Degenerate art was a term adopted in the 1920s by the Nazi Party in Germany to describe modern art. During the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, German modernist art, including many works of internationally renowned artists, was removed from state-owned museums and banned in Nazi Germany on the grounds that such art was an "insult to German feeling", un-German, Freemasonic, Jewish, or Communist in nature. Those identified as degenerate artists were subjected to sanctions that included being dismissed from teaching positions, being forbidden to exhibit or to sell their art, and in some cases being forbidden to produce art.
Welthauptstadt Germania or World Capital Germania was the projected renewal of the German capital Berlin during the Nazi period, part of Adolf Hitler's vision for the future of Nazi Germany after the planned victory in World War II. It was to be the capital of his planned "Greater Germanic Reich". Albert Speer, the "first architect of the Third Reich", produced many of the plans for the rebuilt city in his capacity as overseer of the project, only a small portion of which was realised between the years 1938 and 1943.
Paul Ludwig Troost was a German architect. A favourite master builder of Adolf Hitler from 1930, his Neoclassical designs for the Führerbau and the Haus der Kunst in Munich influenced the style of Nazi architecture.
Peter Behrens was a leading German architect, graphic and industrial designer, best known for his early pioneering AEG Turbine Hall in Berlin in 1909. He had a long career, designing objects, typefaces, and important buildings in a range of styles from the 1900s to the 1930s. He was a foundation member of the German Werkbund in 1907, when he also began designing for AEG, pioneered corporate design, graphic design, producing typefaces, objects, and buildings for the company. In the next few years, he became a successful architect, a leader of the rationalist / classical German Reform Movement of the 1910s. After WW1 he turned to Brick Expressionism, designing the remarkable Hoechst Administration Building outside Frankfurt, and from the mid-1920s increasingly to New Objectivity. He was also an educator, heading the architecture school at Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 1922 to 1936. As a well known architect he produced design across Germany, in other European countries, Russia and England. Several of the leading names of European modernism worked for him when they were starting out in the 1910s, including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius.
The Reich Chancellery was the traditional name of the office of the Chancellor of Germany in the period of the German Reich from 1878 to 1945. The Chancellery's seat, selected and prepared since 1875, was the former city palace of Prince Antoni Radziwiłł (1775–1833) on Wilhelmstraße in Berlin. Both the palace and a new Reich Chancellery building were seriously damaged during World War II and subsequently demolished.
The Deutsches Stadion was a monumental stadium designed by Albert Speer for the Nazi party rally grounds in Nuremberg, southern Germany. Its construction began in September 1937, and was scheduled for completion in 1943. Like most other Nazi monumental structures, however, its construction was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II and was never finished.
The Volkshalle, also called Große Halle or Ruhmeshalle, was a proposal for a monumental, domed building to be built in a reconstituted Berlin in Nazi Germany. The project was conceived by Adolf Hitler and designed by his architect Albert Speer. No part of the building was ever constructed.
Arno Breker was a German architect and sculptor who is best known for his public works in Nazi Germany, where they were endorsed by the authorities as the antithesis of degenerate art. He was made official state sculptor, and exempted from military service. One of his better known statues is Die Partei, representing the spirit of the Nazi Party that flanked one side of the carriage entrance to Albert Speer's new Reich Chancellery.
Paul Bonatz was a German architect, member of the Stuttgart School and professor at the technical university in that city during part of World War II, and from 1954 until his death. He worked in many styles, but most often in a simplified neo-Romanesque, and designed important public buildings both in the Weimar Republic and under the Third Reich, including major bridges for the new autobahns. In 1943 he designed several buildings in Turkey, returning to Stuttgart in 1954.
Josef Thorak was an Austrian-German sculptor. He became known for oversize monumental sculptures, particularly of male figures, and was one of the most prominent sculptors of the Third Reich.
The Nazi regime in Germany actively promoted and censored forms of art between 1933 and 1945. Upon becoming dictator in 1933, Adolf Hitler gave his personal artistic preference the force of law to a degree rarely known before. In the case of Germany, the model was to be classical Greek and Roman art, seen by Hitler as an art whose exterior form embodied an inner racial ideal. It was, furthermore, to be comprehensible to the average man. This art was to be both heroic and romantic. The Nazis viewed the culture of the Weimar period with disgust. Their response stemmed partly from conservative aesthetics and partly from their determination to use culture as propaganda.
Conrad Hommel was a German painter. He was best known for his portraits of leading German entrepreneurs such as Max Grundig, Herbert Quandt, and politicians such as Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring and Paul von Hindenburg.
Lilly Reich was a German designer of textiles, furniture, interiors, and exhibition spaces. She was a close collaborator with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for more than ten years during the Weimar period from 1925 until his emigration to the U.S. in 1938. Reich was an important figure in the early Modern Movement in architecture and design. Her fame was posthumous, as the significance of her contribution to the work of Mies van der Rohe and others with whom she collaborated with only became clear through the research of later historians of the field.
Fascist architecture encompasses various stylistic trends in architecture developed by architects of fascist states, primarily in the early 20th century. Fascist architectural styles gained popularity in the late 1920s with the rise of modernism along with the ultranationalism associated with fascist governments in western Europe. Fascist styles often resemble that of ancient Rome, but can extend to modern aesthetics as well. Fascist-era buildings are frequently constructed with particular concern given to symmetry and simplicity.
The Führermuseum or Fuhrer-Museum, also referred to as the Linz art gallery, was an unrealized art museum within a cultural complex planned by Adolf Hitler for his hometown, the Austrian city of Linz, near his birthplace of Braunau. Its purpose was to display a selection of the art bought, confiscated or stolen by the Nazis from throughout Europe during World War II. The cultural district was to be part of an overall plan to recreate Linz, turning it into a cultural capital of Nazi Germany and one of the greatest art centers of Europe, overshadowing Vienna, for which Hitler had a personal distaste. He wanted to make the city more beautiful than Budapest, so it would be the most beautiful on the Danube River, as well as an industrial powerhouse and a hub of trade; the museum was planned to be one of the greatest in Europe.
Ernst Neufert was a German architect who is known as an assistant of Walter Gropius, as a teacher and member of various standardization organizations, and especially for his widely disseminated reference book Architects' data.
A Führer city, or Führerstadt in German, was a status given to five German cities in 1937 by Adolf Hitler, the dictator of Nazi Germany. The status was based on Hitler's vision of undertaking gigantic urban transformation projects in these cities, and executed by German architects including Albert Speer, Paul Ludwig Troost, German Bestelmeyer, Konstanty Gutschow, Hermann Giesler, Leonhard Gall and Paul Otto August Baumgarten. More modest reconstruction projects were to take place in thirty-five other cities, although some sources assert this number was as high as fifty. These plans were however not realised for the greater part because of the onset of the Second World War, although construction continued to take place even in wartime circumstances at Hitler's insistence.
The Degenerate Art exhibition was an art exhibition organized by Adolf Ziegler and the Nazi Party in Munich from 19 July to 30 November 1937. The exhibition presented 650 works of art, confiscated from German museums, and was staged in counterpoint to the concurrent Great German Art Exhibition. The day before the exhibition started, Adolf Hitler delivered a speech declaring "merciless war" on cultural disintegration, attacking "chatterboxes, dilettantes and art swindlers". Degenerate art was defined as works that "insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill". One million people attended the exhibition in its first six weeks. A U.S. critic commented, "There are probably plenty of people—art lovers—in Boston, who will side with Hitler in this particular purge". This particular take is controversial, however, given the greater political context of the exhibition.
Dr. Hans Posse was a German art historian, museum curator, and, for over three years, from June 1939 until his death, the special representative of Adolf Hitler appointed to expand the collection of paintings and other art objects which Hitler intended for the so-called "Führermuseum" in Linz, Austria. The museum, which was never built, was to be the core of a cultural center which was part of a planned general rebuilding of the city intended to have it surpass Vienna and rival Budapest.
Adolf Hitler's art collection was a large accumulation of paintings which he gained before and during the events of WWII. These paintings were often taken from existing art galleries in Germany and Europe as Nazi forces invaded. Hitler planned to create a large museum in Linz called the Führermuseum to showcase the greatest of the art that he acquired. While this museum was never built, that did not stop Hitler and many other Nazi officials from seizing artwork across Europe. The paintings that the Nazis acquired were often stored in salt mines and castles in Germany during World War II. Eventually, many of these works of art would be rescued by a group called the Monuments Men. While this task force of art dealers and museum specialists were able to retrieve many of the stolen works of art, there are still many paintings that have yet to be found. In 2013, Cornelius Gurlitt, a son of one of Hitler's art dealers, was found with an apartment full of paintings which his father had kept from both the Nazis and the Monuments Men. This discovery of paintings has brought to light once more many paintings that were considered lost.
