The Shadow of Degeneracy To look at the work of Pol Cassel is to witness a career interrupted by the brutal mechanics of history. He was not merely a painter; he was a casualty of political upheaval. Born Paul Ernst Karl Cassel in Munich, his trajectory from the arts and crafts schools of Erfurt and Dresden toward the heights of German modernism was violently severed in 1933. When the Nazi regime classified his paintings as "degenerat…