Book Talk: Nazi Exhibition Design and Modernism

Part of The Wiener Library’s London 1938 exhibition series.

National Socialist exhibitions are largely known for their role in attacking modern art. What is less widely known, however, is that many Nazi exhibitions beyond the fine arts served as surprising sites of formal experimentation for artists, architects, and graphic designers to draw upon and reconfigure modernist ideas and practices. As this talk will explain, a core motivation behind such experimentation was the interest in provoking forms of “engaged spectatorship”—attempts to elicit experiences among exhibition visitors that would spark their desire to become involved in wider processes of social and political change.