Before the Fall: German and Austrian Art of the 1930s opened at Neue Galerie New York on March 8, 2018. Organized by Olaf Peters, it was the third exhibition in the museum's trilogy on German history, following Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany 1937 and Berlin Metropolis: 1918-1933. The exhibition examined artistic production under the pressures of economic crisis, authoritarianism, exile, censorship, and the rise of National Socialism. In the context of Neue Galerie's focus on early twentieth-century German and Austrian art, the show extended familiar narratives of Expressionism and Weimar culture into the unstable decade when many artists faced persecution, accommodation, or forced migration.
It linked modernist art history to the political collapse of the 1930s and to the afterlife of Nazi cultural policy.
