The Art Center of Burlington will host a one-day event based on an exhibit of art that German Nazis in the 1930s labeled as degenerate.
Art Center Executive Director Elizabeth Pappas said the Nazi Party felt modern art was not culturally appropriate, and they labeled modern artists as subversive or mentally ill.
“These artists were depicting the realities of post-World War I. They were depicting the raw realities of what soldiers were dealing with coming back from the war,” she said.
“Germany was going through an identity crisis, and so they were doing what artists do, and that was — through art — expressing what was happening in German lives.”
The Nazis felt the art was antithetical to what art should reflect, so they held shame exhibits to publicly humiliate artists and denounce their work. That culminated with their 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibit in Munich.
The exhibit at the Art Center of Burlington, 301 Jefferson St., will feature reproductions of that “degenerate” artwork. They can be seen from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Friday, April 24. The art center also will have a list of the approximately 16,000 banned artworks.
The event will resume in the evening when the art center hosts a concert at 8 p.m. The art exhibit can also be viewed during that time.
The concert will feature the gypsy jazz of Belgian guitarist and composer Django Reinhardt. He continued to play jazz in Paris during World War II, even though the Nazis detested jazz.
Both the exhibit and concert are free and open to the public.
The band is led by Elizabeth’s husband, Daniel Pappas.
“My husband and I love a good collaboration, so we thought, wouldn’t it be interesting and cool for the community to experience both an art and music one-day event,” Elizabeth said.
Daniel said Reinhardt made more money during the war than any other time in his life, even though his music was supposed to be forbidden. Daniel said Reinhardt’s music was loved by the troops, so Nazi leaders in France turned a blind eye to it.
“In fact, Paris became the place where the troops would go on holiday. And what did they want to hear on holiday? Django Reinhardt, the most famous jazz musician in Europe,” said Daniel.
The musicians will play Reinhardt’s music from before, during, and after the war.
Ed Mansheim will play Reinhardt’s guitar parts. He said Reinhardt developed a unique style and technique because he lost the use of two fingers on his left hand in a fire when he was a child.
“The way he plays, it sounds just as fast as anybody using all their fingers. I’m still kind of baffled as to how he does it,” Ed said.
He believes Reinhardt should be as highly regarded as other top jazz musicians from that era.
Ed said he’s looking forward to seeing people become immersed in the artwork and music.
“You’ll feel like you’re there at the time, maybe. It might take you back to actually sense those feelings that maybe these artists had, maybe these musicians had,” Ed said.
Daniel said the events of nearly a century ago remain relevant. He points to book bans and the dismantling of the humanities in education.
He hopes this event provokes thought.
“I think it’s pretty easy to draw parallels if you would like to. But we don’t want to draw those parallels for people. We would like for people to come and draw them themselves and come up with whatever conclusions they come up with,” he said.
Elizabeth said the event emphasizes that art matters. She said it mattered enough in the 1930s for the Nazis to mock it and ban it.
“Hopefully this is a lesson in the dangers of censorship and how essential freedom of expression is and how important it is to protect that,” Elizabeth said.
She said the Nazis opened the Great House of German Art right across the street from the Entartete Kunst exhibit to show what they considered to be perfect German art.
“But ironically, the degenerate art exhibition was the most popular exhibition that had ever happened in Europe at the time,” Elizabeth said.
She said the artists who were labeled as degenerate then are now considered to be on the right side of history.
Elizabeth also hopes the event sparks conversations that will continue into later this year, when the Burlington Public Library, 210 Court St., hosts the traveling exhibit Americans and the Holocaust in August and September.
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