A new era

by Marc Masurovsky

As the transition in political and economic power unfolds in the United States, the world is apprehensive, wondering what the new administration, one unlike any that has set foot in Washington, DC, Congress and the White House, has in store for the average person living on American soil and for the rest of the world. A unique event in American history, not an unexpected one, but, nonetheless, one that has taken many people by surprise, not the least in the United States proper.

For those who are unfamiliar with the dynamics inherent to right-wing populist movements that operate on emotions, machismo, raw power, and domination games, you are in for a long ride. The potential for violence is high, intolerance is at our doorstep, and the opening of deep rifts along ethnic, social, cultural, religious, political, and economic fault lines is imminent. The new folks in Washington have no desire to heal wounds produced and salted by the most egregious presidential campaign in American history. Make no mistake, they are set to dominate, intimidate, and rule like a theocracy.

Intolerant, dogmatic, populist movements are driven by hatred of the “other” and resentful of the “educated”, those whose views extend far beyond those of the village, the local church and its requisite cemetery, fields pockmarked with farms, small towns with few distractions available to a restless youth, minds shaped by myths and legends of once glorious nations fighting bloody battles, overpowering real and imagined enemies, always on the defensive, considering other peoples as too different, not enough like them, and frankly ripe for enslavement and/or extermination. Constantly fed a mantra of negative stereotypes pertaining to “those” people responsible for their perceived or actual misfortunes, these folks have now unleashed their petty revenge on the alleged guilty ones, they have freed themselves of the shackles of their own failures by deflecting them on the “others.” 

It is not at all surprising that the first targets of the new administration’s ideological fury should target government funding of the arts and culture across the United States. The Nazi regime indulged in such bloodlust against culture--Kultur!--for 12 years both inside the Reich and in territories its troops and security henchmen occupied and devastated. Obsessed by difference, these "purgers" seek homogeneity, they yearn to create a monolithic echo box in which they can see and hear themselves every morning and not fear the "other", no longer. Difference must be quashed at all cost. How will the art world react? No one knows for certain.

If the new administration does actually plan on gutting Federal funding of the arts, it will destroy in one fell swoop a vast landscape of creative cultural and artistic expression across the United States, in small towns, large cities, in rural and urban areas alike, red States and blue states. The crusade launched by the enemies of culture in the works for decades now has finally found its articulation in the incoming administration. In short, to satisfy a Puritanical fundamentalist agenda, they will end up throwing the baby out with the bath water and isolating the United States as a dark place with which the rest of the world wants nothing more to do.

American museums, concert halls, public art and cultural activities, will all be affected as much as State-level arts initiatives and local arts programs. Artists of all kinds, traditional and unconventional alike, will be the victims of the hatred of these ideologues whose sole inspiration is a faith-based fundamentalism that resembles more the outlines of Calvinist orthodoxy and belief in the eternal sin of man on earth than anything else. Should this massacre of the arts unfold, it will be unlike any other in American history.

A new "obscurantism" is about to take hold in the hallways of American political power, one that appears to sate the cruelty and viciousness of the current leadership in the US Senate and House of Representatives, as much as in State legislatures across the red expanse of the United States.

Joseph Goebbels would have been proud. Were he alive today, Joe McCarthy might wonder if this incoming administration is not going too far, too fast, despite the fact that his mentee is now about to be enthroned as the 45th president of the United States.

Stay safe.

So What Was on Hitler's Mind as an Art-Plunderer?

by Ori Z Soltes

For many readers of this blog, these observations may not be new, but for others they may provide food for thought. Those with historical awareness recognize that the Nazis more often than not didn't invent new ideas; they adopted old ones and innovated as they adapted them to their needs. 

Thus, for instance, at least as far back as the Fourth Lateran Council, in 1215, in which the 67th through the 70th canons dealt with the Jews, the idea was promoted in Christendom, and well-followed in parts of the realm, that Jews be rendered readily distinguishable from their good Christian neighbors by special clothing, or special marks--a yellow circle, for instance--on t heir clothing. Thus the eventual ubiquity that Jews across Nazi-controlled Europe wear yellow six-pointed stars was innovative in its details but not in its fundamental conception.

And the French created the first camps into which those guilty of no crime but who somehow should not be allowed to run around freely might be concentrated in the context of the Spanish Civil War. Too many Spaniards coming over the Pyrenees in 1938-9 (the infamous Retirada) made the prevailing French government uncomfortable and a mechanism that was, as it were, extra-legal had to be created to assuage that discomfort. The Nazis not only created a much wider system of concentration camps, but further enhanced the idea by designating some of them as slave-labor camps--and others as extermination camps.

And so with the issue of Nazi plunder, of cultural and other property--but particularly of cultural property--the historical precedents were many and some of the underlying reasons very familiar, but the shape of the plundering process was, again, innovative.

Lucius Mummius

One might begin by asking about those underlying reasons. Plundering the art of one's defeated enemies is one way of showing one's military and political success over them. But when Lucius Mummius, the Roman general--the first art plunderer whom we can identify by name--returned from his military success in subduing the Greeks at Corinth in 146 BCE, he carted piles of Greek statues back to Rome. The fourth-century CE Roman historian, Eutropius, informs us, with an amused tone, that Lucius took out an insurance policy on his plunder, and that the contract stipulated that, should any of the sculptures be damaged in transit, the company would supply the general with compensatory pieces equal in weight to those that were damaged.  
If Eutropius' amusement derives from his recognition that Lucius was an ignorant boor who had no concept of the intrinsic value of art, we might recognize that the purpose of acquiring his horde was precisely to show his friends and neighbors back home that he was not a boor, or a destructive savage, but a cultured man, who, while successful at his business of fighting and killing, appreciated the fine things wrought by human mind and hand.

Eutropius

We may see this intention emulated down through the centuries, arriving at an exalted destination in the far-reaching plunder of Napoleon, who brought back art from Egypt, and from Rome that had been taken by the Romans from Egypt, as he also did from other parts of Italy and from Spain and Germany and the Hapsburg domains. The Nazis followed this lead, eager to show how civilized they were. Even before they began to expand their plundering activities beyond their borders, they were determined to underscore this point by organizing a large exhibition of "true" art that ran virtually side-by-side with an exhibit of "degenerate" art. If the Nazis were consummately civilized, those who made and patronized the likes of Picasso and Matisse or anything abstract or connected to Jews, were surely barbaric. (Even an admired painter like Rembrandt, when he painted a work like "the Jewish Bride" slipped from his pedestal.)

Part of the Nazi innovation, of course, was to begin the plunder before there was a war outside their borders from their own citizens: barely was Hitler in position as Chancellor and his henchmen were forcing Jews to give up their collections--forced sales, mind you, nothing that could be legally called plundered--as gradually, over the next few years, Jews (and others) would be deprived of a range of citizenship rights before they began to be concentrated, for their own "protection" into designated camps, and before they would be deprived of their lives.

A second innovation, once the plundering process began to gain momentum, both within Germany and outside it--once the war itself officially began and countries beyond Germany either embraced (Austria, for example) or succumbed (Western Europe, for instance) to German arms--was the elaborate and systematic, multi-leveled program devoted simply to plunder. Thus on the one hand, with the Anschluss into Austria (March 1938), a program was implemented that required Jews--or anyone with even a vaguely Jewish relative--to fill out property-census forms. These listed everything they owned, from jewelry, silverware and furniture to drawings, paintings, and statues.

(One of the interesting proofs, both of how Austrian the Austrian Jews thought they were and thus of how taken by surprise they must have been by the onslaught on them not only of the Germans but of their Austrian neighbors, comes from a study of those property-census forms. When Marc Masurovsky and I had the chance a few years back to look over a few thousand of them, two things in particular, for which we were not searching, stood out. One was how Jews already living elsewhere, beyond Nazi reach, filled out forms, as required, and often added offhanded comments--for example, that a given bunch of drawings is not worth really mentioning--in a tone that indicated their sense of being virtual colleagues of the presumed readers of these forms. The second was how not only did so many Jews own works by second- and third-rate Austrian artists--Austrian artists, whose work good Austrians would own and display--but so many owned real estate, from merely part of an apartment to several apartment buildings or factories: one does not invest in real estate if one has even an inkling that one may need to leave quickly; it is too difficult to liquidate.)

Alfred Rosenberg

I digress. For a different aspect of systemic innovation was practiced in France, one of the places where Alfred Rosenberg--Hitler's expert in matters of racial distinctions (Aryans vs Slavs vs Roma vs Jews, from nose-type to hair-color to mental and moral acuity)--in charge of the organization that bore his name, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, (ERR), elaborated an extraordinary web of informants, from gallerists and museum directors to bankers and housemaids, regarding who had what and where, if it had been hidden, it could be found. It was this network that helped facilitate the plunder of cultural property on an unprecedented scale.

Part of the purpose of this massive undertaking, run by an army of plunderers who ran on a track parallel to that of the German army, was, to repeat, to underscore the cultured and civilized nature of the regime. The illusion that Nazis were civilized operated on different levels and for different sub-purposes. Oddly or not, the exhibition of proper art had been a failure: for every visitor to it more than a hundred flocked to see the "degenerate" art (Entartete Kunst) exhibit. Apparently far more Germans disagreed than agreed with Propaganda Minister Goebbels' notion of "real" art. 

Joseph Goebbels

On the other hand, the permission for several years to Jewish musicians to offer their own performances for their own, Jewish audiences--both Jewish musicians and Jewish audiences having been excluded early on from association with their non-Jewish counterparts--which permission was formally organized as der Judische Kulturbund (the KuBu, as it was popularly known); and the encouragement of music and, to an extent, visual art, at the Terezin Concentration Camp (its inhabitants often there temporarily, before being moved on to Auschwitz)--these kinds of activities were to enhance the illusion both that the Nazis fostered culture, even among the Jews, and in fact that the Fuhrer really loved his Jews. Perhaps no Nazi action with regard to art and culture was more cynical than the band of Jewish players that was organized to serenade victims at Auschwitz as they marched toward the gas chambers.

 What did the Nazis want with all the art that they plundered, besides using it as some proof of their high level of civilization and for other propagandistic purposes? Or rather, how did that intended validation play out? There was, to be sure, the art that was hoarded--but in different ways. The Fuhrer himself loved 18th- and 19th-century landscapes and images of happy, strong, beautiful--preferably blondish and blue-eyed--younger rather than older people, painted or sculpted by Northern European artists (as inherently superior than those in the south). Goering had more catholic tastes--even collecting art that Hitler would have disapproved. There was a line of German and Austrian museum directors who were looking to beef up their collections and there were Nazi upper and lower echelon operatives who wanted works for themselves, all available at bargain-basement prices through the auctions that followed both forced-sales and, later, outright confiscations.

Design for the so-called Fuhrermuseum in Linz, Austria

Hitler had in mind, in fact, to build the largest art museum that the world had ever seen in his hometown of Linz, Austria. This was effectively the other side of a project to take place in Prague: the shaping of a huge museum of Jewish ceremonial objects, using the synagogues in the city's 850-year-old Jewish quarter to house the collections. Hitler's intention was to show the world how vast and powerful had been the Jewish civilization that he had destroyed--a statement of what he had accomplished as a kind of gift to humanity. For the sake of this museum both the synagogues and the artifacts survived.

Otherwise, the plunder of Judaica was intended to lead to its destruction--usually, by melting it down if it was made of silver or gold. Degenerate art was slated to be traded for art that was more acceptable, or to be sold through myriad willing "neutral" intermediaries in places like Switzerland, Sweden and--yes--France, (to be purchased in active, question-free art markets like that in New York) in order to raise money for armaments, particularly as the war effort moved away from its early blitzkrieg of success.

By then even as the battlefield results were increasingly negative for the Nazis and their allies, the war against the Jews--the Holocaust--continued unabated. That ongoing effort was, of course, facilitated by British and American governments who found good excuses for limiting their efforts to curtail the destruction of the Jews (by bombing the train tracks to Auschwitz, for instance) on the specious grounds that this would take away from their effort to win World War II. Lucius Mummius as a model of self-promoting cultural illusion and his Nazi emulators and expanders were not alone in either looking at plundered cultural property through closed eyes or in promoting illusions about themselves to and for themselves and the wider world.

"Neutral" Europe during WWII

Safeguarding art in Nazi Germany for the greater good: an outline

For as long as museums have existed, one of their cardinal raisons d’être has been to preserve the finest specimens of “CULTURE” for the greater good, for us, the general public. Although the old yarn remains true, which is to say that most museums with items within their collections more than a century old are comprised of objects of plunder, we forgive their sins for they embody the best of what the civilized world has to offer us, which is beauty embodied in objects of outstanding aesthetic and historical significance in their own right. Or so we hope or think. Not every museum is born equal, and as the world becomes increasingly digitized, the function of these august temples of culture shifts dramatically in emphasis. Should they continue to display objects or should virtual renditions suffice? After all, we sate our thirst for knowledge through Internet searches where we view, admire, study these objects. What we know as modern and as art become increasingly more complex and difficult to tease out as “art” or as “representation” or both. And should we be so picky? And who picks? But then, we are getting ahead of ourselves here.

Back to our museums as temples and guardians.

War and conflict are ideal scenarios during which everything is under threat of destruction and theft. Therefore, if the mission consists in salvaging as much as possible from a culture or a society under direct threat of enslavement, subjugation or, worse, annihilation, museums will, more often than not, become repositories of salvaged objects to be preserved for us and for the aggrieved.

We are now in the 1930s in Germany. As modern art comes under ruthless attack from the New Nazi Order, effective winter of 1933, tens of thousands of works of art are under threat of an unpredictable fate, especially at the hands of roaming bands of Brown Shirts or Sturm Abteilung (SA), eager to cleanse German towns and cities of all that is unhealthy, Jewish, Bolshevist, communistic, antithetical to the New Think.

Museum curators and directors, from as far away as the West Coast of the United States, are watching these troubling events very carefully. American, British, French, Dutch, Swiss cultural institutions have forged close ties with their counterparts in what has now become the Third Reich. Many of their German colleagues are now out of a job, fired because of their support of condemned artistic forms, like Expressionism, Impressionism, Cubism, “Jewish” art. Untold numbers of artists can no longer exhibit their wares, and gradually their creative activity is being regulated before being completely prohibited.

Non-German museums and galleries send scouts and agents scurrying across Germany on a salvage mission. They have expense accounts with which to acquire all that they feel is ‘salvageable’ and worthy of incorporation into their paymasters’ collections. Auctions of collections belonging to the Reich’s political opponents and to recently dispossessed Jews are taking place with increasing frequency even in auction houses run by Jews like Paul Graupe’s famed boutique in Berlin. Opportunities abound as paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, furniture, disappear from apartments, houses, and galleries and enter the market like a gushing torrent. Hungry artists and dispossessed collectors are only too happy to sell their cultural possessions to be able to survive until making the fateful decision to emigrate. They sell to the agents and scouts of non-German museums and galleries. Enterprising brokers like Richard Zinser travel back and forth between Germany and the United States carrying works on paper, both classical and modern, in portfolios that they show to museum officials up and down the East Coast. Their provenance? Needy refugees only too happy to sell.

As Nazi cultural policies force out of museums onto the open market an increasing number of undesirable works, non-German museums and galleries are only too happy to collect them, through various Reich institutions like the Goebbels Ministry of Propaganda and Cultural Enlightenment. Salvage operation or crime of opportunity?

Whether they are the Saint Louis Museum of Art, the Carnegie Institute’s Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, or the newly-minted Museum of Modern Art in New York, all are on the lookout for ‘salvaging’ works of art from the Nazi maelstrom. How noble!

The salvaged works are either shipped directly to the United States or they transit through Switzerland, France, Belgium, Holland, and the United Kingdom.

Let’s pause here. What does “salvage” actually mean? In plain English, it is akin to a rescue. Hence, the non-German collecting world is eagerly sending emissaries throughout the Reich who meet with German officials, artists and dealers, to rescue works for their collections. Who could even criticize such laudable behavior? Nevertheless, shouldn’t we wonder where salvage ends and opportunism begins? What intentions must we lend to these heralds of Western culture embarked on an altruistic mission to ‘salvage’ what is museum-worthy from the clutches of the Nazis?

There are two kinds of ‘salvage’ operations: those which cast a very wide and undiscriminating net to rescue as many works as possible, regardless of their quality, and there are those “salvage” operations that place quality above quantity and focus solely on what our non-German museum and gallery scouts and agents deem to be of the best quality worth saving. The rest can be consigned to its fate.

In the latter case, salvage takes on the contours of a commercial cultural operation specifically geared to enhance the collections of the institutions that are underwriting these rescue efforts from a land torn by a cultural revolution of sorts, stoked by a racially-inspired political movement.

When we fast forward to the first decade of the twenty-first century, the non-German art world’s “salvage” and “rescue” operations of art disgorged by the Nazis becomes scrutinized anew as heirs of victims of those whose collections ended up on the open market as a direct result of the New Order’s “Kulturkampf” are now suing for recovery of what they view to be their property, forced out of their hands by unscrupulous Nazi officials.

Those works which are not coming under fire are those which were forcibly removed as objectionable or “degenerate” from dozens of State-owned museums and galleries under the same wave of cleansing of the Reich’s cultural assets to suit the new ideology. And there are thousands of these "salvaged"  works that were disgorged from German cultural institutions, which are now spread out across the globe, mostly in Western Europe and North America.

Strangely enough, the non-German art world has accepted the official Nazi mantra which, after 1945, became the official German view, that the ideologically-driven removals of undesirable art objects from German State collections were legitimate de-accessioning acts and, as such, should not be viewed as illegal. Since that time, those “de-accessioned” works have entered the most prestigious collections in the world, including, but not limited to:

• The Museum of Modern Art of New York
• The Solomon Guggenheim Museum of Art
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art
• The Brooklyn Museum of Art
• The Cincinnati Art Museum
• The Carnegie Institute’s Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA
• The Philadelphia Museum of Art
• The Boston Museum of Fine Arts
• The St-Louis Art Museum
• The San Francisco Museum of Art
• The Tate Gallery
• The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection in Madrid, Spain

Museums and galleries in the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Italy, and so forth, and so on.

It would be nothing short of an earthquake if, all of a sudden, those thousands of “salvaged” works of art were to become subject to restitution and sent back to Germany to resume their place in the collections whence they came. However, the day that the German government decides to overturn one of the few Nazi laws that it has upheld with the unwavering support of postwar Allied powers will surely be a day of reckoning for the international art world and an obvious ethical and moral victory for the victims of Nazi persecution and, especially, for those artists who were hounded, ostracized, and, in many cases, eliminated, and their Jewish art dealers and collectors who either fled into exile or perished in the Reich.

Wishful thinking...