Degenerate Art

This article, on the Philadelphia Museum site, is a good overview of Hitler's "Degenerate Art" campaign in which thousands of paintings were seized, artists were fired from teaching positions and prohibited from art-making, and Goebbels attempted to whip the German public into a frenzy about the dangers on incomprehensible, modern, art. The "degenerate" artists were considered destroyed, so "corrupted and enfeebled by modern life that they have lost the self-control needed to produce coherent works."The actual 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition must have been an amazing show, and its hard not to feel a bit ill about the thousands of painting that were burned (when they couldn't be sold). Looking at this work today, its difficult to imagine the reactions it elicited, but they were certainly violent. What did this classification of "degeneracy" mean for the careers of these artists? Do we still equate the "incomprehensible" with the ugly, degenerate, or grotesque?