9. Totalitarian states attempt to control artists (throughout the 1900's)

The increasing totalitarianism, including the rise of such dictators as Benito Mussolini of Italy, Adolf Hitler of Germany, and Francisco Franco of Spain, led to attempts to suppress modern art. Russia banned abstract art in 1922. Early 20th century masters, especially German Expressionists, were deemed "degenerate" in Germany (1937). Governments sponsored social realism as the only acceptable style.

Surrealist artists combined Freudian dreams with magic realism in warning and protest.

Pablo Picasso combined elements of Cubism and Surrealism in his monumental mural painting Guernica (1937), a devastating commentary on the bombing of that Basque city during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). This attack was an early warning of the mass destruction of civilians by aerial attacks in World War II (1939-1945). The Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish people in the Holocaust caused a mass exodus from Germany and Austria. Jewish artists, scholars, and teachers moved to the United States, profoundly influencing American art, art criticism, patronage, teaching, and scholarship in art. New York City replaced Paris as the Western world's art center, and Bauhaus architects and artists of Germany regrouped in Chicago (1937). Government control and repression of the arts continued under Communist regimes, most devastatingly seen in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).