Fate of Germany's 'degenerate art'
revealed
London's Victoria and
Albert Museum is
publishing online two
volumes which record
what the Nazi regime did
with confiscated
'degenerate art'.
Hitler believed post-
impressionist modern art,
including Expressionists
such as Kandinsky and
Otto Dix, to be "evidence
of a deranged mind".
He ordered more than
16,000 artworks,
including works by Van
Gogh and Man Ray, to
be removed from German
museums.
The ledgers reveal the fate of those artworks, many of
which were destroyed.
The 'Entartete Kunst' inventory, compiled in 1941-2,
was donated to the V&A by the widow of Heinrich
Robert (Harry) Fischer in 1996. The term 'Entartete
Kunst' translates as 'degenerate art'.
Since then it has been used by art researchers across
the world as they attempt to identify the provenance of
particular paintings that went missing during the Nazi
era.
V&A curator Douglas Dodds, who is responsible for
making the ledgers available to the the public, told the
BBC that the volumes were "systematically organised".
"This was a major campaign managed from the top," he
told the BBC's Arts Editor Will Gompertz.
"For me there are so many echoes of what happened
later to people, as well as art works."
For each institution, confiscated works are listed
alphabetically by artist and include information on what
happened to each piece - using symbols such as
'T' (for exchanged) and 'V' (for sold). Those marked 'X'
were destroyed.
Often the name of the work's buyer and a price are
given, with names including Hermann Goring and
Hildebrand Gurlitt frequently recurring.
Hitler, a failed artist, maintained that "anyone who sees
and paints the sky green and fields blue ought to be
sterilised", there was still some "uncertainty " among
other Nazi leaders about what constituted "good art",
prompting Goring to buy up some of the artworks for his
own private collection.
Hildebrand Gurlitt is the father of Cornelius Gurlitt, in
whose Munich apartment more than 1,400 artworks
were found last year, many of which were alleged to
have been looted by the Nazis.
It was in response the discovery of Gurlitt's trove of
paintings - including works, long thought to have been
lost or destroyed, by Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Henri
Matisse - that the V&A decided to make the records
public.
Many of the paintings withdrawn from Germany's
museums had been loaned by private individuals and
were never returned.
Much of the documentation held by the institutions from
which the art was confiscated has never been made
available to those seeking the restitution of lost art, so
the V&A volumes will offer new hope.
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