Dictators of both the left and the right persecuted modern art in the early 20th century.

Join the Great Neck Library in part 2 of this 3-part series, Art Under the Dictators and Under the Democrat, as we explore the reasons for both its unpopularity with the demagogues and its eventual triumph in America during the postwar period.

An international faculty of distinguished modernists taught at the Bauhaus School of Art and Design in liberal Germany during the 1920s, but Hitler organized modern art seized from museums into his “Degenerate Art Exhibit” of 1936, which ridiculed modernism as an unhygienic symptom of miscegenation that needs to be outlawed.

As a result, most of Central Europe’s best artists, designers, and architects moved to the United States.

Presenter Dennis Raverty is a speaker, author, and art historian who, for decades, has delighted audiences with lively presentations at libraries, churches, synagogues, hostels, and business lunches on a variety of topics in the history of art, from the Italian Renaissance to the Harlem Renaissance.

His articles and criticism have appeared in Art Journal, Art in America, The International Review of African American Art, Art Criticism, The New Art Examiner, Prospects: An Annual of American Studies, Source: Notes in the History of Art, and Art Papers, where he was a contributing editor.

He authored four entries for the most recent edition of the Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, published by Oxford University Press (2011).

The Fate of Art in Nazi Germany lecture will be at the Main Library Community Room at 159 Bayview Ave. in Great Neck on Tuesday, June 11 at 2:00 p.m. Registration is not required.

First come, first seated. For more information, please contact Great Neck Library at (516) 466-8055 or email adultprogramming@greatnecklibrary.org.