criptie - Evelien Andree Wiltens

61
Group 9
This section none can only give the heading “Consumate Madness.” It occupies the
greatest area of the exhibition and contains a sample of the monsters of all
‘ism’ which Flechtheim, Wollheim, and [Jewish] accomplices concocted, promoted,
and sold dirt cheap over the course of the years.
From the paintings and drawing in this chamber of horrors there is really
nothing more to perceive than what hovers before disturbed minds as they take
brush or pencil to hand. Ultimately one of these “paints” only with the contents
of trashcans. Another satisfies himself with three black lines and a chunk of
wood on a large white background. A third had the inspiration to paint “a few
circles” on two square yards of linen. A fourth requires for three self-
portraits one after the other six pounds of paint, since he cannot decide
whether his head is green or sulphur yellow, round or angular, or whether his
eyes are red or sky blue or something else.
In this collection of insanities, exhibition goers are given only to shaking
their heads and to laughing. Certainly not without justification. But when one
considers that all these “art objects” also have been dragged out, not by chance
from dusty corners of deserted studios, but from the art collections and museums
of the major German cities where, to some extent even in the first years after
the take-over of power, they hung and were offered to the astonished present
generation, then one can no longer laugh; then one can only struggle with rage
over the fact that such an upright people as the Germans could at any time ever
have been made such cruel sport of.
De negende kamer van de tentoonstelling
Entartete Kunst
61 Hitler, A. (1937)