Before the Third Reich came to power, Adolf Hitler vowed to unleash 'a thunderbolt against degenerate art' as epitomized by Symbolism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Dadaism and Surrealism. Once he was Chancellor, Hitler commanded President of the Third Reichs Chamber of Art, Adolf Ziegler, to extract 16,000 'degenerate' artworks from German museums. Before being sold or burnt, they were exhibited in Degenerate Art Exhibitions designed to expose this art as pathological in their words, 'the product of sick minds and bodies'. Yet the Third Reich was by no means the first to conflate 'degeneracy' with dissonant Modernism. Its genealogy was spawned when Darwinism became a dominant discourse in Western nations seventy years earlier and any sign of deviation from 'normalcy' signified the threat of racial extinction. Its best-known theorist was Max Nordau who, aghast at images of bodily distortion and sexual transgression, declared that 'degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced lunatics", but "decadent authors and artists.' Starting with such Symbolist painters such as Gustave Moreau, and writers such as Huysmans (author of 'Against Nature'), this course will investigate the relationship of self-proclaimed 'decadents' to the new aetiologies of neurology and sexology, the diagnosis of such disorders as hysteria and neurosthenia, as well as the new practice of psychoanalysis. It will examine their linkage with such twentieth-century dissidents as Khnopff, Munch, Nolde, Ibsen, Alfred Jarry, Gauguin, Picasso, Kees Van Dongen, Kirchner, Picabia, Duchamp, Max Ernst, Sonia Delaunay, Hannah Hvch, Suzanne Valadon and Meret Oppenheim, to examine why those artists, who featured so prominently in Nazi Decadent Art Exhibitions, were long derided elsewhere as decadent, dissident and degenerate.