Art in Hitler’s Reich
Hitler’s heart belonged to antiquity. In his eyes the world was beautiful back in that time, but race-mixing and degeneration had polluted it. For example Sparta was the racially purest state in history. They did not only not mix up with other peoples but also discarded weak and deformed babies right after their birth; a policy Hitler also pursued, to clean his people of the disabled and mentally challenged and of the racial impureness. He wanted to form a people shaped after the antique ideal.
Thinking about good and bad art in this context, good is the beautiful, the perfect and the pure whereas bad art is everything that somehow degenerates these ideals. Regarding his art exhibitions this ideals become obvious. Statues of the perfect body were common, an ideal that was also very present in paintings together with beautifulness and cleanliness.
What he considered to be bad art was exposed at the exhibition of degenerate art. This exhibition already anticipated his plans for the Jews and the handicapped. It was full of Jewish art and paintings of degenerate bodies which were to be destroyed at the end of the gallery, a fate that should also later meet the “participants” of the exhibition themselves.