Nazi Exhibition Design and Modernism

A new and challenging perspective on Nazi exhibition design

In one of the most comprehensive analyses ever written on the subject, Michael Tymkiw reassesses the relationship between Nazi exhibition design and modernism. While National Socialist exhibitions are widely understood as platforms for attacking modern art, they also served as sites of surprising formal experimentation among artists, architects, and others, who often drew upon and reconfigured the practices and principles of modernism when designing exhibition spaces and the objects within. In this book, Tymkiw reveals that a central motivation behind such experimentation was the interest in provoking what he calls "engaged spectatorship"—attempts to elicit experiences among exhibition-goers that would pique their desire to become involved in wider processes of social and political change. 

For historians of art, architecture, performance, and other forms of visual culture, Nazi Exhibition Design and Modernism unravels long-held assumptions, particularly concerning the ideological stakes of participation.