A House for Art Haters

Nazi monuments have an abiding chill. However impressive the architecture, there's a granite determination that still lurks behind those façades. Normally, of course, the detritus of the Third Reich that is still left standing was for primarily municipal or military use. Not so at the start of Prinzregentenstrasse in Munich, just at the bottom of the contrastingly bucolic Englischer Garten. This totem to times thankfully gone by is the Haus der Kunst, a bold but dismaying reminder of the Third Reich's cultural policies.

Designed by Paul Ludwig Troost, Hitler's first and most revered architect before the arrival of Albert Speer, the building is a typical example of Neoclassical architectural Nazism. As with many architects of his generation, Troost rejected decoration for decoration's sake.

Unlike Loos and the geniuses who created and ran the Bauhaus, Troost all-too-happily aligned aesthetic aims with twisted political ideology. Like the Nazi party's processions and regalia, Troost consciously echoes the Ancient Romans in his design choices, using vast sweeping porticos and bath-like exhibition halls. The building itself provides as much a statement as that which was displayed inside.

While Munich gawped at the official Entartete Kunst exhibition in 1937 – the visual percursor to the 1938 Entartete Musik show that gives this blog its name – the Haus der Kunst became home to the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung. A purportedly edifying alternative to the 'degenerate' art on show elsewhere in the city, it provided a riot of unwittingly homoerotic sculptures by Ottmar Obermeier, kitschy Völkisch landscapes and, of course, the Reichsministers captured on canvas for posterity-cum-infamy.

The building still stands, a hulking great emblem of the political and racial misappropriation of culture. Unfortunately, when the Pinakothek der Moderne opened in 2002, previously cited 'entartet' paintings left the Haus der Kunst building for their new home. Yet, to remember and ponder this building's extraordinary and often contradictory history, the Haus der Kunst is currently staging an exhibition about the 'ideological use of art' between 1933 and 1955. Times have changed, but the chill still hands around the walls. Click here for more information.