The Musée National Picasso Paris recently opened the exhibition, “’Degenerate’” Art: Modern art on trial under the Nazis.” It evokes the 1937 show of “Entartete Kunst” (degenerate art in English), displayed in Munich and several other German cities. The exhibition featured 740 avant-garde artworks by 100 artists, all confiscated by Hitler’s regime. Those modernist artworks were condemned by the Nazis as being, “produced by ‘idiots,’ the ‘mentally ill,’ ‘criminals’, ‘speculators,’ ‘Jews’ and ‘Bolsheviks.’” With its exposure under the umbrella of mockery and disdain, the Nazis presumed it would “… pave the way for a ‘healthy’ art in the image of the German race.” With the inclusion of stellar modernists such as Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, George Grosz, Vassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, André Masson, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso and many others, the show, attended by more than two million visitors, was a blatant political attack on culture that ultimately backfired. It also revealed Hitler’s revenge against the modern art world (which had rejected his own artistic efforts), in part by installing the so-called "degenerate" paintings and sculptures carelessly and crookedly on walls covered with graffiti that was originally of the artists’ own making.
Does the Trump administration’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion, and its early forays into cultural dictatorship, augur the same attack on contemporary culture? Will Washington D.C.’s esteemed Smithsonian Institution, owned and operated by our federal government, undergo a similar fate as that of the "Degenerate Art" exhibition? While some of the Smithsonian’s 17 D.C.-area museums, including the National Air and Space Museum, are kid-friendly and not particularly identified with liberalism, others likely offend President Trump and his minions. These include the Museum of African American History and Culture, the Museum of the American Indian, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The latter is currently exhibiting “Osgemeos: Endless Story,” by Brazilian twins Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo, who are known for their distinctive graffiti style.
When I visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) a few years ago, I toured its extensive historical display. That installation detailed in words and images several centuries of forced transport of Africans to the United States and to European countries. It also related how slaves ultimately claimed their own freedom, while also helping to define our country’s ideals of liberty, justice and democracy.
A current exhibition at NMAAHC, “In Slavery's Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World,” describes how slavery helped shape our world today. Yet, considering President Trump’s effort to eradicate D.E.I. and his recent seizing of the Chairmanship of Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Performing Arts Center, his administration might revise or dismantle the show at the NMAAHC.
Similar oppression might be brought to bear on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. With three facilities, one on Washington D.C.’s National Mall and two others in New York City and Maryland, “The National Museum of the American Indian was established by Congress to rectify our nation’s historical amnesia about the role of Native Nations in the making of modern America,” according to the museum's website. That reality remains dramatically different from the national mythology that took form around the narrative of Manifest Destiny. As with the goals of the January 6th insurrectionists, the reality-based Indigenous narrative is now in harm’s way.
“Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations” is currently on view at the D.C. venue. The exhibition focuses on the unfortunate circumstance that, while most Americans learn about our Founding Fathers, we are told very little about the plight of the Indigenous people who were forced to relinquish millions of acres of lands to the United States. Approximately 368 treaties were negotiated and signed by U.S. commissioners and tribal leaders from 1777 to 1868; yet our government did not recognize or honor most of those treaties.
Indeed, high school history classes barely teach how the Manifest Destiny movement of the 1840s was less the Word of God and more the seizure by force of Indigenous land by white settlers. After about 20,000 years living in North America, Native Americans throughout the continent suffered a genocide.
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, also on the National Mall, owns and exhibits contemporary and modern work by hundreds of prominent artists from the U.S., Europe, Asia and beyond, much of it from the 20th century. Numerous surreal, abstract and in-your-face artworks are on view, pieces that would likely have greatly offended Hitler, and no doubt offend President Trump in the year 2025. Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2)” (1912) is a cubist-futurist inspired painting, conveying motion by a nude rather than presenting the nude in its traditional repose. The painting was one of the most controversial artworks at the New York Armory Show of 1913, with one critic calling it “an explosion in a shingle factory.”
Another provocative artwork at the Hirshhorn is André Masson’s “Legend” (1945), a surreal and cubist painting by the artist most closely associated with automatic drawing and altered states of consciousness. Among numerous other artists at the Hirshhorn are Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and Alice Neel. The latter is known for paintings expressing her commitment to social justice and civil rights, and also for her portraits of counter-culture people from the 1920s right up until her death in 1984.
A recent Washington Post article reported that Washington D.C.s Art Museum of the Americas, run by the Organization of American States, “… has canceled two upcoming shows one featuring Black artists from across the Western Hemisphere and the other showcasing queer artists from Canada”. The cancellation, ordered by the Trump administration, had the goal of eradicating federal funding for diversity, equity and inclusion. Not surprisingly The National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian have closed their offices supporting work by racial minorities.
I grew up in the New York City suburbs. The city afforded me the continual availability of museums, concerts and Broadway shows. I never doubted that art of all types, including exhibitions and performances that reflect our ever-changing, diverse world, would always be accessible. Yet today I worry that many of the art forms that I love might soon be besmirched or seized by the current administration.
Liz Goldner is an award-winning art writer based in Laguna Beach. She has contributed to the LA Times, LA Weekly, KCET Artbound, Artillery, AICA-USA Magazine, Orange County Register, Art Ltd. and several other print and online publications. She has written reviews for ArtScene and Visual Art Source since 2009.
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