Degenerate art: Encyclopedia II - Degenerate art - Theory of Degeneracy

Degenerate art - Theory of Degeneracy

The theory of degeneracy was conceived by the critic and author Max Nordau in his 1892 book, Degeneration, (German title: Entartung). According to Nordau, artists were victims of modern life and suffered from decayed brain centers. Nordau's inspiration was the criminologist Cesare Lombroso, author of The Criminal Man published in 1876. Lombroso attempted to prove that there were born criminals, which could be detected by scientific methods to determine atavistic personality traits by measuring abnormal physical characteristics. Nordau then used this as a pseudoscientific rationale and a critique of modern art. Based upon Lombroso's theory, Nordau asserted that modern artists also suffered from an atavistic degeneracy as Lombroso's born criminals. For Nordau, all forms of modern art, whether music, poetry, or visual contained symptoms of mental disorder and corruption. Modern artists suffered from both fatigue and nervous excitement. Therefore, all modern arts lacked discipline, and failed to make coherent connections. Nordau particularly focused his attacks on the Symbolist movement in French literature, Aestheticism in English literature, and Impressionism in painting, claiming that the mysticism of the Symbolists was a product of mental pathology, and that Impressionist painterliness was the sign of a diseased visual cortex.

Nordau's pseudoscientific theory of degeneration was seized upon by German National Socialists during the Weimar Republic as a rallying point for racial purity in art. Racially "pure" artists produced racially "pure" art, and modern artists of an "inferior racial strain" produced works which were contorted. Nordau's theory, then, was used to defend the National Socialist doctrine of the decline of culture due to the decadent influence of modernity. Romantic realism was an accurate representation of racially pure art, while modern art was a deviant from socially accepted norms of classical beauty.

Alfred Rosenberg was the first to use Nordau's theory in Myth of the Twentieth Century published in the 1920s, which became a best-seller in Germany. The influential art critic Paul Schulze-Naumberg wrote three books: Art and Race, The Fate of the German House, and The German Art. Schulze-Naumberg argued that modern artists unwittingly produced their own racial stereotypes in their artwork. To prove this, he utilized both Nordau's and Lombroso's methodology by placing examples of distortions of the human figure in modern art next to photographs of people with deformities and diseases. Schultze-Naumberg then compared healthy people with examples of the new,Heroic Art to prove that modern art was an indication of racial impurity.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Theory of Degeneracy", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki