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Degenerate Art: "Take Dada Seriously! – It’s Worth It " (1937)
Dada – an expressly international movement of overtly political, cosmopolitan, pacifist artists who embraced chaos and uncertainty, rejected patriotism, and challenged the so-called rational basis of bourgeois capitalist society – embodied almost everything despised by the Nazi and thus served as a virtual paradigm of “degeneracy.” The “Dada” installation below features a George Grosz (1893-1959) quote taken from a poster at the First International Dada Fair [Erste Internationale Dada-Messe] in 1920: “Take Dada Seriously! – It’s Worth It” [“Nehmen Sie Dada ernst! – Es lohnt sich”]. Underneath it are two works by the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters and two title pages from the magazine Dada. The wall also includes works by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, neither of whom was connected to Dada.