In 1916, a new monthly magazine appeared on the US art scene. Published in New York, The Art World was a deeply conservative if not reactionary affair, announcing its ideological commitments on the cover of its first issue, which featured the highly classicizing motif of a bust of Zeus enclosed within an elaborate triumphal arch.1 There was much about the publication that further underscored those ideological tendencies, including what would become a regular and recurring feature, a section devoted to judging the aesthetic merit of works of art. Among the various categories to which artworks were assigned, which included the great, the clever, and the trivial, the most redolent phrasing was reserved for describing—or perhaps more accurately, decrying—those that were deemed to cling to the lowest rung of the aesthetic ladder, a group composed exclusively of modern works designated as “degenerate art.”
For those with even a passing familiarity with the history of modern art, that term conjures one of the most infamous cultural episodes of the twentieth century, when it was used by the Nazis in the 1930s to denigrate works of art seen as antithetical to the “Aryan” values the party sought to cultivate. It became the title of a traveling exhibition, first staged in Munich in 1937, of more than six hundred modern artworks seized from German museum collections, a massive cultural propaganda effort aimed at turning the public against the putative decadence of avant-garde artistic innovations.
In this context, and given how notorious the German episode has been in accounts of twentieth-century art, our attention might already be drawn to the appearance of nearly identical rhetoric in an American art publication some two decades prior to the Nazis’ “Entartete Kunst” exhibition. But there’s more to the story than that. Those columns in The Art World appeared under the byline Petronius Arbiter—yet another nod to the classical past (it is one of the names ascribed to the author of the Satyricon) and the chosen pseudonym of Frederick Wellington Ruckstull, the editor and guiding force behind The Art World.2 The journal was something of a second act, or at least a side gig, for Ruckstull, who was then in his sixties. For by the time the publication appeared, he had already distinguished himself as a major American sculptor, one who in the prior decade and a half had come to be deeply invested in creating a particular brand of statuary: that of Confederate memorials. Ruckstull thus offers a conspicuous link—one in need of further examination—between the production of Confederate monuments in the US and Nazi cultural policies, in their overlapping engagement with the rhetoric of racial supremacy, idealizing sculptural forms, and the anti-modernist discourse of degeneracy.