Emil Nolde’s 1919 portrait of a red-haired woman had such intense color usage that the Nazi Party called the painting “degenerate.”

For some reason, the idea that an artist would paint a portrait and interpret his subject through color rather than physiognomy was crossing the line for the Third Reich. They despised the vigorous brushstrokes and flamboyant color choices that comprised his garish and appealingly distorted renderings. Red-Haired Girl became the piece on which the Nazis focused the majority of their disgust.

The German government confiscated the portrait during the “Degenerate Art” campaign in 1937 in which the Nazis seized pieces of artwork from museums and private collections across the country. Red-Haired Girl was just one of Nolde’s 1,052 pieces that the party took. It was even part of a three-year exhibition that toured Germany and Austria, putting the subversive art on display in order to teach the German public to hate modernist art. Hitler and his following labeled these displays “exhibitions of shame.” The Nazi’s followed the traveling collection with a counter-exhibit that was supposed to teach viewers what art should look like.

Hollywood furthered that display of art in the film The Monuments Men, directed by George Clooney. Looks like Nolde’s degenerate painting lasted a lot longer than the Nazi standards of what are was supposed to be. How tragic for the Nazis.