the never-built Führermuseum

[MrBern]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/arts/design/19abroad.html?ref=arts

It’s hard to overstate how seriously he took the whole project. Art collecting obsessed him for years; his staff endured nightly soliloquies, Hitler droning on about art while Germany collapsed around him. He fussed even about how the rooms in the museum should be decorated.

 

[Chas]

He also took a great deal of interest in persecuting art he disagreed with. There was a travelling exhibit called Entartete Kunst meant to denigrate modernist art. All sorts of really dangerous stuff, like Dali, Picasso, the impressionists the cubists etc. etc.

This piece would have been referred to by Mr. H. and the NAZIs as "degenerate". Only a NAZI would want to vilify a Degas.

 

[Edward]

Fascinating story. To think if it had gone ahead, today they'd probably be facing some of the same issues regarding disputed ownership and 'cultural property' that the British Museum has in recent decades.

Commentators often say that totalitarianism produces bad art... Myself, I've always been fascinated by propaganda art - Axis, Soviet, Allied, whatever - as it can tell us so much about the mindset of those who produced it. The same applies by extension, to quite some degree, to the art which any political cause or state attempts to adopt (subvert?) for its own ends. There is serious scope here for an absolutely fascinating historical exhibition, one half carrying the art of which Hitler approved, the other half the art which he wished to destroy, and why he found it threatening.

 

[filfoster]

Fuhrer museum

I wonder how many tons of 'degenerate art' the fuhrer's second-in-command, Reichsmarshall Goring was able to shield from public gaze by confiscating it for Carinhall or wherever else he stored his loot. Perhaps that was his real reason for grabbing so much of it. The totalitarian take on 'do as we say-not as we do'.

 

[TM]

No, Gorring shared AH's taste in art, he had no "degenerate art" in his collection. Curiously, early on Goebbels liked modern art, but changed his tastes to also match AH's.

For more on art & nazi's see the DVD: Architecture of Doom

on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Architecture-Doom-Rolf-Arsenius/dp/B00003XALS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1274328344&sr=1-1

Tony

 

[filfoster]

Opportunity knocks

No, Gorring shared AH's taste in art, he had no "degenerate art" in his collection. Curiously, early on Goebbels liked modern art, but changed his tastes to also match AH's.

For more on art & nazi's see the DVD: Architecture of Doom
on Amazon:
Tony

What an opportunist! I'm wondering if Goebbels had time to collect much art of any kind, being so busy auditioning starlets for the Deutsche cinema.
I am reminded of one of my favorite lines from "Mad Men", when Don Draper is showing someone around the offices at Sterling/Cooper and observes that his firm has "more failed artists and intellectuals than the Third Reich".