The arbiter of what was unacceptably "modern" was Hitler. Although Goebbels and some others admired the Expressionist works of artists such as Emil Nolde, Ernst Barlach, and Erich Heckel, a faction led by Alfred Rosenberg despised the Expressionists, and the result was a bitter ideological dispute which was settled only in September 1934, when Hitler—who denounced modern art and its practitioners as "incompetents, cheats and madmen"—[1][2] declared that there would be no place for modernist experimentation in the Reich.[4]