Le commerce de l'art moderne sous le Troisième Reich. Un marché douteux

Abstract

From the 1930s onward, in Germany, attacks perpetrated by the national socialist party against the pictorial representations of the “expressionists” were of unprecedented violence, and repercussions on the art market were immediate. The artistic policy put in place by the Nazis in 1937 with the “Entartete Kunst” exhibit, the law of 1938 relative to the confiscation of the sale of so-called “degenerate” works, and the sale of Lucerne in June of 1939 managed to make modern art an object of public scorn. Current German historiography nonetheless allows us to nuance this story. The research of Uwe Fleckner describes a modern art market under the Third Reich in which works despised by the Nazis, which were nonetheless the object of speculation, were acquired through looting and despoilment carried out in occupied countries (Belgium, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands). Paradoxically, these campaigns of denigration against artists considered to be “degenerate” contributed to their recognition in the international art market after the war.