When Adolf Hitler seized power, his ambition went far beyond conquering territories – he wanted to rewrite the very soul of German culture. Modern styles like Expressionism, Dadaism, Cubism and Surrealism were stamped as “degenerate” and hauled from museums, burned in bonfires, or sold off to fund the Reich. Below we dive into ten daring works art that the Nazis tried to erase, yet survived to tell their own rebellious tales.
Why These Works Art Matter
Each of these paintings not only showcases a bold artistic vision, but also carries a dramatic backstory of exile, confiscation, and sometimes miraculous recovery. By tracing their journeys, we glimpse the resilience of creators and the stubborn endurance of art against tyranny.
10 Moon Over a Mountain Lake Max Beckmann
Max Beckmann, a leading Expressionist, built his reputation on bold, distorted figures that reflected his harrowing World War I experiences. Before the Nazis rose, he enjoyed acclaim and even earned awards for his paintings. But once Hitler’s regime took over, Beckmann was stripped of his teaching post at Frankfurt’s Stadel Art School, and over 500 of his works vanished from German museums.
Fleeing to Amsterdam and later the United States, Beckmann escaped the worst of the purge. Yet some of his pieces still ended up in the infamous 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition. In 2012, a trove of his work was uncovered in a Munich apartment once filled with looted art. While the watercolor Moon Over a Mountain Lake wasn’t among the recovered pieces, it had been seized from Berlin’s National Gallery during the war and now hangs in the Bavarian State Painting Collections in Munich.
9 Bathers With a Turtle Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse, the pioneer of Fauvism, delighted in wild brushstrokes and vivid, unrealistic colors—exactly the kind of art that made the Nazis nervous. To raise foreign currency, the regime often dumped seized works at low‑price auctions. In 1939, a newlywed Joseph Pulitzer Jr. stumbled upon one such auction in Lucerne, Switzerland. With help from Matisse’s son Pierre, he snapped up the painting for $2,400, calling it “the most creative works of then‑existing artists of that period.”
Matisse was allowed to keep showing his art in Paris only after swearing an oath declaring his “Aryan” status, a compromise he later lamented in a letter to his son, saying he would feel like a deserter if he fled.
8 The Absinthe Drinker Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso’s Cubist and abstract experiments made him a prime target for Nazi ridicule. While he stayed in occupied Paris, he kept a low profile and didn’t exhibit during the war. His iconic Guernica openly condemned both warfare and the Third Reich, a fact the Nazis surely noted.
The painting featured here, The Absinthe Drinker (also known as Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto), belongs to Picasso’s melancholic Blue Period. It resurfaced in 2006 when Andrew Lloyd Webber announced a charity auction. Descendants of the former owner, Paul von Mendelssohn‑Bartholdy, argued the work had been sold under duress during the Nazi era. After a protracted dispute, the painting was sold to an anonymous buyer in 2010, with the matter settled out of court.
7 Reclining Nude Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt’s sensual and erotic style clashed sharply with Nazi ideals, even though he died in 1918. Two of his female nudes, seized from the Kunsthalle Mannheim, now sit in the Freie Universität Berlin database, their whereabouts unknown.
The tragedy deepens with the story of Adele Bloch‑Bauer, a Viennese socialite who modeled for Klimt’s most famous work, The Kiss. After her death, her husband Ferdinand kept her portraits as a memorial. When the Nazis forced the Jewish family to flee, the paintings were looted. Decades later, an Austrian arbitration panel ordered the return of five works, including the two portraits of Adele, to her niece Maria Altmann. One now decorates New York’s Neue Galerie, the other resides at the Museum of Modern Art.
6 Self‑Portrait Dedicated To Paul Gauguin Vincent Van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh’s swirling, expressive style landed him squarely in the Nazis’ crosshairs. His self‑portrait, painted on a sea‑foam background, was donated to Munich’s Neue Staatsgalerie in 1919. Two decades later, the Nazis lifted it from the museum walls and auctioned it in Lucerne to fund the Reich.
Collector Maurice Wertheim purchased the work and later bequeathed it to the Harvard Art Museums. Because it was taken from a state‑run institution, it isn’t legally required to be restituted. Ironically, the seizure may have saved it; the museum was bombed later, destroying many other works, while this van Gogh survived.
5 The War Cripples Otto Dix
Otto Dix’s harrowing critique of war made Dadaism his most hated target in Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” where Dadaists were described as the “degenerate excess of insane and depraved humans.” Dix’s painting The War Cripples resembles a collage, mocking the military, the public’s morbid fascination, and the wounded veterans themselves.
Featured in the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition, the work vanished after the show and is presumed destroyed, a stark reminder of the regime’s ruthless cultural cleansing.
4 Color Order Hans Richter
Hans Richter, a Dadaist who’d fought in World War I and later became partially paralyzed, believed artists must oppose war and champion revolution. His abstract studies in color and composition, plus pioneering abstract films like Rhythmus 21, earned him Nazi ire.
His piece Farbenordnung (“Color Order”) was displayed in the Entartete Kunst exhibition after being seized from the Provincial Museum in Hannover. The painting was ultimately destroyed, and Richter escaped to the United States in 1941.
3 Winter Garden Paul Klee
Paul Klee, a rare Jewish modernist, blended Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstraction. Teaching at the Düsseldorf Academy from 1931‑1933, he fell victim to a Nazi newspaper that exposed his Jewish heritage. The Gestapo searched his home, and Klee was dismissed.
In response, Klee painted Struck from the List, depicting a faceless figure with a black “X” across its face. He and his family fled to Switzerland. Meanwhile, his work Winter Garden was confiscated from the Civic Museum of Arts and Crafts in Halle and later destroyed after being displayed in the Degenerate Art show.
2 La Belle Jardinière Max Ernst
Max Ernst, another Dadaist, found himself trapped in Paris as an “undesirable foreigner” when World II erupted. After friends intervened, he was briefly released, only to be arrested again by the Gestapo after the German invasion. He eventually escaped to America with help from patron Peggy Guggenheim.
Ernst’s daring works often provoked the Nazis. In La Belle Jardinière (also called Creation of Eve), he painted a nude Eve with a dove perched provocatively, backed by a fruit‑shaped line drawing. The painting was displayed at the Degenerate Art exhibition, and a photo captures Hitler walking past it. Unfortunately, records of the piece vanished after the show, suggesting it was likely destroyed.
1 Self‑Portrait As A Soldier Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a founding member of the avant‑garde group “The Bridge,” battled both physical and mental ailments worsened by his World I service. His 1915 masterpiece Self‑Portrait As A Soldier shows him in uniform, clutching a stump where his right hand once was, set against a studio backdrop with a nude model.
When the Nazis seized power in 1933, they condemned Kirchner’s abstract style, forcing him out of the Prussian Academy of the Arts. Over 600 of his works were removed from German museums, and at least 32 appeared in the Degenerate Art exhibition. Overwhelmed, Kirchner took his own life in 1938.