Sorry for the dearth of posts recently...I've been working on a project, wanted to devote all my time to it, and kept telling myself...it'll be done today so I can get back to blogging here tomorrow.
The next day it was... okay, it's definitely going to get done today....
Well, today it is done... so back to posting here on a daily basis tomorrow. (With the first post appearing tomorrow afternoon while I'm watching football!)
Thanks for your patience.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Austrian gallery ordered to return Nazi-stolen Romako works
From Austrian gallery ordered to return Nazi-stolen Romako works
VIENNA – Vienna's Albertina art gallery was told Tuesday to return six works by Anton Romako to the descendants of Jewish art collector Oskar Reichel, whose collection was stolen by the Nazis.
The Austrian culture ministry's art restitution council said that four of the works by the Austrian painter (1832-1839) had been bought by the Albertina gallery in 1939-40 and the two others after World War II.
Reichel, a renowned collector of Austrian art, died in Vienna in May 1943, four months after his wife Malvine Reichel had been deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
She survived the war and was liberated by the Red Army in 1945. Their two sons fled in 1939 but the oldest was murdered by the Nazis in 1940.
Under a 1998 restitution law, Austria has returned some 10,000 Nazi-plundered paintings to the descendants of their former owners.
Most notorious was a painting by Gustav Klimt, a 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, which the Austrian state was forced to return to the heirs of its previous owner in 2006 after a lengthy legal battle.
A Klimt landscape stolen by the Nazis and returned this year to the family of the Jewish owner sold for a huge $40.4 million at Sotheby's in New York last month.
VIENNA – Vienna's Albertina art gallery was told Tuesday to return six works by Anton Romako to the descendants of Jewish art collector Oskar Reichel, whose collection was stolen by the Nazis.
The Austrian culture ministry's art restitution council said that four of the works by the Austrian painter (1832-1839) had been bought by the Albertina gallery in 1939-40 and the two others after World War II.
Reichel, a renowned collector of Austrian art, died in Vienna in May 1943, four months after his wife Malvine Reichel had been deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
She survived the war and was liberated by the Red Army in 1945. Their two sons fled in 1939 but the oldest was murdered by the Nazis in 1940.
Under a 1998 restitution law, Austria has returned some 10,000 Nazi-plundered paintings to the descendants of their former owners.
Most notorious was a painting by Gustav Klimt, a 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, which the Austrian state was forced to return to the heirs of its previous owner in 2006 after a lengthy legal battle.
A Klimt landscape stolen by the Nazis and returned this year to the family of the Jewish owner sold for a huge $40.4 million at Sotheby's in New York last month.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Leonardo's Lady and the Quest For War Loot Restitution
From 8/11/11
From Huff Post England: Leonardo's Lady and the Quest For War Loot Restitution
The new Leonardo da Vinci exhibition at London's National Gallery opens tomorrow, however it has long been regarded as the highpoint of the city's Winter cultural attractions.
Through the gallery's own treasures and those on loan from the likes of the Louvre in Paris and St Petersburg's Hermitage, the show tells the tale of da Vinci's spell in the late 15th century as court painter to one of Renaissance Italy's most powerful men, Lodovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan.
Thanks to the power of the image of Mona Lisa and the imagination of Dan Brown, the da Vinci brand will never lack box office appeal. But, just in case, curators for this new exhibition have used another of the artist's most recognisable works to help drive publicity.
Lady with an Ermine is one of only a handful of Leonardo portraits known to survive. Painted onto a small wooden panel with oils, it depicts Cecilia Gallerani, Sforza's teenage mistress, clutching a stoat. The animal is not thought to have been a random prop but chosen because Leonardo wished to add a further symbol of his subject's purity to please his paymaster. The ermine was believed to rather face death than soil its white winter fur.
Ironically, given the purity to which one of history's most famous polymaths was alluding more than five centuries ago, the painting itself has become one of many symbols of a much darker episode in history, one which stretches back 70 years.
It was one of an estimated 600,000 paintings stolen by Germany during a looting programme instigated by Hitler himself to stock what he intended to be the planet's largest museum in his boyhood home town of Linz.
Through forced sales or confiscations from Jewish collectors, a network of magpie collaborators and agents, and secret trades with renowned state collections anxious to protect their finest pieces, the Nazis acquired one-fifth of the world's fine art treasures.
At least for Lady with an Ermine, the trauma was not to last too long. It had been pulled from its hiding place in an outbuilding at the country home of its owner, the Polish prince Augustin Czartoryski, in December 1939. Just over five years later, it was safely recovered by the Allies from the haul seized from Reichskommissar Hans Frank, the Nazi's officer in charge of Poland, as he tried to flee to safety.
The most famous Leonardo of all was reputed to be among works retrieved in much more dramatic circumstances. While writing our book on the subject of war art loot, myself and Peter Harclerode discovered documents suggesting that 6,500 items, including the Mona Lisa, were down an Austrian salt-mine and only hours from being blown up by retreating Nazis when they were rescued by Allied secret agents.
However, even though the Czartoryskis had Lady with an Ermine returned to them, they are among families still fighting to get back many tens of thousands of other pieces of art stolen just before and during World War Two. Although the wartime owners have died, their heirs have combed archives and libraries as well as arguing in galleries and courtrooms in an attempt to win restitution.
There have been some high-profile successes but, sadly, they are exceptions. Given recent developments in Europe and the United States, any positive momentum looks like being stopped in its tracks even as new initiatives allow access to the sort of paperwork which might support restitution claims.
The US Supreme Court recently decided that California couldn't extend a statute of limitations which might give affected families more time to have missing works handed back to them. Sir Norman Rosenthal, the former leading curator at London's Royal Academy of Art, has called for an end to the restitution process, suggesting that it is not an effective way to erase a painful and destructive chapter in history.
Meanwhile, modern collectors seek to defend their ownership of disputed art by claiming that they had bought pieces in good faith. They include Andrew Lloyd Webber, who was allowed to auction a Picasso for £35 million last year after demands for its return from one Jewish family had halted a previous sale at Christie's auction house in New York.
Despite the potential narrowing of their chances for success and the passage of more than 60 years since the end of the Second World War, the families press on. In Amsterdam, Christine Koenigs is keen to trace more than 2,600 drawings and 46 Old Master paintings which had belonged to her grandfather. Her enquiries also extend to a portrait of van Gogh's physician which once held the title as the most costly work of art ever sold at auction.
Whether her long quest for justice enjoys the same sort of happy ending as those with whom the image of Cecilia Gallerani resides remains to be seen.
From Huff Post England: Leonardo's Lady and the Quest For War Loot Restitution
The new Leonardo da Vinci exhibition at London's National Gallery opens tomorrow, however it has long been regarded as the highpoint of the city's Winter cultural attractions.
Through the gallery's own treasures and those on loan from the likes of the Louvre in Paris and St Petersburg's Hermitage, the show tells the tale of da Vinci's spell in the late 15th century as court painter to one of Renaissance Italy's most powerful men, Lodovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan.
Thanks to the power of the image of Mona Lisa and the imagination of Dan Brown, the da Vinci brand will never lack box office appeal. But, just in case, curators for this new exhibition have used another of the artist's most recognisable works to help drive publicity.
Lady with an Ermine is one of only a handful of Leonardo portraits known to survive. Painted onto a small wooden panel with oils, it depicts Cecilia Gallerani, Sforza's teenage mistress, clutching a stoat. The animal is not thought to have been a random prop but chosen because Leonardo wished to add a further symbol of his subject's purity to please his paymaster. The ermine was believed to rather face death than soil its white winter fur.
Ironically, given the purity to which one of history's most famous polymaths was alluding more than five centuries ago, the painting itself has become one of many symbols of a much darker episode in history, one which stretches back 70 years.
It was one of an estimated 600,000 paintings stolen by Germany during a looting programme instigated by Hitler himself to stock what he intended to be the planet's largest museum in his boyhood home town of Linz.
Through forced sales or confiscations from Jewish collectors, a network of magpie collaborators and agents, and secret trades with renowned state collections anxious to protect their finest pieces, the Nazis acquired one-fifth of the world's fine art treasures.
At least for Lady with an Ermine, the trauma was not to last too long. It had been pulled from its hiding place in an outbuilding at the country home of its owner, the Polish prince Augustin Czartoryski, in December 1939. Just over five years later, it was safely recovered by the Allies from the haul seized from Reichskommissar Hans Frank, the Nazi's officer in charge of Poland, as he tried to flee to safety.
The most famous Leonardo of all was reputed to be among works retrieved in much more dramatic circumstances. While writing our book on the subject of war art loot, myself and Peter Harclerode discovered documents suggesting that 6,500 items, including the Mona Lisa, were down an Austrian salt-mine and only hours from being blown up by retreating Nazis when they were rescued by Allied secret agents.
However, even though the Czartoryskis had Lady with an Ermine returned to them, they are among families still fighting to get back many tens of thousands of other pieces of art stolen just before and during World War Two. Although the wartime owners have died, their heirs have combed archives and libraries as well as arguing in galleries and courtrooms in an attempt to win restitution.
There have been some high-profile successes but, sadly, they are exceptions. Given recent developments in Europe and the United States, any positive momentum looks like being stopped in its tracks even as new initiatives allow access to the sort of paperwork which might support restitution claims.
The US Supreme Court recently decided that California couldn't extend a statute of limitations which might give affected families more time to have missing works handed back to them. Sir Norman Rosenthal, the former leading curator at London's Royal Academy of Art, has called for an end to the restitution process, suggesting that it is not an effective way to erase a painful and destructive chapter in history.
Meanwhile, modern collectors seek to defend their ownership of disputed art by claiming that they had bought pieces in good faith. They include Andrew Lloyd Webber, who was allowed to auction a Picasso for £35 million last year after demands for its return from one Jewish family had halted a previous sale at Christie's auction house in New York.
Despite the potential narrowing of their chances for success and the passage of more than 60 years since the end of the Second World War, the families press on. In Amsterdam, Christine Koenigs is keen to trace more than 2,600 drawings and 46 Old Master paintings which had belonged to her grandfather. Her enquiries also extend to a portrait of van Gogh's physician which once held the title as the most costly work of art ever sold at auction.
Whether her long quest for justice enjoys the same sort of happy ending as those with whom the image of Cecilia Gallerani resides remains to be seen.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Former Nazi Art Dealer Leaves Collection to Friends, Family
The article below is from July 12, 2007!
Nevertheless, it makes for an interesting story.
From Art Info: Former Nazi Art Dealer Leaves Collection to Friends, Family
Bruno Lohse, a German art dealer appointed by HermannGoering to acquire looted art in occupied France in the 1940s, died on March 19at the age of 95, leaving his private collection of Dutch 17th-centurymasterpieces and expressionist paintings to friends and family, Bloomberg reports.Since May, the collection has been the focus of a three-nation investigationinto a looted Camille Pissarro painting discovered in a Swiss bank safeconnected to the dealer. However, historian, documentary maker, and Lohse’sacquaintance Maurice-Philip Remy said that of the 40 artworks in Lohse’scollection, there are only three paintings where he ``is not yet sure'' of theprovenance. ``I know every painting in the collection,'' Remy said. ``It is nota stash of looted art.''
Nevertheless, it makes for an interesting story.
From Art Info: Former Nazi Art Dealer Leaves Collection to Friends, Family
Bruno Lohse, a German art dealer appointed by HermannGoering to acquire looted art in occupied France in the 1940s, died on March 19at the age of 95, leaving his private collection of Dutch 17th-centurymasterpieces and expressionist paintings to friends and family, Bloomberg reports.Since May, the collection has been the focus of a three-nation investigationinto a looted Camille Pissarro painting discovered in a Swiss bank safeconnected to the dealer. However, historian, documentary maker, and Lohse’sacquaintance Maurice-Philip Remy said that of the 40 artworks in Lohse’scollection, there are only three paintings where he ``is not yet sure'' of theprovenance. ``I know every painting in the collection,'' Remy said. ``It is nota stash of looted art.''
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Stolen Art Returns Home after 60 Years
From ArtFixDaily.com: Stolen Art Returns Home after 60 Years
A painting stolen from Berlin in the chaotic aftermath of WWII, and subsequently sold to the Indiana University Art Museum, is finally on its way back to Germany after years of investigation, according to the IU News Room.
The 15th century oil on panel, which depicts the flagellation of Christ, was originally part of an altarpiece and created by an unknown artist of the Cologne school. The relatively small image shows a bound and bloodied Christ encircled by four tormentors who brandish flails and clubs.
The piece was part of an IU Art Museum research project regarding the looting and destruction of art during World War II.
A British soldier took the artwork from the Jagdschloss Grunewald Museum in Berlin sometime during the summer of 1945. From him, it passed into the hands of an art dealer and then on to former IU President Herman Wells, who bought it for his personal collection in 1967. In 1985 Wells donated the “Flagellation of Christ” to the IU Art Museum, not realizing it was a piece of looted art. While the IU agreed to return the painting to Berlin some time ago, the painting remained in their possession while the Jagdschloss Grunewald Museum was undergoing major renovations.
The painting is just one of 3,000 works listed by the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation in recently created catalogues detailing art lost during and after World War II.
The return of the “Flagellation of Christ” coincides with the return of two other looted German art works, both by Expressionist painter Karl Schmitt-Rottluff. According to Bloomberg, the paintings belonged to Berlin businessman Robert Graetz, who was deported to Auschwitz during World War II and later killed there. The paintings, a landscape and a self-portrait, are together valued at $4 million.
Schmitt-Rottluff was part of a group of artists called Die Brücke(or the Bridge) who favored intense color combined with an emphasis on primitivism. Other prominent members of the group included Emile Nolde and Ernst Kirchner, both of whom also created works of art that have been at the center of a looting controversy. All three artists were part of Hitler’s ban on what he deemed entartete Kunst of “Degenerate Art.”
The exact details of the disappearance of the paintings are not known. However, after a government panel looked into the matter, Germany decided the best course of action was to return the paintings to the victim’s heir and grandson, Roberto Graetz.
Germany is a supporter of the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi confiscated art created in 1998. The city of Berlin will return the paintings.
A painting stolen from Berlin in the chaotic aftermath of WWII, and subsequently sold to the Indiana University Art Museum, is finally on its way back to Germany after years of investigation, according to the IU News Room.
The 15th century oil on panel, which depicts the flagellation of Christ, was originally part of an altarpiece and created by an unknown artist of the Cologne school. The relatively small image shows a bound and bloodied Christ encircled by four tormentors who brandish flails and clubs.
The piece was part of an IU Art Museum research project regarding the looting and destruction of art during World War II.
A British soldier took the artwork from the Jagdschloss Grunewald Museum in Berlin sometime during the summer of 1945. From him, it passed into the hands of an art dealer and then on to former IU President Herman Wells, who bought it for his personal collection in 1967. In 1985 Wells donated the “Flagellation of Christ” to the IU Art Museum, not realizing it was a piece of looted art. While the IU agreed to return the painting to Berlin some time ago, the painting remained in their possession while the Jagdschloss Grunewald Museum was undergoing major renovations.
The painting is just one of 3,000 works listed by the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation in recently created catalogues detailing art lost during and after World War II.
The return of the “Flagellation of Christ” coincides with the return of two other looted German art works, both by Expressionist painter Karl Schmitt-Rottluff. According to Bloomberg, the paintings belonged to Berlin businessman Robert Graetz, who was deported to Auschwitz during World War II and later killed there. The paintings, a landscape and a self-portrait, are together valued at $4 million.
Schmitt-Rottluff was part of a group of artists called Die Brücke(or the Bridge) who favored intense color combined with an emphasis on primitivism. Other prominent members of the group included Emile Nolde and Ernst Kirchner, both of whom also created works of art that have been at the center of a looting controversy. All three artists were part of Hitler’s ban on what he deemed entartete Kunst of “Degenerate Art.”
The exact details of the disappearance of the paintings are not known. However, after a government panel looked into the matter, Germany decided the best course of action was to return the paintings to the victim’s heir and grandson, Roberto Graetz.
Germany is a supporter of the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi confiscated art created in 1998. The city of Berlin will return the paintings.
Germany to restitute two Nazi-looted paintings
From JTA: Germany to restitute two Nazi-looted paintings
BERLIN (JTA) -- Germany will return two paintings to the sole heir of a collector who was murdered by the Nazis.
Two paintings by the renowned Expressionist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff -- "Estate in Dangast" (1910) and "Self Portrait" (1920) -- will be turned over to Argentinian businessman Roberto Graetz, 60, the nephew and sole heir of Jewish textile manufacturer and art collector Robert Graetz, who was killed in Auschwitz. Roberto Graetz reportedly had fought for 10 years for the return of the paintings, which are worth an estimated $4 million.
German Culture Minister Bernd Neumann announced the decision Nov. 19 by the so-called Limbach Commission to return the paintings "based on the overall situation, the persecution of Robert Graetz, and given the fact that there was no concrete evidence" opposing the claim that Graetz had lost his collection due to Nazi persecution, according to the German news agency dpa.
The Limbach Commission was established in 2003 to help resolve disputes over cultural inheritance.
The Schmidt-Rottluff paintings are on loan currently to the Neue Nationalgalerie, one of Berlin's premier modern art museums. Roberto Graetz and the Prussian Foundation are expected to hold talks to arrange for the works to remain at the museum.
The state of Berlin reportedly had claimed that there was not enough evidence to prove the works had been stolen or confiscated by the Nazis. They said that Robert Graetz still owned the paintings in 1938 and they were sold at a gallery in 1953 for 3,500 German marks, or under $900. But researchers were unable to document what had happened to the paintings after 1938.
The fate of Graetz, however, is known. According to reports, he was forced to sell his home and belongings in 1938 and was deported to Auschwitz in 1942, where he was killed.
His nephew told Bloomberg after the decision that "You cannot undo the past, but it is possible to achieve a little bit of justice."
BERLIN (JTA) -- Germany will return two paintings to the sole heir of a collector who was murdered by the Nazis.
Two paintings by the renowned Expressionist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff -- "Estate in Dangast" (1910) and "Self Portrait" (1920) -- will be turned over to Argentinian businessman Roberto Graetz, 60, the nephew and sole heir of Jewish textile manufacturer and art collector Robert Graetz, who was killed in Auschwitz. Roberto Graetz reportedly had fought for 10 years for the return of the paintings, which are worth an estimated $4 million.
German Culture Minister Bernd Neumann announced the decision Nov. 19 by the so-called Limbach Commission to return the paintings "based on the overall situation, the persecution of Robert Graetz, and given the fact that there was no concrete evidence" opposing the claim that Graetz had lost his collection due to Nazi persecution, according to the German news agency dpa.
The Limbach Commission was established in 2003 to help resolve disputes over cultural inheritance.
The Schmidt-Rottluff paintings are on loan currently to the Neue Nationalgalerie, one of Berlin's premier modern art museums. Roberto Graetz and the Prussian Foundation are expected to hold talks to arrange for the works to remain at the museum.
The state of Berlin reportedly had claimed that there was not enough evidence to prove the works had been stolen or confiscated by the Nazis. They said that Robert Graetz still owned the paintings in 1938 and they were sold at a gallery in 1953 for 3,500 German marks, or under $900. But researchers were unable to document what had happened to the paintings after 1938.
The fate of Graetz, however, is known. According to reports, he was forced to sell his home and belongings in 1938 and was deported to Auschwitz in 1942, where he was killed.
His nephew told Bloomberg after the decision that "You cannot undo the past, but it is possible to achieve a little bit of justice."
Saturday, November 26, 2011
New Archive of Nazi Exhibitions Complicates Our Understanding of Hitler's Art History
From ArtInfo.com: New Archive of Nazi Exhibitions Complicates Our Understanding of Hitler's Art History
Richard Wagner was his favorite composer and Arno Breker his official house sculptor — but Adolf Hitler’s taste in art was surprisingly broad — and gaudy — judging by a vast archive of some 11,000 Nazi-era exhibition installation photos now published online for the first time.
The "Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung 1937-1944" database lists the Führer as the buyer of some 1313 artworks from the eight grandiose (and heavily-sanitized) exhibitions put on by the Nazi party before and during the Second World War at Munich’s Haus der Kunst. Among the works on which Hitler spent some seven million Reichmarks were a bust of Mussolini's head, paintings of playful leopards, and Anna Elisabeth Rühl's sculpture of a donkey.
The project is the culmination of years-long research and digitalization by the Haus der Kunst and the Central Institute for Art History after researchers began unearthing the forgotten images from the Haus archives in 2004. Together, they suggest a Nazi curating style that was less totalitarian than fractional, beset by factional differences.
"We have to rethink some very easy and clear-cut prejudices," Dr. Christian Fuhrmeister, who spearheaded the project at the Central Institute, told ARTINFO.
In 1933, Hitler grandly promised that Germany would have the world's finest art, and the dictator put a definite end to the avant-gardism of the Weimar Republic. To make good on his claims, he became the country's biggest collector. But beyond proud eagles, muscular athletes, and the regime-glorifying works of Breker and Thorak — and despite the ban on most modern works as "degenerate" — there was no real consensus on the nature of true national socialist art.
There were works by Edmund Steppels, the quasi-Surrealist and former pupil of Max Ernst. In 1937, works by Rudolf Belling were presented both in the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung and in the derisive "Entartete Kunst" exhibition, showing confiscated works that were denounced as having insulted Germany and its people, or possessing what Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels termed a "perverse Jewish spirit." "Today, the challenge is to grasp these contradictions that no one thought about," said Dr. Fuhrmeister.
"The archives reveal that only a minor part of the works admitted to the exhibition openly depicted themes of National Socialist propaganda. A large amount of the works belonged to landscape and genre painting. Small-scale sculptures — mostly of animals and female nudes — had a much greater quantity than the monumental heroic sculptures," said Okwui Enwezor, today's director of the Haus der Kunst. "Hitler's collecting gives us an insight in how banal most of these art works were, and that the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung mainly reflected the taste of a dictator."
Still, the photographs are full of diversity. Seeking to represent all generations of Germans, the exhibition juries accepted soldier portraits painted by a 16-year-old Hitler youth as well as works by a 70-year-old professor. The exhibitions spanned every German region. And the selection process was riddled with infighting, said Dr. Fuhrmeister. "You have a rather heterogeneous and dynamic situation, starting in 1934 when they were discussing Expressionism," he said. "You saw continuous fighting between various institutions about national socialist art. This was a contested field."
The traditional view of totalitarian, top-down curating has endured, in part, because much of the writing about Nazi-era art has been based on the old exhibition catalogs or newspaper reports. Their black-and-white images were mainly of works referencing state iconography, propaganda and the military, which were considered most relevant at the time. It fit nicely with the assumption that Nazi Germany was a monolithic state where Hitler saw all and ruled all. "When you look at the art and art politics, you get a very different picture," said Dr. Fuhrmeister. "You now have this huge mass of rather petty-bourgeois, 19th-century-style painting, of landscapes, flowers, still life and so on." A few of these did also make it into catalogs — but not in proportion to their vast numbers, he noted.
Since 2007, the researchers have been identifying the more than 12,500 works shown in the pictures, from old paper catalogs, curator's hand-scribbled notes with occasional mistakes — and the Haus der Kunst's old accounting ledgers that only identified works by cross-referenced numbers. None of the photographs were precisely dated and some showed artworks that were not in the catalog, or omitted works that were.
"We had thousands of exhibition views, with no idea what we were looking at," said Dr. Fuhrmeister. "You have images from the opening, but after a few months, some works were sold and taken down — and others brought up from the basement and put on the wall. Sometimes, particularly in the case of Hitler photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, works were rearranged specifically to create a more impressive array of images — then put back in place." Little information was available for the years 1937 and 1944, so the researchers had to reconstruct those exhibitions visually. They perused the Bavarian state and Munich municipal archives for log books and went through the some 700 oil paintings today housed in Berlin's Deutsches Historisches Museum.
Visually, the exhibition views are a dull crop, and the German media has gleefully greeted their "immense boredom," as Die Welt described it. The debate about showing Nazi-era art has been controversial over the past decades, and some still subscribe to German-born Jewish art historian Nikolaus Pevsner's famous assertion that any word said about Nazi architecture is a word too much, extending this opinion to visual art.
"This kind of talk does not belong to art history at all," insisted Dr. Fuhrmeister, noting that copyright issues — since few of the artists' works are yet in the public domain — had been much more worrisome than debates over old taboos. "The Central Institute is housed in the Nazi party's former administration building and developed after America chose the site for its art institute and restitution work after the war — so for us, the legacy of national socialism is a common, everyday experience. We would not accept any taboos or restrictions. We saw that the difference between what the literature says about national socialist art and what you see in the photographs was so big that we had to bring this new material into the scholarly discourse, and perhaps change its perceptions."
The Haus der Kunst itself is "a testimony of the time," said Enwezor. "I am of the opinion that we absolutely have to not only show the material in our archives, we have to properly contextualize it and defetishize it." He added that for its 75th anniversary next year, the Haus is planning an exhibition based on its archives, and that of the Große Kunstausstellung, which took over the mantle of great exhibitions after the Nazis and until the 1960s.
Richard Wagner was his favorite composer and Arno Breker his official house sculptor — but Adolf Hitler’s taste in art was surprisingly broad — and gaudy — judging by a vast archive of some 11,000 Nazi-era exhibition installation photos now published online for the first time.
The "Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung 1937-1944" database lists the Führer as the buyer of some 1313 artworks from the eight grandiose (and heavily-sanitized) exhibitions put on by the Nazi party before and during the Second World War at Munich’s Haus der Kunst. Among the works on which Hitler spent some seven million Reichmarks were a bust of Mussolini's head, paintings of playful leopards, and Anna Elisabeth Rühl's sculpture of a donkey.
The project is the culmination of years-long research and digitalization by the Haus der Kunst and the Central Institute for Art History after researchers began unearthing the forgotten images from the Haus archives in 2004. Together, they suggest a Nazi curating style that was less totalitarian than fractional, beset by factional differences.
"We have to rethink some very easy and clear-cut prejudices," Dr. Christian Fuhrmeister, who spearheaded the project at the Central Institute, told ARTINFO.
In 1933, Hitler grandly promised that Germany would have the world's finest art, and the dictator put a definite end to the avant-gardism of the Weimar Republic. To make good on his claims, he became the country's biggest collector. But beyond proud eagles, muscular athletes, and the regime-glorifying works of Breker and Thorak — and despite the ban on most modern works as "degenerate" — there was no real consensus on the nature of true national socialist art.
There were works by Edmund Steppels, the quasi-Surrealist and former pupil of Max Ernst. In 1937, works by Rudolf Belling were presented both in the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung and in the derisive "Entartete Kunst" exhibition, showing confiscated works that were denounced as having insulted Germany and its people, or possessing what Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels termed a "perverse Jewish spirit." "Today, the challenge is to grasp these contradictions that no one thought about," said Dr. Fuhrmeister.
"The archives reveal that only a minor part of the works admitted to the exhibition openly depicted themes of National Socialist propaganda. A large amount of the works belonged to landscape and genre painting. Small-scale sculptures — mostly of animals and female nudes — had a much greater quantity than the monumental heroic sculptures," said Okwui Enwezor, today's director of the Haus der Kunst. "Hitler's collecting gives us an insight in how banal most of these art works were, and that the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung mainly reflected the taste of a dictator."
Still, the photographs are full of diversity. Seeking to represent all generations of Germans, the exhibition juries accepted soldier portraits painted by a 16-year-old Hitler youth as well as works by a 70-year-old professor. The exhibitions spanned every German region. And the selection process was riddled with infighting, said Dr. Fuhrmeister. "You have a rather heterogeneous and dynamic situation, starting in 1934 when they were discussing Expressionism," he said. "You saw continuous fighting between various institutions about national socialist art. This was a contested field."
The traditional view of totalitarian, top-down curating has endured, in part, because much of the writing about Nazi-era art has been based on the old exhibition catalogs or newspaper reports. Their black-and-white images were mainly of works referencing state iconography, propaganda and the military, which were considered most relevant at the time. It fit nicely with the assumption that Nazi Germany was a monolithic state where Hitler saw all and ruled all. "When you look at the art and art politics, you get a very different picture," said Dr. Fuhrmeister. "You now have this huge mass of rather petty-bourgeois, 19th-century-style painting, of landscapes, flowers, still life and so on." A few of these did also make it into catalogs — but not in proportion to their vast numbers, he noted.
Since 2007, the researchers have been identifying the more than 12,500 works shown in the pictures, from old paper catalogs, curator's hand-scribbled notes with occasional mistakes — and the Haus der Kunst's old accounting ledgers that only identified works by cross-referenced numbers. None of the photographs were precisely dated and some showed artworks that were not in the catalog, or omitted works that were.
"We had thousands of exhibition views, with no idea what we were looking at," said Dr. Fuhrmeister. "You have images from the opening, but after a few months, some works were sold and taken down — and others brought up from the basement and put on the wall. Sometimes, particularly in the case of Hitler photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, works were rearranged specifically to create a more impressive array of images — then put back in place." Little information was available for the years 1937 and 1944, so the researchers had to reconstruct those exhibitions visually. They perused the Bavarian state and Munich municipal archives for log books and went through the some 700 oil paintings today housed in Berlin's Deutsches Historisches Museum.
Visually, the exhibition views are a dull crop, and the German media has gleefully greeted their "immense boredom," as Die Welt described it. The debate about showing Nazi-era art has been controversial over the past decades, and some still subscribe to German-born Jewish art historian Nikolaus Pevsner's famous assertion that any word said about Nazi architecture is a word too much, extending this opinion to visual art.
"This kind of talk does not belong to art history at all," insisted Dr. Fuhrmeister, noting that copyright issues — since few of the artists' works are yet in the public domain — had been much more worrisome than debates over old taboos. "The Central Institute is housed in the Nazi party's former administration building and developed after America chose the site for its art institute and restitution work after the war — so for us, the legacy of national socialism is a common, everyday experience. We would not accept any taboos or restrictions. We saw that the difference between what the literature says about national socialist art and what you see in the photographs was so big that we had to bring this new material into the scholarly discourse, and perhaps change its perceptions."
The Haus der Kunst itself is "a testimony of the time," said Enwezor. "I am of the opinion that we absolutely have to not only show the material in our archives, we have to properly contextualize it and defetishize it." He added that for its 75th anniversary next year, the Haus is planning an exhibition based on its archives, and that of the Große Kunstausstellung, which took over the mantle of great exhibitions after the Nazis and until the 1960s.
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