibition targeted art deemed unacceptable to the Third Reich in Germany in the years before World War II. It is 32 pages long and was just a big piece of propaganda to turn the German people against certain segments of German society, a prelude to the horrors of World War II, and not many copies of this exhibition guide have survived the war. The title page reads “Fuhrer Durch Die Ausftellung Entartete Kunst“, which means “Guide to the Exhibition of Degenerate Art”, and the purpose of this propaganda was to raise up the ideas of National Socialism and glorify the German state. The exhibition gathered works that were considered insulting to the German nation, such as works of modern art, the pieces were compared to the works of patients in mental hospitals, and if you owned art like this, “you had better get rid of it” was the gist of the exhibit. Background: The Third Reich’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, along with Adolf Ziegler, President of the Chamber of Art, created the art exhibition. It displayed 650 works of art that were confiscated from 32 museums and galleries across Germany, because the art was considered “an insult” to the German people and did not meet the ideological aesthetics of the Third Reich. This included Impressionism, Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, Cubism and Fauvism, and many of Germany’s most talented artists fell victims to this targeted attack, and the exhibition was just propaganda, no two ways about it. “If you weren’t part of the Aryan race, you weren’t welcome in Germany” was the message of the people behind the exhibition - it was all about cultural heritage and preserving the purity of the Aryan race. Artists like Pablo Picasso, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee and others were included in this group of degenerate artists, as well as art by “Jewish Bolsheviks”, and their works were banned from Germany after this. More than two million people visited the exhibition, which opened in Munich on July 19, 1937 and then toured twelve other cities in Germany and Austria until April 1941. So artwork by Jews and others were targeted in the exhibition as unsuitable for German society, and while the show had a decidedly anti-Semitic tone, in fact relatively few of the artists who had their works displayed were Jewish. Afterwards, artworks from the show were were added to party leaders’ personal collections or sold internationally, but thousands were publicly destroyed. The artists themselves were prohibited from producing art in Germany, and those that could, fled, some continued working in secret, while others were interred and died in concentration camps. The book is not a copy or reproduction, but a softcover which is 32 pages long and an original from the exhibition in 1937. The book measures 8 1/4 x 5 3/4 in. wide and is in great condition. The binding is tight and the pages and illustrations are very clean, with just a slight corner crease at one tip, and we don’t know how many of these guides survived the war, but imagine there weren’t many. The book is protected by an acetate type plastic, which is probably why the book has survived so well. A poster for the exhibition done by Rudolf Hermann and published in 1939 by Grossdruckerei Pickenhahn in Chemnitz, Germany is selling for five figures, and it’s also in the vein of the book here - pure propaganda and a denunciation of unwanted art by the Third Reich. #5445