The Female Artists Targeted by the Nazi ‘Degenerate Art’ Campaign

Who were Maria Caspar-Filser, Lotte B. Prechner, Emmy Klinker and Martha Schrag? Today, only few people are familiar with their names and those of many other modern female artists. Yet their works were part of German museum collections until they were defamed as ‘degenerate art’ in 1937 and confiscated as part of the Nazi war on culture. Unlike their male counterparts, such as the Brücke artists, these women were consigned to oblivion.

 

90 years after the Nazi confiscations and the subsequent propaganda exhibition ‘Degenerate Art’, the Brücke-Museum is shining a spotlight on these female artists in 2027. Drawing on the stories of around 40 of the 130 female artists whose works were confiscated, it recounts the history of the Nazi campaign from a female perspective. Who were these painters and sculptors? How did their fates differ from those of their male colleagues? The exhibition centres on the diversity of their artistic output and the scope they had for action as women in a male-dominated art world. Alongside the mechanisms of political influence on art, the exhibition addresses the fundamental question of who decides whom or what we remember, and what is lost as a result.

 

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The exhibition, which is accompanied by a catalogue, has been developed in collaboration with the art historian and provenance researcher Dr Meike Hoffmann, head of the ‘Degenerate Art’ Research Centre at the Freie Universität Berlin. The project is funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds and the Ferdinand-Möller-Stiftung.

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To mark the 90th anniversary of the Nazi campaign, an awareness day will take place on 18 July 2027 to commemorate the victims and highlight the scale and the consequences of the Nazi campaign, while also calling for solidarity in support of artistic freedom, democracy, and cultural diversity.

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Artists:

Alma del Banco, Charlotte Berend-Corinth, Marianne Britze, Edith van Campendonk-Leckwyck, Maria Caspar-Filser, Klara Maria Fehrle-Menrad, Ida Gerhardi, Natalia Goncharova, Lise Gujer, Paula Grünfeld, Sella Hasse, Erich Heckel, Jacoba van Heemskerck, Marta Hegemann, Ida Kerkovius, Emmy Klinker, Käthe Kollwitz, Gertrud von Kunowsky, Lotte Laserstein, Else Lasker-Schüler, Elfriede Lauckner-Thum, Rosy Lilienfeld, Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, Dorothea Maetzel-Johannsen, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Marg Moll, Otto Mueller, Emil Nolde, Alexandra Povòrina, Lotte B. Prechner, Anita Rée, Emma Ritter, Emy Roeder, Dora Schmetz-Diehl, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Martha Schrag, Martel Schwichtenberg, Renée Sintenis, Milly Steger, Käte Steinitz, Elisabeth Voigt.