The Woman in Gold: battle for Klimt's art

The film Woman in Gold, directed by Simon Curtis, was about the recovery of Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I 1907.

Gustav Klimt 1862-1918 (Moritz Bleibtreu)’s finished portrait painting, made of gorgeous oil, silver and gold, took three years to complete. His 1907 painting, commission by the husband, had originally been titled Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. It was the first of 2 port­raits that Klimt painted of Adele; then Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II in 1912.

When Adele died in 1925, her 6 paintings by Klimt were not left to Austria. She spec­if­ied in her will that the paintings were to be left to her husband and asked that he donate them to the Austrian State Gallery upon his death, to be put on display in the prest­ig­ious Belvedere Palace. However Adele's husband, wealthy sugar magnate Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer's own will stated that his estate, including the Klimt paintings, was to go to his heirs.

But Ferdinand did not die until WW2, and by that time the paintings had already been stolen by the Nazis. A German lawyer administered their sale, and in 1941, the Austrian State Gallery won the Klimt works. The Nazi curator at the Austrian Gall­ery first changed the paint­ing’s name to hide the fact that the model was Jewish.

Dame Helen Mirren played the late Maria Altmann (nee Bloch Bauer 1916-2011), niece of Adele, very well. I don’t like docu-dramas, especially when English-speaking actors have to put on fake German accents while speaking in English. But I love Vienna’s early C20th Golden Era, its art, music and cultural salons, and was keen to see the film.

The story was seen through two streams, the first located recently, and the second via flashbacks to the 1930s. We saw the cultiv­ated life of the Bloch-Bauer family, a Jewish business family in Vienna. Adele (1881-1924) hosted a chic cult­ural sal­on where Klimt and other artists met their patrons and bonded with them. Maria Altmann recalled the arrival of Nazi forces in Vienna, oppression of the Jewish com­munity and Nazi looting of art treasures. Nazis raided the family-home and took jewel­lery, her father's Stradivarius and paintings.

Anne-Marie O'Connor's book Lady in Gold: Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece said Ferdinand Altmann had been arrested by the Nazis and held at Dachau concentration camp for two months. Later the couple tried to escape 3 times before the country was completely shut off; eventually they succeeded, boarding a plane to Cologne. While Altmann and her brand new husband were successful in escaping, she was forced to abandon her parents in Vienna. From the UK, the young couple made their way across Holland and then to Liv­erpool. But as the British were growing more suspicious of Axis citizens living in Britain, they travelled to America.

Then the film jumped to the 1990s when an elderly and widowed Altmann was attending her sister’s funeral in Los Angeles. She discovered her sister’s late 1940s letters which wanted to recover fam­ily artwork that had been stolen by the Nazis.

Altmann hired lawyer Randol Sch­oenberg (Ryan Reynolds) to get her art back via the Restitution Board in Austria. Note that grandpa Arnold Schoenberg’s music had been defined as Degenerate by the Nazi Party's cultural auth­orities. After being warned to get out, Arnold fled via Paris to America in 1933, teaching at the University of Southern California.

 Woman in Gold, by Klimt. 1907 (top photo)

 Adele Bloch-Bauer (lower photo)

                                       
The film showed how Maria Altmann first tried to reclaim some of her family's art in 1998, aged 82! Restitution across Europe was improving; Swiss banks had agreed to a $1.25 billion settlement after being sued by Holocaust surviv­ors, to return assets deposited during the war. The Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art was signed in Dec 1998 by 44 countries, including Austria. And the Austrian Parliament passed its own law requiring museums to allow researchers to explore their stolen items archives. 

By opening the Ministry of Culture archives for the first time, the new law enabled Austrian lawyer and investigative journ­alist Hubertus Czernin (Daniel Bruhl) to discover that Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer had NEVER donated the paintings to the state museum. [Czernin eventually traced thousands of Nazi-looted works of art to Austria’s national museums] . 

In 1999, Schoenberg and Maria sought to sue the Austrian government in an Austrian court. But under Austrian law, the filing fee for lawsuits was determined as a percentage of the recoverable amount. The five paintings were then estimated at cUS$135 million, making the filing fee $1.5+ million - too much for Altmann, so she dropped her case. In any case, Altmann heard that the country's minister was unwilling to part with the iconic painting, which they felt had be­come part of Austria’s national identity.Randol then filed in Aug 2000 in the Californian District Court, using a nar­row rule of law in which an art restitution law was retro­act­ively applied. A Republic of Austria v Altmann appeal went to the American Supreme Court where the court ruled in Altmann's fav­our.

The American Supreme Court cleared the way to sue the Austrian government. In order to avoid a lengthy and expensive court battle, she agreed to binding arbitration in Austria, given her advanced age.

In front of three arbiters, the panel heard the case over four months. Schoenberg asked the arbitration panel to see the injustice to the families who were deported or forcibly separated from their treasures by the Nazis. The arbitration panel ruled in favour of Altmann, returning 5 of her 6 works!

Yes the Bloch-Bauer art collection was looted by Nazi authorities in Vienna, and yes Austria fought aggressively to avoid returning it, given that the iconic paintings were seen as part of Austria’s identity. So of course the painting's departure was a significant loss to Austria. But hey.. after 8 years of struggle to reclaim the paintings (1998-2006), Maria grabbed the works and took them back to the USA!

The film didn’t discuss the heirs' decision to sell off the family paintings, valued at $325 million, but I personally found it prob­lematic. Were the Bloch-Bauer heirs simply cashing in on a booming art market, rather than pursuing justice? What other memories would they have of their parents and grandparents? The main painting was sold to cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder (son of Estée Lauder) in 2006 for a record $135 million.

Lauder promised to display the painting at his Neue Galerie New York permanently. Plus he planned a fine exhibition called Klimt and the Women of Vienna's Golden Age 1900-18, held at the Neue Galleries New York until Jan 2017. Naturally the two Bloch-Bauer portraits were the star presentations.

Gustav Klimt

All photos from Beauty Will Save

William Hogarth and Trump

I can recognise and love every one of William Hogarth's (1697-1764) works of art. What I did NOT realise that one of his dogs, Trump (c1730–1745), appeared in a number of his engavings and paintings. Apart from looking ugly, it has been suggested by Hogarth's biographer Ronald Paulson that this dog appeared as an emblem of the artist's own pug-nacious and dog-matic character.

Hogarth was clever and famous for blasting whatever he con­sid­ered to be politically corrupt, vulgar, criminal, charitable and patriotic. The artist was disparagingly nicknamed the Painter Pugg.  But Hogarth continued to use the dog as his trademark in a sat­ir­ic­al 1763 engraving The Bruiser. The image was based on his 1745 self-portrait with Trump, replacing art critic Charles Churchill who was lampooned as a drunken bear. Note the rude dog, urinating on a copy of the “Epistle to William Hogarth”, published by Charles Churchill, archenemy of the painter.

How prescient William Hogarth was!!

William Hogarth and Trump, 1745

Tate Museum, London

William Hogarth, The Bruiser, 1763
NGV

Friedrich Drumpf and Fred Trump left their grandson and son a handsome legacy in business and building. Yet since the beginning of his career, Donald Trump has been, at best, apathetic to the arts in New York and elsewhere. His first media spectacle, in 1980, focused on the then-33-year-old developer destroying a pair of Art Deco reliefs that were part of the facade of the Bonwit Teller Building in midtown Manhattan, which Trump tore down to build his Trump Tower. The Metropolitan Museum of Art wanted the reliefs for its collection and Trump agreed to donate them, if the cost of their removal wasn’t prohibitive. It wasn’t, but Donald Trump’s construction crew destroyed the works anyway. He later told the New York Times that he was concerned for “the safety of people on the street below”.

Later Donald Trump fashioned himself as a philistine par excellence. In 1999 Trump made a public call for censorship and claimed that his hypothetical presidency would cut federal funding for the arts. That was the year that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani embarked on a crusade against the Brooklyn Museum for its exhibition of Chris Ofili’s The Holy Mary Virgin (1996), which depicted the Madonna in ugly materials. Giuliani went so far as to try to cancel the institution’s lease with the city, evicting it from its home of more than 100 years. Only Trump supported the mayor's criticism, releasing a statement to the Daily News that said “As president, I would ensure that the National Endowment of the Arts stops funding of this sort. It’s not art. It’s absolutely gross, degenerate stuff.” Note the word degenerate.

But as a citizen, Donald Trump has had a more tangible effect on the NEA beyond his mere endorsement of slashing government funding for the arts. In 2013, Trump took over the lease of the Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Ave in Washington DC, in order to build a private 270-room hotel. Among the occupants that were forced to vacate were the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Looted art in Germany and France - Hildebrand and Cornelius Gurlitt

Notable German art dealer Hild­ebrand Gurlitt (1895–1956) was the ­son of a famous art hist­or­ian, Cornelius Gurlitt I (1850–1938), and grandson of Louis Gurlitt (1812–1897), an important C19th landscape artist.

Early in his car­eer in the 1920s, Hilde­brand worked as a museum dir­ector in Zwickau, where he tried to convince people of the merits of modern art. But he faced a right wing backlash and was dropped. In 1933 he moved to Hamburg where young Hildebrand tried to rebuilt his career as a modern art dealer, just as the Nazis rose to power.

Hildebrand started to actively link himself with the Nazi goals, writing to the Propa­ganda Ministry to volunteer his skills as a leading expert in modern i.e degenerate art. He was sent with other dealers to act for the Nazis, with the task of acquiring works for the Führermuseum project. Hit­ler’s Special Art Comm­ission of Linz planned to create a super museum in his boyhood town, Linz, that would contain every important art work in the world. So Hildebrand had a blank cheque. He obtained works by Delacroix, Fragonard, Seurat and Courbet, Paul Signac, water­colours by August Macke; horses by Franz Marc; Millet, Boucher and works by Kollwitz, Munch and Liebermann. Many paintings had been stolen from noted French Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg.

Claude Monet
Waterloo Bridge, 1903

Monet's The Bridge of Waterloo was found wrapped in newspapers behind a library in Cornelius Gurlitt's house in Salzburg. It was of a London day of fog and grey skies. The canvas back had a 1938 note from Hildebrand's mother saying: "I am happy to confirm that this picture photographed on the back was bought by me and my father many years ago and I gave it to you on your wedding in 1923". Hildebrand Gurlitt clearly lied about the origins of his collection, making  this painting one of the many works on display with dodgy provenance.

                               

Matisse
Odalisque, 1923
Stedelijk Museum

Remember the Allied armies' Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Programme aka Monuments Men? They were an international volunteer group who operated within the Allied Forces to protect Eur­ope’s cultural prop­erty. In June 1945 they captured Hildebrand and 20 boxes of art in Aschbach, and questioned his connection to the Nazis. But his reply was uncheckable: he said that most of his coll­ection and papers had been destroyed in Dresden’s bombing, Feb 1945.

In 1945 Hildebrand described his dealings with Allied author­ities, and listed the art in his possession. As part of its investigative process, German authorities’ search found that in May 1940 the Reich Propaganda Ministry sold 200 paintings to Gurlitt for a small price. Hildebrand gained 115 more works of Degenerate Art in the same way in 1941, giving him a per­sonal trading collection of 1,500 art obj­ects. Gurlitt used his position to sell art to domestic collectors, mostly to Bernhard Spreng­el, whose collection forms the core of  Hanover's Sprengel Museum.

After the war, Hildebrand Gurlitt was quickly rehab­il­it­ated and in 1948 he was again direct­or of Dusseldorf Kunst­verein gallery. He continued trading artworks until dying in a car crash in 1956. And was memorialised in his son’s obituary.

In Sept 2010 Hildebrand’s son, art collector Cornelius Gurlitt II (1932-2014), was caught on a Munich train by German cus­toms of­f­icers with a large stash of cash after ret­urning from Switzerland to sell art works. Cornelius was allowed to go on his way, still under suspicion. But he never married or work­ed, and never had a source of income other than sales of daddy’s art.

The art historian who first examined the collection claimed in Focus Magazine in 2010 that c300 pieces had appeared in the 1937 Nazi Deg­en­erate Art Exhib­it­ion in Munich. And she was trying to trace the original owners of the works and their surviving relatives. Other art historians asked that all the paintings be published, to be returned to their rightful owners.

In Sept 2011, the prosecutor obtained a search warrant to enter his rented apartment in Munich. They found 1,490 framed and unframed paintings hidden behind food, estimated at €1 billion! Some of the paintings were immediately suspected of having been looted by the Nazis during WW2. The Old Masters, Impressionist, Cubist and Expressionist artworks were done by the best artists News of this delayed discovery by Focus Magazine in Nov 2013 provoked a worldwide sensation.

In April 2014, an agreement was finally reached whereby the collection confiscated in Munich was to be returned to Gurlitt in exchange for his co-operation with a government-led task force. However Cornelius Gurlitt died in May 2014. In his will he bequeathed all his possessions to the Swiss Mus­eum of Fine Arts Bern as his sole heir.

More art objects appeared, even after Gurlitt's death. In July 2014, a new discovery was made in his Munich apartment: sculptures, perhaps by Rodin and Degas. A Monet landscape was found in a Gurlitt suitcase. Max Liebermann's work Riders on the Beach was auctioned at Sotheby's in 2015 in London. A Cezanne painting was found in his Salzburg home behind a cupboard.

Into 2018 the Kunstmuseum in Bern and the Bundeskunst­halle in Bonn pres­ented the Gurlitt works in two par­allel shows. They told the story of the confiscation of modern art, outlawed by the Nazis as Degenerate Art in 1937-8: 23,000 paintings, prints and sculptures from public galleries across Germany. Many of the works were sold abroad, making money for the Nazi regime.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

A Group of Artists: Otto Mueller, Kirchner, Heckel, Schmidt-Rottluff , 1927
Museum Ludwig, Cologne

Portrait of a woman by Henri Matisse was traceable to Paul Rosenberg, a Jewish art dealer from Paris who had represented Matisse and Picasso and who had been forced to leave his collection behind when he fled France. Rosenberg's grand daughter had been fighting for decades for the return of the art dealer's paintings. She immediately sent lawyers on behalf of the Rosenberg heirs who entered into negotiations with Cornelius Gurlitt, his lawyers and the German state. Portrait of a woman WAS returned to Paul Rosenberg's heirs in May 2015.

Gurlitt's cousins filed a claim of inheritance on the artwork. Their lawyer supported the cousins with a psychiatrist who stated that Gurlitt suffered from schizoid personality disorder when he wrote his will. But the Munich court ruled against this relatives’ claims.

Unlike in Austria, there is no law in effect in Germany  requiring the return of Nazi-looted art, as long as the items in question can be proven to have been, at any point in time, legally acquired.  So in Nov 2014, the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern agreed to accept the Gurlitt estate.

Guernica by Picasso: anti-war in general or pro-Republican specifically?

Pablo Picasso was born in 1881, in Málaga Spain. Landmarks of the artist’s childhood are still vibrant today in this sunlit Medit­er­r­anean city. The Church of Santiago was where Picasso was bapt­is­ed. Touristy Plaza de la Merced was where the art­ist etched his first drawings outside his home.

Picasso was messy, both boisterous and silent, amor­ous and domineering. His love of bullfighting stemmed from child­hood visits to Málaga’s Plaza de Toros de la Malagueta, making picadors and bulls a recurring motif in his work.

 Guernica, 1937
3.5 × 7.8m
Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid
Photo credit: publicdelivery

Early on Pablo shed his father’s name, Ruiz, and adopted his mother’s more memorable Picasso. Within a few years, Picasso was painting skilled portraits of family and friends. By 16, his work got him into the prestigious Royal Acad­emy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid. And studied the Spanish masters he admired at the Prado Museum.

Picasso was young when Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat and the Post-impressionists freed themselves from Impressionist brush work, adding defined forms and emotional intensity to their can­vases. Under their influence, Picasso quickly reinvented his style.

The Spaniard finally settled in Paris in 1904, at 22, where he  progressed quickly. With his painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 1907, the artist overturned traditional composition, persp­ective and aesthetic appeal. The five distorted, naked women at a brothel alarmed even Picasso’s closest friends. But his radical art movement was launched.

**

Now a leap in time. Picasso had been given a commission by the Spanish Republican Government to produce a mural for the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 Paris World’s Fair!! He had been searching for months for a subject, but per­s­onal and international turmoil had disrupt­ed his process. On the day after the attack in Guern­ica, Picas­so was sitting in the Café de Flore Paris where he read of the atrocity in the newspaper. He had found his theme at last.

Nationalist Vs Republican Spain, 1937

Press on G for Guernica

In July 1936 the brutal Spanish general Francisco Franco had laun­ched a semi-successful coup against Spain’s democratic re­public; over half of Spain fell under Franco’s Nationalist control, while less than half was retained by the Republican Government. As glob­al tensions soared, Spain’s bitter civil war rapidly internat­ion­al­­ised: the Republicans were armed from the Communist Soviet Union, while Franco was armed by Fascist Germany and Italy.

In April 1937, a busy market day in Guernica, German and Italian war planes assembled overhead to bomb the small un­def­ended Basque town. The attack lasted for 3 hours as high explos­ives destroyed the town. Although the death toll was revised down to 200-300, it sent a terrifying mes­s­age to the world: The new weapon unleashed from the sky on civil­ians was a prelude to the devastat­ing WW2 carpet-bombing of Europ­ean cities. The raid was not carried out for military purp­os­es; rather it had the specific aim of terrorising civil­ians: military facilities were not targeted.

In May 1937, Picasso made his first sketches, using elements from a previous work. The bull and the horse were present in early drafts, along with the fallen soldier and the woman with a lamp. After 5 weeks, the vast, mural-size canvas was complete, filling the vast canvas with what would become the defining image of the horror of war. Unveiled at the World’s Fair, Guernica caused a sensation. Best of all, the painting was acquired by the Republican government, for a total of 200,000 francs.

The work remain­ed in the USA for dec­ades, in the Museum of Modern Art New York; there it huge­ly influenced post-war abstract American art­ists eg Jackson Pollock.

Artists and critics noted the painting’s powerful but ambiguous imagery. His use of a bull, a tradition­al Spanish sym­bol, could have represented either Spanish victims or Spanish brutality. The figure of the wailing mother mourning her dead child may have referred to Michelangelo’s Pietà in which the Virgin Mary grieved her dead son. The one hope­ful figure was the female form emerging from a window, shining a light on the devastation. But then why did he choose a monochrome palette?

Picasso always said that he would not allow the picture to travel to his homeland until Spain was a republic. General Franco died in 1975 and Spain made the transit­ion to democracy as a constitut­ion­al monarchy, not to a republic. After 20 years of travelling to museums around the world, Guernica could return home in 1981 and be shown at Madrid’s Prado Museum. Note that the passions of the Spanish Civil War had not yet faded. 

Guernica after 3 hours of terror from the skies, 1937

Picasso was masterful at branding his image. The traits that pro­moted Picasso’s creations led to praise and cult-like worship. But how pro-Republican was Picasso really? We know Picasso’s cousins were fighting on the Republican side, but I cannot find any details about Picasso’s own formal commitment. He was anti-war to be sure, but how party political was Picasso’s art?

[Alex Danchev was actually more moved by Picasso's graphic accounts of the camps, complete with anti-war illustrations. An article on the crematoria at Natzweiler-Struthof, near Strasbourg, crucified innocence and clenched-fist defiance grappled with mass killing and dismemberment. And The Charnel House 1945 was the offensive and defensive weapon deployed].

And why was Picasso tolerated during the Nazi Occupation of Par­is, despite being the most famous Degenerate artist there. He didn’t care. He avoided commissions, instead painting only what he wanted and expecting people to be interested. More tellingly, he joined the French Communist party only in 1944, which he did with great fanfare. But he was in his mid 60s by then!

Even post-war, Spanish art critic José Maria Galván was dispatched to the Côte d'Azur, in ord­er to have secret talks with Franco's rep­resentatives about hold­ing a Picasso retrospective in Madrid. Had Picasso accepted the proposals it would have been a major coup for the Nationalists, destroying Picasso's status as a hero of the left; he would have been regarded as a traitor for going back to Franco’s Spain. The retrospective eventually failed, but the newspapers quickly revealed Picasso’s political ambivalence.

Picasso cultivated his reput­at­ion, relying on the influence of pat­rons esp Gertrude and Leo Stein. But even to them Picasso’s own interpretation of Guenica was cagey. It was up to the pub­lic to see what they want to see, Picasso said.

Picasso on a stepladder in front of Guernica in his Paris studio, 

by Dora Maar in June 1937.
Gelatin silver print, 21 x 19 cm

In 1992 Guernica travelled, for last time, to Reina Sofía Museum Madrid. It remains the strongest anti-war artwork of the ages.

The focus has now moved to a Tate exhibition in London - Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy until Sept 2018, written up very well in the Books and Boots blog. Or visit Musée Picasso Paris in the Mar­ais. 

  

Vienna's Indoor Snow Palace - the world's first

As the last of the Vienna terminus railway stations, Nordwest­bahnhof was built by architect Wilhelm Bäumler in the years between 1870-1873. The building was placed in a great location, on the corner of Nord­westbahnstraße and Tabor Road, right near the lovely public parks that the Viennese so loved.

Arrival of a train at Nordwest­bahnhof
by Karl Karger, 1875,
91 × 171 cm
Belvedere Gallery, Vienna

Nordwest­bahnhof, Vienna 

completed 1873

But not just for trains. The grand hall in the centre of the station has been used for many purposes over the years - entertainments, exhibitions, political gatherings and popular demonstrations leading up to WW1. After WW1 Karl Seitz (1869-1950) had been president of the Austrian Constituent National Assembly and a member of the Austrian National Council. Then he became the very popular Social Dem­ocratic mayor of Vienna from 1923-34. Remember Seitz’s name.

It all changed in the Roaring Twenties. With the end of the old Austrian-Hungarian empire, fewer trains were using Nordwest­bahnhof Railway Station by 1924. Once the station was totally abandoned in 1926, an ex-Norwegian ski jumper was very keen to introduce a snow palace in Vienna. In those days most citizens would not have known what an indoor ski slope was, but they quickly learned. By the time (Nov 1927) the snow palace was built, the mayor Karl Seitz was delighted to formally launch this amazing new facility. The Illus­trated Sports Journal could not have been more excited: "Kitzbühel in NordWestBahn Snow" was the head­line. Who needed to wait till winter, to exercise and get healthy?

The skiers went down a long wooden ramp, getting up enough speed on the downward descent to make long jumps (20 meters) possible. But going up was tougher. There was no climbing aid to go up! The art­if­icial snow was artificially produced by Englishman Laurence Clarke Ayscough and his secret Schneemixtur was imported into Austria. This material was so soft, the clients often thought the snow was real.

 

Vienna's Snow Palace was opened.
November 1927.

I would have said that this brand new winter wonderland thrilled the healthier citizens of Vienna – real mountain trees, a toboggan run and an even steeper ski slope. Vigorous exercise, throughout the year, was now possible for fit and sexy young adults to wear their gorgeous ski wear. And to look cool – at night the entire space was lit by attractive lamps.

Yet the Good Times did not rock on. In the July Revolt of 1927, protesters were gathering at Vienna University and at Parliament House, both on the Ringstrasse. Vienna’s chief of police, Johann Schob­er, urged the mayor Karl Seitz to call in the Austrian Armed Forces, which Seitz reject­ed. The Christian Social Party de­fence minister, Carl Vaugoin, also rejected military intervention. So Schober armed the police with army weapons and ammunition, and publicly announced that the premises would be cleared by force if the crowd did not leave. The police were command­ed to open fire on the civilians, killing 100 protesters and five policemen. Many hundreds of other by-standers and other policemen were injured.

The world's first indoor snow palace was shut down and bolted closed.

Indoor skiing has come a long way since the Vienna Schneepalast opened in 1927. Throughout the next decade, indoor skiing facilities opened up in Paris, Boston, New York, Berlin and London; in time 50 indoor snow centres were operating in 20 countries around the world. It is very possible that the film industry, which developed at about the same time as the indoor snow palaces, also helped spread the white snowy sport into city residents’ thinking.

Before WW2 started, the former Nordwestbahnhof/former ski palace became the scene of Nazi art exhibitions. In early 1938 an anti-Semitic exhibition called The Eternal Jew was displayed in the large central hall. Goebbels and Hitler gave speeches to celebrate the grand event. The location of the exhibition was perfectly placed, given that many Viennese Jews lived in Leopoldstadt and Brigittenau. And following the Anschluss, Nordwestbahnhof was the venue for the that city’s Degenerate Art Exhibition.

During the war, the German Wehrmacht used the old railway station as a ware house, a facility that was promptly bombed by the Allies. The once proud Nordwestbahnhof was permanently demolished in 1952.

History Carnival Jan 2016. Architecture, the visual arts and literature.

We often assume that hist­ory can only be analysed via near-contemporary texts, so the theme of this month’s carnival was "the use of the visual, performing, musical and literary arts".  We can analyse history via these modes that did not come from official royal, church or military sources.

First architecture. Nick V at Intelliblog analysed Ephesus. Town planning made the Greek city famous; the Temple of Artemis c550 BC was an Ancient Wonder, but it was Emperor Constantine who rebuilt the public architecture.

Adrian Yekkes' fine example of Russian art nouveau was the 1902 Ryabushinsky Mansion in Moscow. Now the Maxim Gorky House Museum, visit the rooms used to exhibit paintings, Gorky's library and his furnishings. The house also tells the history of the Old Believers sect.

Heather Cowper in Heather on Her Travels saw Venice's  St Mark’s square, Doge’s palace and the Basilica, San Georgio Maggiore Island & Palladio's church, Murano's glass industry and Madonna dell’Orto Church with Tintoretto art and the Old Customs House with golden Fortuna. 

C18th Venice was a city famous for high quality art, music and fest­iv­ities. Masked revellers att­ended the opera. Vivaldi was maestro di concerti at the Pietà, responsible for composition, rehearsal and performance. But artistic reputations come and go, as Venetian Cat showed.

San Georgio Maggiore in Venice 

In Heritage Calling, Shrewsbury’s Flaxmill Maltings was a large factory embodying modern structural engineering. 50% of the workforce were women and 35% were children under 16, working long weeks. Engines with dominant boilers and tall chimneys appeared like a modern skyscraper.

On The Convict Trail discussed Horsecroft, an early colonial structure in Sorell Tasmania. Captain Glover and the convicts built the 400 acres homestead and stone barn in 1826 and a stone walled sheep fold. Read the history of bush rangers, and of Queen Victoria and her far flung colonies.

Louise Wilson, Author wrote Australian history, natural and built, in one post. She discussed the floods, droughts, hard woods and bushfires, noting the impact on The First Fleet, convict architect Francis Greenway, churches, gold rush, creation of Canberra and the nation's transport systems.

Now Sculpture. Black Mark by Mark Holsworth told Melbourne's public sculpture story. Bertram Mackennal's dad did the architectural ornamentation on Victoria’s Parliament House. Bertram soon became Australia’s star at the Royal Academy and the Paris Salon.

Ornamental Passions by Chris Partridge analysed Temple Bar Memorial. City of London authority extended beyond the old walls, becoming both decorative & functional. A new stone bar was built post-Great Fire. And redesigned by Horace Jones (1819–87), architect of Tower Bridge.

Then paintings, photos & film. A thing for the past analysed the history of beards, shaving and razors in the C18th. Johan cleverly analysed Scandinavian paintings and sculptures, and looked for differences based on age, income, participation in the military and urban/rural settings.

Follow Jacques Tissot's career in A fancy Frenchman’s Jewish Jesus. Tissot lived the good life in London from 1871 on, painting lush society women. Only in 1885, aged 50, did he have a St Paul moment. He visited Ottoman Palestine, painting landscape, architecture, religion and people.

Art and Architecture, mainly analysed the history of modern German art, starting with Die Brücke's campaign against Wilhelmine morality in 1905. Most of the artists now in a Israel Museum Exhibition were branded degenerate after 1933, and their art confiscated, destroyed or sold.

Ben Knowles in The Victorian Era examined Russian paintings of porcelain tea sets and asked about the social history of tea drinking in Scandinavia and Russia.

Bruce Dearstyne wrote about Albany's Institute of History & Art in The New York History Blog. "The Capital Region in 50 Objects Exhibit" tells of conflict, industrial history, politics and culture. The site was established in 1791 as the Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts and Manufactures.

Environment, Law, and History by Mark Weiner analysed the Austrian landscape around Salzburg. His video explored it as an inheritance of the legal principles of monarchy and of a desire for security. In the same blog David Schorr wrote "Art and the history of environmental law", a series that started with the Impressionists and continued into the C20th.

Jason M Kelly discussed Indianapolis' Museum of the Anth­rop­ocene. The idea was to create an outdoor, city-wide museum that explored their history, science, art and beauty. Vista markers along Indianapolis’ 8 mile Cultural Trail highlight important park features and and cultural districts.

Ephesus

Now literature. Stylisticienne highlighted the role of noble women in commissioning mid C15th English verse. Note the literary interests of teenage Queen Margaret of Anjou who arrived in England in 1445 to marry King Henry VI. 

Elma Brenner analysed a C15th treasure in the Wellcome Library. Folding almanacs contained astrological, medical and calendrical information, portable reference tools. Its fine artwork and silk binding indicated a wealthy patron.

the many-headed monster by Jonathan Willis showed Oliver Cromwell and his C17th puritans tried to ban Christmas because of the revelries!! The abolition of Christmas was a hot topic in the popular pamphlet war of the 1640s-50s.

Napoleon on St Helena reading books was in Finding Napoleon by Margaret Rodenberg. He was always a great reader/book collector; as a general and emperor, he carried a mahogany travelling library! Discover the books he read on St Helena and the men who spent long evenings listening.

The Resident Judge of Port Phillip examined the Melbourne Debating Society from 1841. Janine Rizzetti cited Jeffrey McNairn's book The Capacity to Judge in Upper Canada 1791-1854, analysing the topics selected and the benefits of vigorous public debates in Canada and Australia.

In The Pirate Omnibus, Simon Abernethy examined railway fares in London, in a 1937 Royal Commission. London Transport analysed New York's system of flat rate fares and found that when transport costs were pushed down, rents in distant boroughs rose. But would that happen in London?

In his memoir My War Gone By, I Miss It So Anthony Loyd travelled across Bosnia-Herzegovnia and spent time in Grozny at the height of the First Chechen War. Mandy Southgate reviewed Loyd's history of the region in her blog A Passion To Understand, in the light of subsequent history and trials.

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Now American history. The word terrorism was analysed by The Junto blog, starting in a 1795 American news­paper, Philadelphia’s Gazette. In The Reign of Terror (1793-4), France's government purged France of counter­-revolution. The alarmed Washington administration used the term.

The Grems Doolittle blog followed brothers Henry and John Glen, merchants in Albany in the 1760s, and into military affairs during the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. And finally the US Congress.

Crailo State Historic Site blog examined King George’s War, a major colonial war fought between England and France which spread to Canada and then the US. The war, which ended in 1748, made few North American border changes.

The Friends of Schoharie Crossing blog followed the career of James Shanahan as a contractor on the Erie & Oswego canals, then railway projects, into New York state politics and finally Superintendent of New York State Canals.

The Quack Doctor blog discussed the use of a medicinal powder to cure drunkedness, Antidipso. These Edwardian advertisements were targeted at the wives of male drinkers.

Kelli Huggins viewed Elmira’s Most Eligible Bachelors in Chemung County Historical Society. The newspaper used images of the town's most eligible single men in 1888. In the same blog, Erin Doane analysed an explosion at Elmira’s Museum building (then a bank) in 1884. And the personal and political life of the bank president, John Arnot Jnr.

"Twilight Over Berlin" German art 1905-1945

Twilight Over Berlin, currently at the Israel Museum Jerusalem, is an important exhibition for people wanting to understand modern German art (1905-1945). Some of the material in this blog post has come directly from the New Media Dept of the Israel Museum - many thanks.

My favourite German art started with the establishment of Weimar Republic and of the Bauhaus (both in 1919), as you can see in the post on the London Exhibition of German Art in 1938. But Expressionism actually started earlier in Germany. Expres­s­ionist artists strove to overcome the rigid traditions of the states’ art academies, as well as the Impressionists' naturalistic rendering of transient phenomena. The new style, which flourished in the German-speaking nations from 1905 on, was characterised by distorted forms, sharp colour contrasts and rapid brush strokes.

German society in the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II (1888–1918) was seen by many as authoritarian and ossified, so freedom-loving intellectuals wanted it radically transformed. Several groups of German artists organised exhibitions of avant-garde art to break away from the established academies. Die Brücke/Bridge was a group of Expressionist artists founded in Dresden in 1905. Influenced by late medieval German art, the Brücke painters created unrefined figure compositions, unspoiled landscape and pristine forms of expression. Their yearning for the "primitive" was equated with flight from the city, a rejection of bourgeois Wilhelmine morality. After 1910 the Brücke artists moved from Dresden to Berlin and depicted the modern metropolis’ hectic life.

Exhibition catalogue cover
Christian Schad, Sonja, 1928
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie

The democratic Weimar Republic, established after the hideous WWI, was marked by strong contrasts. Although daily life continued to be deeply affected by the war, the unfavourable cond­itions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles and economic instab­ility, citizens actually enjoyed new-found freedoms! It is not an exaggeration so say the period was a golden age for cultural and creative activity.

But their art was not necessarily attractive. The younger generation emph­asised the ugly and grotesque, meant as an intentional affront to comfort­ab­le bourgeois society. New Object­ivity spread through various centres in the Weimar Republic, creating cynical, often caricature-like depictions of injured war veter­ans, unemployed workers and war profiteers. They portrayed an irrep­arably scarred society, denouncing the devastating effects of WW1.

The Nazi regime sought to put an end to this so-called art, branding it Degenerate. Already in April 1933, non-Aryan museum directors and curators had been fired from state institutions. Artists were forced to join official groups, and undesirables were dismissed from teach­ing posts in the academies and professional organisations. Many of the artists fled Germany, creating an avant-garde exiled community whose influence also arrived in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Movements like Expressionism, Cubism, Dada and Surrealism were viewed as intellectual, elitist and foreign. Their work was associated with pernicious Jewish influen­ces, socialism and mental ill health. No matter what their political allegiances, artists who worked in modern styles came under attack. The directive issued to the commission, which culled 650 works for the Munich exhib­ition, defined Degenerate Art as works that insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form, or reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill. The culled art from 32 German public museum collections was selected and from July 1937, Entartete Kunst (decadent, unGerman) was on view in Munich. It attracted more than two million visitors. Over the following three years, it travelled throughout Germany and Austria and was seen by nearly one million more.

At the same time a much more lavishly displayed presentation of Nazi-approved art, the Great German Art Exhibition, opened to inaugurate Munich's House of German Art, the first official museum building erected by the National Socialists. The Great German Art Exhibition prom­oted ideals of beauty in which the key values were völkisch i.e from the authentic, historical people: family and community, physical vigour and military prowess.

Why did they open the two radically different exhibitions on the same day and in the same Munich street? The simultaneous presentation of the 2 exhibitions was to demonstrate the triumph of official art over deg­en­erate art and to eradicate forever the various forms of modernism that had permeated the German art scene since 1910. Did Joseph Goebbels realise that far fewer people bothered to queue for this second exhibition?

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Potsdam Square, 1914
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie

Most of the artists whose work is seen in the Israel Museum Exhibition were branded degenerate, their art confiscated under the Nazis and destroyed, or sold at auction. Some of the artworks that had been removed were brought back when the war ended; others were gradually re-acquired over subsequent decades. George Grosz participated in Dada Berlin and became a leading expon­ent of New Objectivity, denouncing the immorality of German society though caricatures of prostitutes and profiteers. A total of 285 of Grosz's works were confiscated from German institutions and 20 were included in the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition.

George Grosz, Grey Day, 1921

Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie 

Compare the impoverished, wounded ex-soldier with the smug, well dressed businessman who enjoyed a successful war.

In Berlin after WW1, Christian Schad became an exponent of New Objectivity, painting cool, sharp portraits of his social milieu in the Roaring 20s. He painted the androgynous Sonja, with fashionable cloth­es, cropped hair and smoking Camel cigarettes, all attributes of the independent New Woman. Yet he was included in the Great German Art Exhibition in Munich, not the Degenerate Art Exhibition!

One room of the exhibition is dedicated to examples of the artistic styles of the Weimar Republic, from Dada to New Objectivity. Many of these works rail against both capitalism and the effects of WW1 on society. A prime example is Otto Dix’s anti-militarist The Skat Players 1920. This marked his trans­ition from Dada to the social­ly critical New Realism, depicting three hideously disfigured office­ers in a café playing skat, a popular three-handed German card game.

Otto Dix 

Die Skatspieler, 1920
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie

The irony of the Israel Museum displaying amazing art works that were banned in Germany by the Nazis is not lost on modern reviewers. This pres­ent­­at­­ion of 50 German master works on loan from the Nationalgalerie illuminates a profoundly influential cultural period, paying tribute to an aesthetic heritage of modernism that in the (very) long run prevailed over censorship, oppression and persecution. The exhibition 'Twilight over Berlin: Masterworks from the Nationalgalerie, 1905–1945' will continue in Jerusalem until 19th March 2016.

Was Paul Rosenberg the most influential interwar French art collector-dealer?

Many foreign artists had settled in France after 1900 and more galleries took the risk of exhibiting their works. So perhaps it was not surprising that most of the truly famous art collectors and dealers in Paris had been born and raised in Germany, or still had their fathers’ and grandfathers’ German surnames. In partic­ular take note of:

Jacques Seligmann (1858–1923) was an important German antiquarian and art dealer. He moved to France in the 1870s but it was only in 1909 that Seligmann bought Paris’ respected Hôtel de Monaco where he opened for business. In 1912 he opened a new Paris office and two years later launched himself in New York as well.

Berthe Weill (1865–1951) was the French art dealer who played a vital role supporting and marketing late C19th art, even before it was popular in France. The young artists affectionately called her La Mere Weill.

Alphonse Kann (1870–1948) was a French collector who acquired very fine late C19th and modern art. His massive collection was hidden in a St.-Germain-en-Laye mansion, but was looted in October 1940 by Nazi occupiers.

David David-Weill (1871-1952) was a banker, art collector and major patron of France’s largest art galleries.

Georges Bernheim (1879-1956) was one of the most important gallery owners and art experts in pre-WW2 Paris. The Bernheim-Jeune Gallery was the heart and soul of the Paris art world. Tragically Georges, his wife and son were deported by the Nazis in 1943 and exterminated.

Rene Gimpel (1881-1945), son of an Alsace collector who moved to Paris, took over from his father as a art dealer and art diarist in his own right. Some of Rene's collection had been removed to safety in England before WW2 but most was looted or destroyed in Paris during the war. Rene died in a Nazi concentration camp but his sons Peter and Charles survived and set up Gimpel Fils in London in 1946

Daniel Henry Kahnweiler (1884-1979) was young German graduate interested in work as an art dealer. He moved to Paris and opened his first gallery in 1907. Kahn­weil­er organised 80 exhibitions of works by Braque, Picasso, Klee, Léger, Derain and Gris, and was the author of many books about cont­emp­orary art in general and cubist art in particular. During the war, he gave his Paris gallery to a non-Jewish relative and hid from the Nazis near Limoges.

Leo­pold Zborowski (1889–1932) was a Polish man of letters. Galerie Zborowski, which opened in 1926, was Leopold’s peak achievement as an exhibitor and patron. He was a close friend and impressive patron of Modigliani, Soutine, Kanelba and others.

Nathan Wildenstein (1851-1934) was a German who moved to Paris and established an art dealership there. In time he became one of the pre-eminent art dealers in Europe. Later he added a New York gallery in 1903 and one in London in 1925. His son Georges specialised in Impressionist and Post-impressionist works.

Paul Rosenberg displaying a Renoir in c1941

Photo credit: Art Magazine

The only French art dealer and gallery owner from the era who I did not mention was Paul Rosenberg (1881–1959). Readers may know of a book, written by his French grand­ daughter Anne Sinclair, called My Grand­father’s Gallery: Family Memoir of Art and War (Text Publishing 2012). Sinclair described how she found a box of letters to and from her maternal grandfather, letters that took her on a journey through decades of previously unknown family and national history.

While I knew a great deal about Weill, Kahnweiler and Bernheim, for example, I knew very little about Rosenberg. Paul’s father was a French antiques dealer who took Paul into the business, specialising in Impres­sion­ist and Post-Impressionist art. Wise man that he was, Old Man Rosenberg encouraged young Paul to travel to the art centres of the world to acquire experience and to meet useful people. It was not until 1906 that Paul & his brother took management roles in the business, and in time took over from dad.

Paul Rosenberg’s two most interesting connections after WW1 were his partner Georges Wildenstein and his own brother-in-law Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler! The young dealer could not have got a better start in his career! It was through Kahnweiler that Paul Rosenberg eventually enjoyed a special and exclusive contract with Pablo Picasso (1918-40). And it was from Kahnweiler that Rosenberg learned to support his artists financially - finding them flats to rent, agreeing to buy their works with exclusive contracts, recommending summer holidays in the south of France.

It all ended in tears when France was occupied in 1940. The Galerie Rosenberg was taken over by the Nazis on the orders of Otto Abetz, German ambassador to Paris; the collection was declared Degenerate and looted. What happened to many of his art treasures may never be known. But at least Rosenberg had the good luck & good management to get his family into exile in 1940. He reopened his business in New York and survived the war intact. The family did not return to Paris until the war ended, sparking an endless pursuit of his remarkable pre-war art collection.

Was Paul Rosenberg the most influential of all French art collectors and dealers until WW2? I don’t think so. I listed some of the people I was most impressed with.

Did he represent the greatest modern artists associated with the Ecole de Paris? Yes he certainly did sustain exclusive contracts with Picasso, Braque, Marie Laurencin, Fernand Leger, Matisse and others. And admit­tedly, when Kahnweiler was declared a German alien in WW1, Rosenberg could and did fill the gap in France. But the book was written by his granddaughter!! Of course she would think that he was the greatest man to walk the earth.

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In 2007 New York's Museum of Modern Art archives accepted the generous bequest of the papers of Paul Rosenberg. According to MoMA, this French art dealer and collector was best known for his role in promoting early modern painters in France and for facilitating the migration of French pictures to the USA during the first half of the last century. As such, he actively upheld the traditions of connoisseurship and innovation on which the Museum was founded, and he had dealings with many artists and collectors who played significant roles at MoMA in its early years. Rosenberg was an advisor and long time friend to the Museum’s first director, Alfred H Barr, and he collaborated frequently with MoMA curators on exhibitions, loaning or donating great works of early modern French art from his private collection and his galleries. He was named a Patron of the Collections at the Museum in 1957.

Examine just one example in the 2007 bequest: Pablo Picasso's book Trente-deux reproductions des maquettes en couleurs, d’après les originaux des costumes & décor par Picasso pour le ballet “Le Tricorne” (Paris: Éditions Paul Rosenberg, 1920). Rosenberg first published the designs for the ballet Le Tricorne as a set comprising one signed etching and sixty-three reproductions. The exceptional quality of the printing, perfected to the last painstaking detail and colour matching, met international acclaim.

Paul Klee, Tate Modern, National Gallery of Berlin

Born in Switzerland, Paul Klee (1879-1940) started out as a musician like his parents but soon chose to study painting in Munich during the years 1898-1901. After finishing at the Acad­emy, he visited Italy with another young artist to widen his know­ledge of art. Then he lived in Bern during 1902-6, taking great interest in music as well as painting. This busy young man settled in Munich in 1906 and had his first one-man exhibition in 1910 at the Kunsthaus in Zurich.

For me the most interesting part of Klee’s life started when he met Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Macke and Marc in 1911 and was included in the second avant-garde Blue Rider exhibition 1912. He was formally invited by Kand­insky to join the Blue Rider group in that same year.

The next big revelation occurred when Klee visited Paris,  meeting Delaunay and his Cubist pictures. Within a couple of years, Klee travel­led to Tunis and Kairouan with Moilliet and Macke where his interest in colour was becoming evident.

Klee, 1920

Head with a German Moustache

MoMA

The EY Exhibition – Paul Klee Making Visible was on at the Tate Modern in London till March 2014.  The history for this post came directly from the Tate Modern’s press release.

I would have liked the Tate Modern’s exhibition to include paintings from the Blue Rider and the pre-war Tunis era. But the exhib­it­ion began with the post-WW1 era, when he first developed his individual abstract patchworks of colour. The many technical innovations that followed were displayed throughout the exhibition, including oil transfer paint­ings (They’re Biting 1920 see below), dynamic colour gradations (Sus­pended Fruit 1921) and multicoloured pointillism (Memory of a Bird 1932).

Being a Bauhaus fan, I was delighted when Klee moved to Weimar in 1921 to teach at the Bauhaus, then moved again with the Bauhaus when they opened up plush new facilities in Dessau in 1926. Klee worked with great rigour; he inscribed numbers on his works in accordance with a personal cataloguing system and wrote volumes on colour theory and detailed lecture notes. The abstract canvases he produced at Bauhaus, such as the rhythmical composition Fire in the Evening (1929 see below), took his reputation to new international heights. This king of European modernism shared the throne only with Matisse and Picasso.

Klee 1920

They’re Biting

Tate Modern 

Klee then taught at the Dusseldorf Academy 1931-3 but the joy of being a practising artist and academic ended when he was dismissed by the Nazis when they came to power in 1933. Klee was not only dis­missed from his teaching position by the Nazis; his works were removed from public art galleries and labelled Degenerate Art in Germany!! He took refuge back at home in Switzerland where he suff­ered from politic­al turmoil, financial insecurity and declining health. Nonetheless he continued to paint until his death in 1940, still in Switzerland.

This was the UK’s first large-scale Klee exhibition for over a decade. Challenging his reputation as a solitary dreamer, the exhibition revealed the innovation and rigour with which he created his work and presented it to the public. Bringing together over 130 colourful works from collections around the world, the Paul Klee exhibition spanned the three decades of his career: from WW1, his years of teaching at the Bauhaus, up to his final quite radical paintings made in Bern until the outbreak of war in 1939. The show reunited important works which the artist created, catalogued or exhibited together at these key moments in his life. By showing these delicate works alongside each other, it was a unique chance to explore his innovations and ideas.

Klee 1929

 Fire in the Evening

MoMA

Klee left more than 10,000 astoundingly diverse works at his death. Let me cite The Observer. Klee was the Buddha of the Bauhaus, imagining the afterlife as a pale paradise floating in a universe of tremulous lines and finding the divine in every dragonfly and acorn. He was Klee the modernist, overriding the paradox of depiction – how to represent three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface – by showing the world as if viewed from above and yet also within, as idiosyncratic incidents and structures adrift in a haze of pure colour. There was Klee the innovator and Klee the genius cartoonist, deflator of pomp, mocker of tin-pot tyrants and inventor of that scratchy pictographic style.

The exhibition was fortunately accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue by Tate Publishing (October 2013) which I warmly recommend.

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A special exhibition called Les Klee du paradis - Paul Klee in the Collections of the Nationalgalerie will continue until the end of August 2014 at the National Gallery of Berlin. The idea of presenting this exhibition originated from art dealer-collector Heinz Berggruen  who died in 2007. Paul Klee was one the collector's favourite artists. Represented by 70 works in the collection, he stands as one of the main protagonists of the Museum Berggruen. And Dieter Scharf (died in 2001) was also an avid collector of the artist's works. As a result, the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg that he built up now includes 30+ works by Paul Klee. The two collectors specialised in different parts of Klee's career - Heinz Berggruen mainly acquired works dating from Klee's time as a teacher at the Bauhaus, while Dieter Scharf was particularly drawn to Klee's early, Symbolist-inspired works. See these two significant collections at the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg, part of the National Gallery of Berlin.

"Museum of the Missing Art" - great book

In the Museum of the Missing book, author Simon Houpt discussed many art crimes over the centuries, including the thefts from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, the Iraq National Museum in 2003 and Oslo’s Munch Museum in 2004. I was most interested to see if Houpt could add some light to the Nazi looting of central and eastern Europe, before and during WW2.

As Germany quickly conquered one country after another, the Nazis confiscated the property of Jews in the defeated territories, contending they were not genuine citizens. After shipping the rightful owners into camps, they could then seize this so-called abandoned property. Who'd complain? At first the Nazis held the property for safe keeping, but soon passed laws permitting its wholesale theft.

Houpt noted that the Nazi attitude to looting of art varied by region: in Eastern Europe, Nazis expanded their activities to the cultural holdings of the countries themselves, while in the West they mainly restricted themselves to private property and left state collections alone. This made perfect sense for Hungary, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia & Poland, but it didn’t make sense for former ally Italy. Apparently the Germans took about half of Florence’s Uffizi Gallery & Pitti Palace’s incomparable collections back home, to protect the treasures from the rapidly advancing Allied armies.

Vermeer, The Astronomer, 1668,  

Hitler wanted this painting, part of the Rothschild collection, for himself. It was delivered to him in 1941.

The painting is now in the Louvre

In France I thought the Nazis would have been reluctant to denude the German-friendly Vichy Government of its prized possessions. But France was the centre of the art world at the time and as soon as the Germans invaded in 1940, confiscations began. The primary Nazi agency for looting and transporting art in France was the special task force Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg. That organisation settled into the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris through which 22,000+ art objects from French private collections ended up in Nazi hands. For the years 1940-44, the Jeu de Paume Museum  became a camp for confiscated works of art.

After the war, Jeu de Paume: Project for the Documentation of Wartime Cultural Losses was dedicated to the historical reconstruction of the Nazis' seizure of Jewish cultural property in France. The naming was perfect.

Here is the question I often ask. Why would the cash-strapped Nazis spend untold financial and manpower resources, right in the midst of a financially exhausting and physically grinding war that had demoralised the entire nation? Why did they pay for top quality museum staff to collect, curate and preserve art objects from France? Why did they rent halls, trucks and curators in 14 different cities across Germany and Austria, showing off the travelling Degenerate Art Show? By the end of the war, the German government had spent 183 million reichsmarks ($800 million in today’s money) on museum staff and rentals. Plus another $2-2.5 billion spent on the art objects themselves.

The simple answer is that although these astronomical amounts of money could have been better spent on the war effort and on feeding their own citizens, the Nazi elite specifically chose to throw endless funds at the acquisition of art. The looting of European art throughout WW2 made the Fuhrer the greatest art collector of all time. The collection was so important to Hitler that it was one of the few elements in his last will, dictated in April 1945. “My pictures in the collections, which I have bought in the course of years, have never been collected for private purposes, but only for the extension of a gallery in my hometown of Linz on Donau”. His museum was to be dedicated to the glory of the German people, for all times!

Clearly some of the art treasures got re-directed, before they reached the Fuhrer. Sometimes his closest and most senior officers, true art lovers in their own right, tucked confiscated art objects into their own collections. Joseph Goebbels, Minister for public enlightenment and propaganda, systematically acquired German Expressionist paintings that had been removed from German galleries, even though those paintings had been declared by Hitler to be decadent and anti-German.

Sometimes the thefts were on a much smaller scale. American soldiers lifted a dozen ultra precious art objects belonging to the German church of Quedlingburg and secreted them in crates on the ship home. Another American soldier stole Durers from Schwarzburg Castle in east-central Germany and sold them to an unsuspecting collector in New York. Russian soldiers took 500 prints and drawings from the German-Dutch banker and art collector Franz Koenigs’ collection, many of them now in the Pushkin.

Bouts, Last Supper, 1464-7, 

now in St Peter’s Church Louvain

The presentation of material in Houpt’s book is very visual and is beautifully reproduced, as befits art history. It is one thing to hear that the central panel of Dieric Bouts' Altarpiece of the Holy Sacrament was a huge work that was hidden in some remote salt mine in Austria during the war. It is another thing seeing the restored painting in all its glorious detail, back in St Peter’s Church Louvain.

I have only one or two quibbles with Houpt's book, Museum of the Missing (published in 2006). I really don’t enjoy the use of “second person” in formal writing; “third person” is less personal, less chatty and more academic. And I really don’t like the use of colloquial language in formal art history writing eg “crooks” instead of thieves.

Degenerate Art Dresden 1933: I was wrong

At the Modernity in German Art 1910-1937 Exhibition at the NGV in Melbourne this year, I read an amazing piece of historical information. The huge and popular Munich Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937 was not the first of its kind, as I had firmly believed. The forerunner of Munich, called Reflections of Decadence, had been held in the inner courtyard of the Dresden Town Hall in Sep-Oct 1933. How amazing!

Jacqueline Strecker noted that Dresden was already a conservative city politically and that the newly appointed director of the Dresden Art Academy was even more conservative. The Lord Mayor of Dresden was dressed in full Nazi uniform when he toured the exhibition in 1933.

But what does it mean when we note that the first decadent art exhibition was put on by the Nazis in 1933 and not in 1937?  Simple... the Nazis had clearly worked out their ideology as soon as they came to power! Thus no one in Germany could say in 1933 that they didn't realise what Nazism was going to mean for the country and its citizens.

The Reflections of Decadence exhibition from Dresden eventually toured to at least eight German cities between 1934 and 1936, before it was finally incorporated into the much larger and more infamous Degenerate Art Exhibition held in Munich. I don't have a catalogue from the Dresden show, so it is difficult to track the individual works of art by name.  But I do know two of Dix's paintings, The Trench (1923) and War Cripples (1920), that appeared in the Dresden exhibition.

Naum Slutzky, Female bust, 1931

Further information about this elusive 1933 exhibition came from a most unlikely source. During archaeological excavations carried out in Berlin in 2010, 11 pieces of modernist art were unexpectedly dug up and revealed. Created between 1918 and 1930, these bronze and ceramic sculptures by Marg Moll, Emy Roeder, Edwin Scharff, Naum Slutzky, Karl Knappe, Gustav Heinrich Wolff, Otto Baum and Otto Freundlich had been declared degenerate and had been put into the Dresden exhibition.

Given that some 21,000 art works produced by Cubist, Expressionist, Dadaist, Fauvist, Surrealist and New Objectivity artists were about to be removed by the Nazis from museums, sold abroad (eg auctioned in Lucerne) to earn foreign exchange or thrown onto a bonfire (1,004 paintings), no-one had expected any of the 1933 art horde to be intact. I would love to know how these works ended up in a Berlin subterranean hidey hole. Was it a fan of modernism, hiding the works from Nazi predators? Or was someone so disgusted by modernist art that he/she buried the pieces to destroy them?

Some of these Dresden exhibits went on to be part of the infamous Nazi propaganda exhibition in Munich eg Marg Moll’s Dancer c1930, Emy Roeder’s Pregnant Woman 1918 and Otto Baum’s Girl Standing 1930. Were the other modernist artists (Käthe Kollwitz, Ernst Barlach, Emil Nolde, Franz Marc, Otto Dix, Ernst, Max Beckmann, Gerhard Marcks, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, Otto Nagel, George Grosz and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff) not identified at degenerate as early as 1933? I am sure they were, but so far there is no evidence that their art was included in the Dresden exhibition. Or perhaps sculptures survived underground for 70 years or more, but paintings perished.

Dix, The Trench, 1923. Bought by the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne.

Bernd Reinhardt and Sybille Fuchs asked what made the Nazis respond so aggressively to modern art? The outlawed artists were accused of having fought on the side of artistic degradation during the years of Russian and Jewish assault on German art. The Nazis developed their hostility to modern art in the shadow of the unstable Weimar society, whose middle classes felt battered by crisis and sensed imminent disaster. This art offered a glimpse of how "international" the world had become, and it reflected the world’s contradictions and fractures. Naum Slutzky, whose 1931 sculpture of a female bust (see photo) was found in the Berlin excavations, worked with the Bauhaus in Weimar. The Nazis thought his bust was ugly, Jewish, anti German, internationalist, modernist and did not reflect well on German women. What was worse for the Nazis, Slutzky was Russian born and educated.

The 11 art works dug up in 2010 offer a glimpse of the cultural wealth and vibrant artistry destroyed by the Nazis. They also point to the gaps that the thefts caused in museum collections. Fortunately some of the lost art objects can be seen in Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive.