Degenerate Art Research Articles

The Right to Enjoy Cultural Assets

The right to cultural enjoyment holds great importance within the framework of open, plural and democratic societies. As is generally agreed, even though the state not only guarantees but also encourages access to cultural goods and cultural heritage, it is not positioned to condition this enjoyment through adopting aesthetic, philosophical or ideological guidelines. Such has often been ignored in the past, especially during the Classical and Enlightenments periods as well as blatantly under the dictatorships that prevailed in parts of the 20th century, for example the National Socialist labelling of degenerate art. However, should democracy, even cultural democratization, prevent the conditioning of any aesthetic, philosophical or ideological nature, it is no less true that the right to cultural enjoyment, protected by public policies, is never limited to guaranteeing access to cultural heritage. It implies providing and raising the conditions for better and more appropriate cultural enjoyment. Furthermore, there is a dynamic aspect to the aforementioned cultural valorization that fosters interventions aimed at qualifying and avoiding degradation as well as those dimensions designed to involve civil society, for example patronage, cooperation and exchange.

Italian Sources for the Display of documenta 1955 in Kassel and an unrealised Reform of the Art Museum

In an effort to rehabilitate modernism in the eyes of the mainstream art public, rebalancing its repression as ‘degenerate art’ during the ‘Third Reich’, the documenta 1955 was a singular attempt to redefine the cultural climate in post-war Germany. While the choice of artists and artworks was largely retrospective, their radically modern display in the provisional setting of a war-damaged historical museum building essentially contributed to its perception as an epitome of the ‘contemporary’. Until recently, the many accounts of this display have not conclusively identified the possible sources of this innovation. The paper discusses to what extend innovative Italian museum displays of the post-war reconstruction period were an inspiration for German exhibition designers. It also identifies how these sources were transmitted, and situates the temporary result within a discourse of museum reform during the 1950s.

Combating Illicit Trade in Cultural Objects in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (State Museums in Berlin): Policies in Acquisitions and Loans and Research of Provenance

In March 2018 the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin-Preußischer Kulturbesitz (State Museums in Berlin) received a significant bequest from the estate of art historian Barbara Göpel (1922-2017), consisting of two paintings, 46 drawings, and 52 prints by Max Beckmann (1884-1950) and one painting by Hans Purrmann (1880-1966). This bequest represents an important addition to the collection of classical modernist works in the Nationalgalerie (National Gallery) and the Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings). In 1937 – during the time of National Socialism – the Nationalgalerie lost 505 artefacts as a result of the confiscation of “degenerate art”, among them eight works of Beckmann, who was in those times classified as a “degenerate artist”. But from whom did the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin receive this bequest? And is it generally important to ask from whom a museum receives an artefact? Where did the artworks come from? Is their provenance “clean” in the sense of the 1998 Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art? Is it legitimate to make a distinction between the person of the collector/estate and the works of art? These are some of the – legal but also moral – questions a museum must address before accepting any cultural object that belonged to a collector who was actively working for a gigantic project like the “Führermuseum Linz”. Or should rejection of the bequest be considered?

Introducing the “New Observationists”: Demystifying a potential tool to revolt in mobile exercise of visuals

This is a paper on art and portable dissent that focuses on drawings, paintings, and graffiti by three prominent Indian artists secretly enthralled by the Kolkata and Bengal of the late 1960s. The focus is on avant-garde agit-visuals or an extension of social sculpture (Beuys) that reappear on house walls, white cubes, notebooks, posters, and travel diaries as a wet narrative that rescues social resistance. Despite a hidden dilemma, they generate a different audience by incorporating the local in cross border, keeping an unambiguity intact while bridging nonconformist art movements. The paper goes on to analyse how art has historically been recognised as an instrument of critical reflection, generally emerging as a dominant form against the despotism of a particular social class. They could be called "degenerate art "1 of the 21st century, as they (graffiti) illegally occupy walls. They were not commissioned or made, but survived decades of purge and reinforce a historical time that includes the dystopia of a surveillance society and the tumult of a physically recorded space. This paper will also explore how nonconformist art forms seek to dominate a dialectical discourse on art and resistance in a space infected by consumption. Overall, the implications of art will be discussed in order to understand its practise in terms of mobility and displacement, beyond form and colour in coordination with resistance.

Ausstellungen der Maler Otto Fikentscher (1862 Zwickau–1945 Baden Baden) und Franz Domscheit/Pranas Domsaitis (1873 Kropiens/Gajewo–1962 Kapstadt) in Hermannstadt/Sibiu

"Exhibitions of the Painters Otto Fikentscher (1862 Zwickau ‒ 1945 Baden Baden) and Franz Domscheit/Pranas Domsaitis (1873 Kropiens/Gajewo ‒ 1962 Cape Town) in Sibiu. The paper is dealing with two art events, which occured in 1914 and 1924 and were organized by the Art Association Sebastian Hann. The protagonists were the animal painter Otto Fikentscher and the Expressionist Franz Domscheit/Pranas Domsaitis, both esteemed artists from Germany. The only source reporting about the events was the important German daily newspaper from Transylvania, Siebenbürgisch-Deutsches Tageblatt. While Fikentscher’s exhibition, which comprised several paintings showing specimens from the Transylvanian fauna, was received with enthusiasm, Franz Domscheit’s show, much more difficult to be understood by the provincials (both, critics and public), did not enjoy recognition. Fikentscher intended to come back to Sibiu the same year with another exhibition, an intention impeded by the outbreak of WWI and the events of its aftermath. Although initially some of the intellectuals from Sibiu intended to convince Domscheit to settle in their town in order to enrich the local art scene, the failure of the exhibition made it invalid. The paper also deals with the most important biographical data of the two artists and makes consideration about their artworks. Keywords: Otto Fikentscher, animal painter, Transylvania, Sibiu, Association Sebastian Hann, Franz Domscheit/Pranas Domsaitis, Impressionism, Expressionism, degenerate art, South Africa, Pranas Domsaitis Gallery, Lithuania, Klaipeda. "

Political Power and Religious Otherness in the Fascist Era: The Polemic about the Connections between Judaism and Modernist Art and the Instrumental Use of the Nazi Iconography against “Degenerate Art”

The aim of this research is to examine anti-Semitic themes during the fascist era in relation to the condemnation of Modernism intended as the result of the negative Jewish influence on cultural life. The paper discusses the reconstruction of the instrumental use of the Nazi iconography against degenerate art in journals sponsored by the fascist regime: Il Tevere, Quadrivio, La Difesa della razza. In 1936 the equivalence between modernism in art and “judaization” became explicit and definitive: rationalism, surrealism, abstractionism, metaphysics and magical realism are Jewish creations. One can immediately see the perspective and imitation of what was happening in Nazi Germany at the origin of the anti-Semitic campaign in Interlandi’s periodicals: fascist intransigence seized the opportunity to import the German model, which thus became its touchstone. In the pages of the journals are to be found illustrations taken from Wolfgang Willrich’s tome (Sauberung des Kunsttempels), from Paul Schulze Naumburg’s Kunst und Rasse and from the catalogue for the Entartete Kunst exhibition. These books not only made a theoretical contribution, but they also defined an iconography of the monstrous and degenerate in modern art. The most hardened contributors to Telesio Interlandi’s periodicals drew on this repertoire of images, publishing them exactly as they were found in the books. It is interesting to note how the same monstrosity that the regime had adopted to represent the deformed inferiority of the impure races is found in the expressions of anti-fascist dissidence. In particular, it is found in the representation of the nude as an object of violence, chosen to testify in an iconographic sense to the abuses of despotic power during the tragic years of the war.

The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes by Jill Richards

Reviewed by: The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes by Jill Richards Linda Roland Danil, Dr. (bio) Jill Richards, The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes (Columbia University Press 2020), ISBN: 9780231197113 (paperback), 344 pages. Already at the outset of her rich and varied book, Jill Richards makes her intent clear: her aim is to “assemble a transatlantic archive of female citizenship.”1 Richards’ analysis is contextualized in wider narratives of women’s rights [End Page 831] during the period generally referred to as feminism’s first wave during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moreover, rather than focus on female citizenship as a priori constituted through shared histories of exclusion and as being underpinned by histories and experiences of shared pain and suffering—Richards focuses on the female/woman as a subject of action. Richards therefore considers women arsonists, industrial saboteurs, queer resistance cells, and suffrage rioters, among others. The thesis of Richards’ book is that women’s rights movements and the historical avant-gardes became entangled in “an often vexed but hugely influential relationship of reciprocal construction.”2 In her analysis, Richards further draws on a wide range of sources, and includes parliamentary inquiries, police reports, mug shots, and propaganda booklets, among others. Specifically, Richards’ book is situated within the historical timeframe when first wave feminism and institutional human rights emerged at the same time as Dada and surrealism, and asks—how can these currents be understood alongside each other and as part of the same historical period? More specific still, Richards focuses on the little-known but significant entanglement between women’s rights movements and the international avant-gardes, with that interweaving having partly arisen through a mutual dependence on a socialist international that provided financial backing for the distribution of radical newspapers, journals and pamphlets across the Atlantic. The individuals (not always women) that populate the book’s pages are endlessly fascinating, intelligent, creative, and principled. In the analysis of the intersection between art and politics, Richards writes about women such as Paulette Nardal, who produced a black feminist periodical and served as an area expert for the newly founded United Nations; Leonora Carrington, the surrealist painter, was a refugee a number of times over and fled to Mexico in fear of reprisal for her involvement in anti-government protest meetings; Til Brugman joined the Dutch resistance; the Dada artist Hannah Höch was an advocate for birth control reform and her work was condemned as ‘degenerate art’ by the Nazis; the novelist Rebecca West rioted with the suffragettes. Other individuals include the gender non-conforming artist Claude Cahun and their partner, Marcel Moore— who were both sent to a prisoner of war camp for their participation in the French resistance. Not all of the individuals in question were admirable or even remotely likable, however—think of the despicable Marie Huot, the nineteenth century secretary of the League Against Vivisection—who claimed to have disposed of new-born puppies by tying a heavy stone around their necks and then tossing them into a body of water. In another anecdote, Huot apparently imparted the advice that housecat populations could be controlled by directly taking the kittens away from the mother and drowning them in a pot of water closed with a heavy lid. Huot allegedly argued that the same could be done for unwanted human infants, and further advocated for the entire extinction of humanity through the use of birth control. In an engaging discussion in which Huot is first brought up, Richards discusses the notion of proletarian “birth strikes” or womb strikes, in which women would deploy birth control as a form of strike against the production of people to feed [End Page 832] to future war machines and the industrial production of commodities. Through this view, “the limitation of reproduction would deprive capitalism of workers and soldiers to exploit, eventually resulting in a world-wide revolution.”3 Here, workers took control of (self)reproduction in a biopolitical form of resistance against the state, and rather than reproductive rights being framed through the language of the human right to privacy to be granted by the...

Expositions of ‘degenerate’ art and music in nazi Germany: reflections on totalitarian aesthetics and education

Durante o Terceiro Reich (1933-1945), os intelectuais nazistas conceberam a música e as artes plásticas como elementos formadores de valores morais, podendo corromper a educação e comprometer a vida política e social. A partir da formulação teórica da estética totalitária, toda arte considerada "degenerada" passou a ser censurada e exposta como exemplo de imoralidade. Inauguradas em 1937, as exposições Entartete Kunst (Arte Degenerada) e Entartete Musik (Música Degenerada) trouxeram até a cidade de Munique obras ligadas ao modernismo, ao bolchevismo, bem como a produção artística de negros, judeus e soviéticos. Com base em uma pesquisa bibliográfica amparada pela teoria crítica da sociedade, o presente artigo analisa o conteúdo dessas exposições, demonstrando a caráter pedagógico da arte na formação dos valores morais da sociedade alemã, sob a ótica dos intelectuais nazistas.

The Twentieth Century German Art Exhibition: Answering degenerate art in 1930s London

In the summer of 1938, an exhibition of modern German art was mounted in London. Any political motives were denied but the event was unmistakably a riposte to two series of exhibitions in Germany: on the one hand, those of entartete Kunst, or ‘degenerate art’, the work that had fallen foul of Nazi cultural values; and on the other the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen, or ‘Great German Art Exhibitions’, consisting of Nazi-approved art. The London exhibition was largely organized by four women: Noel ‘Peter’ Gordon, a London dealer; Irmgard Burchard, a Swiss dealer, whose contacts were invaluable; and Edith Hoffmann and Charlotte Weidler, art historians. In a defensive gesture, the display was composed of works by entartete artists dating from the late nineteenth century up to the 1930s. Many were works of Expressionism, but examples of Realism, Surrealism and Neue Sachlichkeit were also shown. It was a ground-breaking event, even though conceived in adversity; there was no precedent for it either in scale or style. More than 270 works were listed in the catalogue but many more that were on show were not listed; a total of at least 314 works were lent by more than ninety collectors. Many of the loans appeared anonymously or pseudonymously. Some collectors provided many pictures – for example, Nell Walden sent at least twenty-five and perhaps as many as thirty-nine works – while others lent only one or two.

Prosthetics

Prosthetics

FROM THE STUDIES ON ‘DEGENERATE ART’ TWENTY YEARS AFTER THE WASHINGTON CONFERENCE. SZCZECIN’S CASE (MUSEUM DER STADT STETTIN)

On 5 August 1937, fulfilling the orders of the Chairman of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts (Reichskammer der bildenden Künste), a confiscation committee showed up at the City Museum in Stettin, and demanded to be presented by the Director of the institution the Museum’s collection in view of ‘degenerate art’. While ‘hunting’ for the Avant-garde and ‘purging museums’, the Nazis confiscated works that represented, e.g. Expressionism, Cubism, Bauhaus Constructivism, pieces manifesting the aesthetics of the New Objectivity, as well as other socially and politically ‘suspicious’ art works from the late Belle Époque, WWI, German Revolution of 1918–1919, or from Weimer Republic Modernism of the 1920s and 30s. The infamous Munich ‘Entartete Kunst’ Exhibition turned into a travelling propaganda display, presented in different variants at different venues. A three-week show (11 Jan.–5 Feb. 1939) was also held in Stettin, in the Landeshaus building (today housing the Municipality of Szczecin). Provenance studies: biographies of the existing works, often relocated, destroyed, or considered to have been lost, constitute an interesting input into the challenging chapter on German and European Avant-garde, Szczecin museology, and on Pomerania art collections. Side by side with the artists, it was museologists and art dealers who cocreated this Pomeranian history of art. The Szczecin State Archive contains a set of files related to ‘degenerate art’, revealing the mechanisms and the course of the ‘museum purge’ at the Stettin Stadtmuseum. The archival records of the National Museum in Szczecin feature fragments of inventory ledgers as well as books of acquisitions, which provide a particularly precious source of knowledge. The published catalogue of the works of ‘degenerate art’ from the Museum’s collections covering 1081 items has been created on the grounds of the above-mentioned archival records, for the first time juxtaposed, and cross-checked. The mutually matching traces of information from Polish and German archives constitute a good departure point for further more thorough studies.

Orénoque as a Book of Cultural Protest: Fautrier’s Brutal Etchings Camouflaged by Ganzo’s Poetic River

Jean Fautrier’s eleven abstract etchings of the decapitated body and severed head, disguised as the flowing waters of a river in the artist’s book Orénoque are landmark symbols of protest at the wartime atrocities in France. Commissioned by French publisher Georges Blaizot during the German Occupation, Fautrier’s etchings transformed Robert Ganzo’s nostalgic poems of the rivers and forests of his Venezuelan childhood into an instrument of cultural resistance. Using the book as a vehicle and Ganzo’s poems as camouflage, Fautrier circumvented the barrier of fear and censorship of the Occupation. The text and images independently cohabited the same book space, each telling a different story, in a rendition of the modernist and “degenerate art” that had been condemned. This paper reveals the influence and timing of the socio-political events during the Second World War on the increased radicalisation of Fautrier’s art which led to the creation of the Orénoque images. This paper also establishes an aesthetic and symbolic link between the etchings in Orénoque and Fautrier’s landmark Les Otages series of resistance paintings and shows that they shared the same illustrative concepts of death and the dismembered body, and they convey the same message of protest. As such Orénoque represents an important milestone in the history of the French artist’s books and as a book of cultural protest during the German Occupation of France.

Life and Death in Sublimation: The Artistic Survival of Hans Reichel in World War II France

Life and Death in Sublimation: The Artistic Survival of Hans Reichel in World War II France Deborah L. Browning (bio) Introduction On the twentieth of October 1937 in Paris, 18 Villa Seurat of Henry Miller fame was crowded with visitors to the opening of an exhibition of the recent works of the forty-five-year-old, German émigré painter Hans Reichel. [Figure 1] It was being held in the second floor flat of the young American painter Betty Ryan. Miller and Ryan had planned this exhibition when they learned of the extent of financial hardship which had befallen their mutual friend. The guest book shows the signatures of Kandinsky, Miro, Duchamp, and Max Ernst, who adds “tres belle exposition!” The photographer Brassai was there. Others who signed in were the surrealist poet Raymond Queneau, the playwright Henri-René Lenormand, Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell, and of course, Henry Miller. Lenormand would pay an extremely high price—negotiated up by Ryan—for a particular favorite oil the painter had initially been reluctant to sell; [Figure 2] but with that money, Reichel would be able to settle his long overdue account at the Hôtel des Terrasses where he had been living across the hall from Brassai, and to move to new quarters, a tiny room, on a short dead-end street in Paris’s [End Page 563] Montparnasse area. 7 Impasse du Rouet would remain his home for the rest of his life—a good 13 years beyond the end of World War II and Reichel’s five years of war life, internments, and artistic productivity about which this essay is concerned.1 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Hans Reichel, 1930/1931 photo by Brassaï (Hans Reichel Archive) [End Page 564] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Hans Reichel 1925 No. 26 (Oil on canvas; 45.5 × 39.5) Unterlinden Museum, Colmar Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Hans Reichel 1927 No. 020 (Oil on cardboard; 21.5 × 23.5 cm) 1941 No. 026 (Watercolor on paper; 18.2 × 23.7 cm) [End Page 565] Across the Seine that October, the Germans and Russians had competed to see who could build the largest and most monstrous of the pavilions for the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, while Picasso’s monumental “Guernica” hung in the Spanish pavilion as a memorialization and protest of that town’s destruction as a result of the Spanish Civil War. Yet more ominous, in Munich, the city of Reichel’s childhood and artistic beginnings, Hitler had already opened the exhibition of “degenerate art,” where some 650 paintings, drawings, and books from museums all over Germany, all deemed unacceptably vulgar and offensive by the Third Reich, were on display. And finally, to round out the context, in June of this year Freud had published “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” and by December would publish “Constructions.” As aware as anyone of the coming nightmare, earlier that year Freud had written to Arnold Zweig, “The political situation seems to be becoming ever more sombre. There is probably no holding up the Nazi invasion, with its baleful consequences [...] My only hope is that I shall not live to see it” (Jones, 1957, p. 213). The above vignette from 1937 is important because six years later, from a safe-house in southwestern France, living under a false identity, Reichel wrote to his friend Herta Hausmann that 1936 and 1937 were the best years of his life. In telling her this, he is conjuring up and writing down for another to read, a memory of a creative period when his career and recognition were at a peak, thus reminding himself of a crucial aspect of his sense of self—that of an artist. Reichel was not Jewish, but as a German living in France he was swept into that country’s response to the flood of refugees pouring across its borders, fleeing both the Spanish Civil War and the rise and spread of Hitler’s National Socialism. Panicked, France had essentially revoked its long-standing position on droit d’asile (right of asylum), also blurring the ambiguous distinction between immigrants and refugees (Caron, 1999...

Австрійська регіональна література 1930-40-х рр.: між літературою “крові та землі” й “асфальтною літературою”

The study analyzes the main formation’s phases of the Austrian regional literature (Heimatliteratur) in the first half of the 20th century. The attention is paid to the connotation’s changes of this direction in the context of the socio-political development of the country in the 1930–40’s. The investigation stresses the similar and distinctive features of the “Heimatkust” in Germany and “Provinzkunst” in the Habsburg Monarchy. The article observes the shift of German-speaking regional literature after the First World War to the folksy patriotic direction as a preparation for the “Blood and Soil Literature” (“Blut-und-Boden-Literatur”). The regional literature, which was focused on the village not the city, became closer to the Nazi doctrine: especially by the praise of the soil (Scholle), in the connection to a family and by depictions of problems of an origin (Stamm). The attention is also turned to the inheritance of the cultural tradition of the regional art after the end of the Second World War. The reception and interpretation of the term “asphalt literature” (“Asphaltliteratur”) is emphasized by adherents of the Hitler’s ideology. That’s why the texts that did not correspond to the canon of National Socialist aesthetics were called “asphalt literature”. This term exists in parallel to the term “degenerate art” (“entartete Kunst”). The quite neutral phrase “asphalt literature” of the 1890’s was borrowed by the Nazis and turned into a completely negative term (based on the antithesis to the soil) in the 1930’s. Nowadays it is used in German-speaking literary criticism with such distorted meaning.

Consecuencias de la II Guerra Mundial para el arte alemán

la Segunda Guerra Mundial supuso la mayor tragedia humana de la historia occidental y tuvo además un efecto letal en la cultura y en el arte europeos. la persecución nazi del «arte degenerado» no solo provocó el desmantelamiento de las relaciones de todas las vanguardias internacionales, sino también la pérdida de miles de obras de sus representantes más destacados. Hitler utilizó el arte como el instrumento fundamental para la consolidación del régimen y como medio propagandístico de la ideología nazi. los artistas alemanes que formaban parte de las vanguardias surgidas antes y después de la Primera Guerra Mundial fueron declarados enemigos del régimen y la persecución a la que fueron sometidos obligó a la mayoría de ellos a huir al extranjero o a esconderse. Otros fueron asesinados. Al acabar la guerra el panorama artístico europeo era desolador, lo que propició que Nueva York se convirtiera en la capital mundial del arte.

From “Degenerate Art” To “Looted Art”: Developments and Consequences of National Socialist Cultural Policy

This article aims to explain the genesis, the dynamics, and some contradictions of National Socialist policy on art around 1937, the year of the notorious exhibition Degenerate Art. Adolf Hitler and his supporters did not invent the phrase degenerate art, but they adopted it, intensified it, and derived from it their destructive policies on art. “Looted art” was a last step and parallel consequence of developments that included the expulsion of the Jews from German society. Degenerate art and looted art should not be conflated, but they are to some degree interwoven. The article focuses on the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich and the extremes of a state-run campaign against modern art that was part of a broader attempt to impose the National Socialist conception of art by force.

Ugliness: a cultural history

'Ugly as sin', 'ugly duckling', 'rear its ugly head'. The word 'ugly' is used freely, yet it is a loaded term: from the simply plain and unsightly to the repulsive and even offensive, definitions slide all over the place. Hovering around 'feared and dreaded', ugliness both repels and fascinates. But the concept of ugliness has a lineage that has long haunted our cultural imagination. In this riveting book, Gretchen E. Henderson explores perceptions of ugliness through history, from ancient Roman feasts to medieval grotesque gargoyles, from Mary Shelley's monster cobbled from corpses to the Nazi Exhibition of Degenerate Art. Covering literature, art, music and even Uglydolls, Henderson reveals how ugliness has long posed a challenge to aesthetics and taste.Henderson digs into the muck of ugliness, moving beyond the traditional philosophic argument or mere opposition to beauty, and emerges with more than a selection of fascinating tidbits. Following ugly bodies and dismantling ugly senses across periods and continents, Ugliness: A Cultural History draws on a wealth of fields to cross cultures and times, delineating the changing map of ugliness as it charges the public imagination. Illustrated with a range of artefacts, this book offers a refreshing perspective that moves beyond the surface to ask what 'ugly' truly is, even as its meaning continues to shift.

Städtisches Gemäldegalerie – muzealna Miejska Galeria Malarstwa z okresu okupacji hitlerowskiej i jej historia

The presented facts concerning the museum’s Städtisches Gemäldegalerie during the Second World War are one of the rather willingly forgotten parts of the history of Toruń and the local museum. This period is closely connected with the Polish People’s Republic principles of centrally planned economy and disposing of the unwanted exhibits, i.e. devoid of artistic and/or historical values – because of such orders from the Ministry. Städtisches Gemäldegalerie, founded in the years 1941–1943, was almost wholly transferred by the Museum of Toruń in the years 1957–1958 (sic) – to the Central Museum Storehouse of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and to PPW Works of Art and Antiques Desa. The exhibits were given away without any remuneration, thus undermining and reducing the collection of exhibits of the museum. Old photographs belonging to the museum made it possible to get to know the contents and the quality of the lost exhibits. They did not attract anybody’s attention for several decades. Therefore not surprisingly, a publication commemorating the 150th anniversary of the museum (1861–2011) did not contain any mention of the Gallery, which is a serious omission. Städtisches Gemäldegalerie contained over 100 paintings (including graphics and drawings), important for the German national heritage and representing the most prominent artistic notions of the second half of the 19th and the first third of the 20th century. The works were chosen based not only on their artistic merit, but also on their ideological and propaganda message (e.g. against degenerate art). The authors of the works of art were members of the Munich School (Adolf Schreyer, Heinrich von Zügel, Friedrich Voltz, Joseph Wenglein, Friedrich August von Kaulbach), Austrian, Czech and other painters. Not only the works of Adolf Menzel, Friedrich Wasmann, Lovis Korinth, Franz von Lenbach formed parts of the collection, but also works of contemporary authors, such as Hans von Bartels, Wilhelm Busch, Albert von Keller, Moritz von Schwindt, Hans Thoma, Friedrich Wasmann, Max Slevogt, Walter Leistikow. Nowadays some of these works of art were tracked down, usually when enlisted during Polish and international auctions of art. Apart from presenting the information about the lost exhibits of the museum, the article aims at inducing some general reflection. Over the years the museum’s exhibits were repeatedly re-assessed: by the German occupants, according to the principles of socialism and finally objectively: according to the scientific, artistic and regional criteria. Enough time has passed to discuss these practices in detail – both their grounds, intentions and aims behind them and their still visible results and consequences. For they did not concern only the museum in Toruń, but those in the whole Poland and thus need to be analysed in a wider perspective.

Fear and Propaganda: National Socialism and the Concept of “Degenerate Art”

Degenerate art—the slogan represents National Socialist cultural barbarism and the destruction of modernism in Germany between the wars. Hitler and his party-liners did not invent the phrase, but they adopted it, intensified it, and derived from it their destructive policies on art. “Degenerate art” is the extreme example of a state-run campaign against modern art.

The Art Historical Haven within the GSA

The Art Historical Haven within the GSA Paul B. Jaskot (bio) Art history has always been a poor stepchild at the German Studies Association (GSA) conference. This continues to strike me as unusual, particularly since the very roots of US (and, indeed, global) art history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century go back substantially to major German and German-language authors. One need only think of such towering names as Heinrich Wölfflin or Aloïs Riegl. These individuals were followed by an equally impressive list of German-speaking exiles during the Nazi period including Erwin Panofsky and Arnold Hauser, among many others who put an indelible mark on English-language art history. So, where are those art historians who address German art and art historical traditions at the GSA? If I look at the conference some thirty years ago, a somewhat arbitrary starting date which corresponds to when I was about to enter graduate school, we see some of the causes why art history was absent then. Put bluntly, art historians weren’t really invited. The program directors were appointed in thematic areas that excluded the visual arts. These areas corresponded to the stated mission of the organization to focus on “history, literature, politics, government, and other fields.”1 What was a Dürer specialist to do? Clearly, serious history and political science would dominate, with a secondary interest in German literature and language. Given that these fields were dominated by men, a field like art history with a majority of women was unlikely to make this conference a top priority. Of the fifty-seven sessions, there were only two that featured art historical scholars: a talk on August Sander in a panel on “Textual and Visual Portraits of the Weimar Republic” and one on Conrad Felixmüller on a panel on “Writing and Art in the Expressionist Period.” In contrast, the debates boiling over in art history at the time (such as struggles over developing feminist methodologies) were hardly anywhere in evidence. In this context, why would an art historian be involved? But there were important points of contact even then, such as Marion Deshmukh, who served on the executive committee. Her research on Kunstvereine helped establish bridges, especially to a strong group of late Wilhelmine and Weimar specialists. Secondly, though, the rising interest in historical studies of the Nazi period evident at the GSA conference in 1985 dovetailed with a subsequent generation of historians [End Page 681] analyzing the culture of that period. These scholars were an important reason for my involvement with the organization: the Nazi era simply wasn’t part of the art historical equation (and, indeed, it is still largely left out of discussions except for studies of exiles or brief excurses on the “Degenerate Art” show). Hence, when I gave my first paper in 1995, it was a breath of fresh air to be in an interdisciplinary environment in which debates on the Nazi period could be actively engaged by the audience, something I could not take for granted in art historical venues. By the 2015 conference, the GSA was welcoming enough to include a Visual Culture network and, with 330 panels, it was also big enough to provide a place for everyone, including any sprinkling of art historians. Yet one would hardly say that the discipline of art history is well represented here. The majority of art historians in the GSA are, like me, coming out of a social historical tradition (often, although not always, with an explicitly Marxist bent). We are also mostly concentrated in late Wilhelmine and Weimar art, with some of us working in the Nazi period and, more recently, postwar Cold War studies. But the vast number of art historians working on German art is still not to be seen. Part of this must be related to the recent turn toward and dominance of contemporary as a subfield within art history, which has led to a fundamental questioning of the nation-focused project associated rightly or wrongly with area studies conferences. Thus, writing about Ai Weiwei in Berlin today doesn’t necessarily mean an interest in Germany, German language, or even Berlin. This is a brave...