Individual Study Issue(Nazi Era Looted Art)

Haley Bentley

10/4/2023

Individual study Issue

Nazi Era Looted Art

MoMA Returning Nazi-Looted Art: seven works of art were plundered. During the time that the Nazis were in power. Which were mainly housed at institutions like the Museum of Modern Art. And with this, there are other museums that are returning pieces to living descendants of the piece that are alive. The DA of Manhattan had returned the piece to the Austrian, which was presented in a ceremony. The piece was returned from the Museums and the collection from the Vally Trust. Grunbaum’s collection still remains to have no whereabouts, but the seven Schiele artworks are presumed to be in Switzerland and were auctioned off to places in New York, with particular sellers who were well known in the history of this collection. ”Reif and Fraenkel filed a suit against the MoMA and the SBMA in 2022 regarding the recovery of two Schiele works: “Prostitute” (1912) from the MoMA collection and “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, Edith” (1915) from the SBMA collection.”(Nayyar1)        

 
Left: Egon Schiele, “Portrait of a Boy (Herbert Reiner)” (1910), watercolor and pencil on paper, recovered from the Sabarsky Trust; right: “Prostitute” (1912), watercolor and pencil on paper, recovered from the Museum of Modern Art

Lots of documents were written while visiting the museum that has this stolen piece and families were writing about stolen pieces that were sold to the museum some of the families were disheartened at the fact, they could not do anything because the museum paid for the pieces not knowing they were stolen. Most of the pieces can be found in the MoMA database. “The collection contains approximately 800 paintings created before 1946 and acquired after 1932 that were or could have been in Continental Europe during the Nazi era.” (Nayyar1)

In the art world, it has become a big trend for collectors at an Auction to collect Art pieces that have been stolen that could possibly Have a relative that is alive from the nazi Era. A lot of times, the heirs to these pieces of work cannot be found or located as so much time has passed that it is hard to find their owners. The piece “Sermon on the Mount” was supposedly stolen at one time by Adolf Hitler, who was known very well in the Nazi looting area, but by now, they are drawing a big blank on who the prewar owners are or if they are even still alive to this day. While they cannot find the rightful owner of the pieces, the Museums that own the pieces can keep them on display while they continue searching for the owner. One of their searches resulted in “German law enforcers seized more than 1200 works at the younger Gurlitt’s Munich apartment in 2012, and hundreds more were later found in his home in Salzburg, Austria.” (Hickley2) In the midst of the chaos, over 700 pieces of art remain recovered, but many remain lost, and with those that are lost, “Sermon on the Mount” is among those pieces hoping to be recovered. There was a piece the German government were after; the legal actions stated that the family did not know the piece had been stolen. Due to their inheritance, they were about to regain the piece under German Law. 

The Nazi leaders became extremely interested in art exceedingly early when they began to confiscate the works of art in 1938.” The Nazis wanted to rid Germany of art created during the Weimar Republic, the period of 1924–1930, when Germany was a leading European cultural center, especially in the fields of art, cinema, and literature. Weimar decadence aroused Nazi anger, and Hitler began closing art schools in 1933.” (Rothfeld3) German institutions were degenerate towards French and German artworks, which caused thousands and thousands of artworks to be removed. By 1938 the Nazis declared that all of the German museums were to be purified of art. An Auction was put in place to sell off all the works of art that were deemed to need to be replaced to purify the museums, which even had pieces by Van Gogh and Matisse as they did not fit in their purified Category. To keep the works of art, they would have to depict realistic paintings of German Volk culture for it to stay. To promote their social status, they would need to give artworks away in auctions to promote Nazi Ideologies in the Reich. This was a way they showed following their leader by emulating them. 

A painting by Edouard Manet, titled Wintergarden, was one of many discovered in the Merkers salt mine and removed by U.S. troops in April 1945.

OMGUS recovered and reconstituted a lot of the looted property and the amount of all the process. The process was created to protect the art. Whether it was damaged or stolen by the power of the military forces, the art was part of the financial assets. The number of pieces left behind by the nazis were from art microfilming the Holocaust project for research on the artworks and artifacts damaged and looted during a time in world war ll. Looted art was recovered some of the works were returned. but ended up with the Herzog family  in their collections, for many decades, most of the advisors to the state department were experts in the holocaust-era of looted art. Representatives who knew the Herzog heirs had come to find more works of art in Poland and possibly in France, and they would possibly have a lead on those art pieces. 

A second work whose return is sought by the family, Gustave Courbet’s “The Chateau of Blonay (snow),” circa 1875, is held by the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts.Credit...Herzog Family Archive

Poland agreed after lengthy negotiations to return a Courbet landscape that had been at the National Museum in Warsaw to the heirs, who sold it at Christie’s in 2014 for $545,000. But to recap everything that was mentioned, it would seem that there were many things that were stolen and resold, along with pieces going missing and never having a chance to recover. But also having a lot of legal actions that needed to be followed from both sides along with dealing with the families of these pieces, with also finding the families that may no longer have the capability of reclaiming their painting.








Sources


  1. Nayyar, R. (2023, September 25). Moma and Morgan Library among museums returning Nazi-looted art. Hyperallergic. https://hyperallergic.com/846287/moma-and-morgan-library-among-museums-returning-nazi-looted-egon-schiele-art/ 

  2. Hickley, C. (2023, September 4). A painting looted at least once, from Hitler, is on the block. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/04/arts/design/a-painting-looted-at-least-once-from-hitler-is-on-the-block.html 

  3. National Archives and Records Administration. (n.d.). Nazi looted art. National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2002/summer/nazi-looted-art-1 

Esterow, M. (2020, October 16). After 75 years and 15 claims, a bid to regain lost art inches forward. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/arts/design/herzog-art-collection-nazis.html



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bauhaus: The Face of the 20th Century - Violet Larimer

Image
 Bauhaus: The Face of the 20th Century Summary: The Bauhaus school, was an art and design school established in Weimar Germany in the early 20th century that, according to the thesis of the documentary, defined and codified the aesthetic and philosophical underpinnings of art and art academia of the 20th century and into the contemporary world. The Bauhaus School was situated as an Avant Garde model to the established pedagogical and aesthetic ideas of the previously established art academy. Instead of learning a cannon and participating in rote tasks; students would learn the building blocks of art and design as a "grammar to visual language." Paired with the workshop structure of teaching, the school was an obvious break from tradition. On a more philosophical and ideological level, the students and teachers had broken down conventional power relations, with students pursuing personal projects within the school. However, despite the radical break in hierarchical structure, ...
Read more

Ryn Forquer Blogpost #4 - AI and Nightshade

Image
     Ben Zhao, a professor at The University of Chicago, has created a program called Nightshade, designed to “poison” AI image generators to stop infringement upon artists’ copyrighted work. Nightshade works by shifting pixels in artwork, confusing the technology on the work’s subject– thus making it possible for an AI generator to transform what is supposed to be an image of a dog into a picture of a cat and so on. The hope behind the creation of this tool is that enough people will use Nightshade that AI generator databases will become unable to produce accurate outputs. Creators of Nightshade include Ben Zhao, Shawn Shan, Wenxin Ding, Josephine Passananti, and Haitao Zheng– at the University of Chicago. The creation of Nightshade comes in response to repeated claims from artists that AI generators, such as Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and Midjourney, use copyrighted works in the database they draw from. So far, very few laws have addressed this issue– hence the creation ...
Read more

Blog Post #1- The Lonely Palette ep.64

Image
  I listened to an episode of the podcast, The Lonely Palette. I chose the episode about artist Barbara Kruger because I have a strong interest in feminism/activism in art. The episode gave a brief summary of her life and the impacts of her work, specifically her 1989 piece, “Your Body is a Battleground.” Kruger attributed her art style to her background in graphic design. In this piece, she mirrors the face of a woman from a 1950s magazine, half beautiful, half frightening. In bold, highlighted red text the phrase “Your body is a battleground.” Kruger made this work for a pro-choice rally march on Washington, and it blew up as a symbol for protesters across the country. This piece is so simple and yet packs a punch to the viewer. So, what makes this work so impactful? She uses specific and curated language to deliver her message to the viewer. Kruger uses language to her advantage, commenting “I think I developed language skills to deal with the threat. It’s the girl thing to do –...
Read more