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"— declared that there would be no place for modernist experimentation in the reich.