Abstract
The chapter examines the radical conservative critique of modern art during the Nazi Germany occupation of the Bohemia and Moravia, former Czechoslovak Republic, in the years 1939 - 1945. By examining this historically important case, It clarifies the pointed manipulation with information, defamation and anti-Semitism utilized for defaming modern and avant-garde art and their representatives in the Czech public eye.
Data have been collected from archives and newspapers. In addition to some individual artists, the opponents of modern art tendencies in the 1930s and 1940s blamed the Mánes Union of Artists and its members for so-called cultural Jewish Bolshevism or for producing cosmopolitical, anti-national art and architecture.
This chapter also clarifies how the radical conservatives and fascists had misused the terms kitsch and degenerate art for damaging avantgardist's reputation and for gaining its strategic superiority over their pre-war cultural competitors. Typically, these groups acted in line with an occupying power, agreed with cultural politics of the Third Reich, and used its terminological apparatus.