It is said that we learn something new every day. The “something new” in this case is that museums and art galleries in the United States (including the Museum of Modern Art in New York) built their collections by purchasing art from the pieces that were often stolen from Jewish or politically subversive artists by Nazis.
Professor of European history at Claremont Mckenna College, Jonathan Petropoulos shed light on this subject in the Wyckoff room in the library on Tuesday evening. He presented his lecture on the Nazi attitude towards modern art, with special emphasis placed on the Nazi exhibition of “Degenerate Art.”
“Prejudice was profitable,” Petropoulos said, as he opened the lecture.
Petropoulos is an expert on the Holocaust. He served on the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States and provided expert witness for multiple cases in which victims of the Holocaust tried to recover lost or stolen artwork. One of these cases formed the basis for the 2015 movie “Woman in Gold” starring Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds.
The Nazi exhibition traveled throughout Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s, and both featured works by Jewish artists and others the Nazis viewed as inferior, as well as works of art in Modernist styles, all of which the Nazis viewed as “degenerate.”
Art was important to the Nazis for purposes of nationalist propaganda. Nazi officials were expected to pretend to be “cultured” by attending the opera and museums. Hitler himself was an aspiring artist, having been rejected from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, ostensibly due to an inability to paint faces.
“They’ll hold it up as an example of his inhumanity,” Petropoulos said. “But I can’t paint faces either.”
Hitler gave his artistic interests the force of law, ordering the elimination of styles he considered “tainted” by Jewish influence. The domination of the Nazi regime over every aspect of German culture meant that art was scrutinized relentlessly.
“If all you have is a hammer, then all you see is nails,” Bradley history professor John Williams said. “Everything was political, including what would seem to us not at all political art.”
Petropoulos’ lecture was co-sponsored by the Bradley History and Art departments. Williams, an expert on 19th.
