In Building Power

Vincent Van Gogh, The Sower, 1888

"Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and pasture blue ought to be sterilized" Adolf Hitler

Hitler defined and dictated the standards. That which didn't Which didn't measure up to his definition and taste simply wasn't art. In Hitler's view, "modern" art-the work of such artists as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigiani, Piet Mondrian, Max Beckmann, and fellow Austrians Oscar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, to name only a few-was "degenerate." To Hitler the works of these artist destroyed the classical concept of beauty and replaced it with interpretive works that were incomprehensible to the viewer. As a group, the "degenerates" included immigrants, foreigners, and Jews all of whom Hitler deemed racially inferior. He made certain to link their work with that of intellectualls, the elites of society who had social agendas. According to Hitler, these were the people responsible for Germany's post-World War I problems and who bore the blame for its decline. Even late nineteenth-century artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Edgar Degas were included among these reviled painters, for in Hitler's view, the distorted figures and bold colors of their work could only be the product of sick minds.