The Dialectics of Design and Destruction: The Degenerate Art Exhibition (1937) and the Exhibition internationale du Surréalisme (1938)

As a genre of cultural production, where iconic (painterly or photographic), sculptural, and architectural conventions intersect to represent the uniquely specific and current conditions of experience in public social space, exhibition design by artists has only recently emerged as a category of art-historical study. While earlier discussions of El Lissitzky's design of the Pressa exhibition in Cologne in 1928, an exhibition that likely had the widest-ranging impact and is the central example of such an emerging genre in the twentieth century, might have served as a point of departure,¹ Romy Golan's important, relatively recent book Muralnomad²—primarily concerned with the history of mural painting and its various transitions into exhibition design—has to be considered for the time being the most cohesive account of the development of these heretofore overlooked practices. Yet, paradoxically, two of the most notorious cases of the historical development of exhibition design after Lissitzky are absent from her study: the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition that opened in Munich on July 19, 1937 (two days after the opening of Nazi Fascism's first major propaganda building, Paul Ludwig Troost's Haus der Deutschen Kunst, and its presentation of German Fascist art in the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung),³ and the Exposition internationale du Surréalisme in Paris, which was installed by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp six months later and 427 miles to the west, on January 17, 1938, at Georges Wildenstein's Beaux Arts Galleries in Paris.⁴