Maecenas Part 5

Grotesque Aestheticism

According to documents produced by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the American firm of Knoedler’s sold “works of art to German museums during the [Nazi] occupation [of France].  The leader of the Schenker firm in Paris,  Willi Bleye and Hans Wiederhold, worked closely with personnel from the German Embassy at its rue de Lille mansion and specialised in the transport of art—mostly plundered—to the Reich.[1]

When respectable dealers such as Knoedler’s, a New York based firm, with two offices in Paris during the 1930s and 1940s, engaged with the process of Nazi confiscations, sales and displacements to German museums as part of the whole process of plundering European, and especially Jewish, art collections, it is not possible to explain this away either as acts of wanton greed or some programme to salvage the heritage of world treasures by cooperating with the enemy of civilization.  The utter vastness of the German actions, from destruction and looting to raising much-needed cash to continue the war effort, could not have been unknown to the auction houses, transport firms, museum directors and others engaged in this collusion with the Nazis, even if, as they pretended, they were unaware of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.[2]  

While we cannot impute motives to individuals such as these without documentary evidence, such as private letters and diaries, it is possible to extrapolate from their actions in the context of the Rape of Europe: they wished to change the face of the art world, on the one hand, that is, to transpose the universal treasury of art from individual, family, private and public collections throughout the lands conquered by the Nazis to the Reich, where it would be seen—or in the cases of private collections established by Hitler, Goering and other National Socialist leaders for their own delectation, not seen—as a manifestation of the revolutionary world view they believed they were establishing for the Thousand Year Reich.  

On the other hand, as a concomitant of this project, the respectable art merchants on both sides of the Atlantic colluded with the Nazis in performing an enormous sleight of hand trick on the history of art, that is, the works of art themselves, the documents of their provenance, the material and written record of who and how the works were created and collected, all of that would filtered through a process of expurgation—destroying virtually Jewish arts and crafts, re-assigning decadent and degenerate objets d’art and their rationale to more salubrious contexts, and thus re-writing both the history of art and the aesthetics of culture from a Nazi perspective. [3]

That Nazi perspective is neither easy to articulate—partly because the people who expressed their disgust at so-called Degenerate Art and their wish for healthy, virile and ideal kinds of paintings, sculpture, music and architecture were never very clear themselves at what they wanted—nor to separate out from middle-class and working-class unease in the face of much of the modernist, post-Impressionist and Expressionist objects praised by critics and displayed in public and private galleries.  A great deal of ambitious and egotistical self-justification lay behind decisions taken by various organs of the Nationalist Party and fellow-travelers, as well as personal grudges to be settled.  Therefore this whole question of what constituted the aesthetics of the Nazi regime needs to be carefully addressed.  It is therefore something to be returned to in later essays.

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[1] Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP), “Knoedler’s in Paris under the Nazis” Plundered Art (30 May 2011) online at http://plundered-art.blogspot.com/2011/05/knoedlers-in-paris-under-nazis (seen 13/10/2011).

[2] Tim Bonyhardy, “The Gallias: A Modern Viennese Family” (pp. 26-35) in Christian Witt-Dörring and Paul Asenbaum, curators, Vienna Art & Design: Klimt, Schiele, Hoffmann, Loos    (Melbourne: National Art Gallery of Victoria, 2011) p. 35. See my review of this catalogue and exhibition in Shofar 31:2 (2013)  pp. 172-174.

[3] Nor should we leave out the Soviet armies and officials who grabbed whatever booty, under the excuse of seeking reparations,  they could as they conquered the Nazi German Reich; or even individual US soldiers who took home “souvenirs” from German hordes.  See the programme for a conference on “Spoils of War v. Cultural Heritage”, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 8-9 February 2008 available online at http://www.comartrecovery.org/events/spoils-war-v-cultural-pheritage (seen 04/10/2011).