GLENN LONEY'S MUSEUM NOTES

Spring Comes to the Frick Collection!

But visitors to the Frick Collection of priceless Old Master paintings will always find some beautiful arrangements of fresh flowers inside.

They are among the many amenities which help both tourists and New York natives imagine what life must once have been like in this palatial mansion for its builder, the coal and steel magnate, Henry Clay Frick. Frick's Manhattan Mansion and his Victorian Gingerbread, Palace in Pittsburgh have both been featured recently on television.

Currently, exterior repairs are being made to prevent seepage and damp between the inner brick walls and outer sandstone cladding. On the 71st Street side, little rectangles of sandstone have been excised, exposing the brick. Fortunately, there's no way a rolled-up Rembrandt can be smuggled through such gaps.

At the Metropolitan Museum:
A Great French Queen's Prayer-Book

WONDERS IN A CASTLE--Jean Pucelle's illumination of "The "Miracle of the Breviary," from The Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux, now on view at the Met Museum.

Even Victorian Roman Catholics—though they certainly had missals and prayer-books—had nothing like the remarkable Medieval Books of Hours. These are elaborately illustrated and beautifully hand-written books, marking the daily devotional prayers to be said at certain hours of the day.

One of the most precious of these, The Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux, is currently on display at the Met Museum. What makes this exhibition so very special is the fact that the book has been unbound for facsimile reproduction.

For the first time, thousands will be able to see the book's delicate and often amusing depictions of Medieval Life. These, however, are mere Marginalia—Drolleries or Grotesques—to the more important prayer-texts. And to the larger illuminations of the Nativity and Passion of Christ and the Life of Saint Louis, Crusader-King of France.

King Louis IX was Jeanne d'Evreux's great-grandfather. Not only did he lead a famous Crusade to the Holy Land to recapture it from the Muslims, but he also healed the sick and performed other miracles.

One illumination in the Queen's Hours shows him with a sack full of skulls and bones, the remains of his valiant warriors, which he is gathering up to bring back home to France.

There are actually two cycles of prayers in this small book.

One is the Hours of the Virgin, based on the 150 biblical Psalms of King David. The cycle begins at midnight with Matins, and continues every three hours through the day for a total of eight sessions of prayer. They include Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline.

It's unlikely that Queen Jeanne woke every three hours during the night to say more prayers. She was, after all, a patroness of monasteries and especially of the Abbey of Saint Denis, tomb of French Kings. So there were many monks, nuns, and priests to fill in the hours of her sleep with prayers.

Today, as hundreds of years ago, such cycles of prayers are still recited every three hours in Roman Catholic monastic foundations all over the world. Even Greek Orthodox religious observe the canonical hours of prayer. Staying in monasteries on a pilgrimage to Mount Athos years ago, I was awakened every three hours by great wooden clappers to remind me of an hour of prayer!

The other cycle in the book is the Hours of Saint Louis, also to be recited at canonical hours.

Not only does the book outline the Queen's sweet medieval Hours of Prayer, but it also includes a Calendar, with religious holidays listed for each month. Various colors indicate the relative importance of each feast or fast-day.

These are illuminated with Zodiacal Symbols, as well as fascinating drawings of scenes from everyday life. One shows an aristocratic hunter on his prancing steed, a falcon poised on his left index-finger. Two hunting-dogs follow close behind the horse's heels.

And they are followed by a peasant, bent by the weight of two uprooted leafy saplings he's carrying on his shoulders. They are similar to another sapling, firmly rooted in the ground behind this hunting-excursion. This suggests that the noble has ordered his servant to uproot the saplings to provide a "blind" to deceive the game when he reaches his happy hunting-ground.

At the bottom of another page in the actual Hours, three monks are scrapping with each other using long tongs.

The wonder of these pages—created by the famed medieval illuminator, Jean Pucelle [active 1320-1334]—is not only the details they provide about both ordinary and aristocratic life of that time. It's also the remarkable skill of Pucelle's brushes.

GET THEE BEHIND ME, SATAN!--Saint Bernard vanquishes the Devil in this medieval German woodcut, circa 1470, shown at the Met Museum.

Faces of laborers, peasant-women, clerics, nobles, kings, and even saints are rendered with astonishing attention to human facial and bodily expressions. Even Pucelle's grotesques—complete figments of this rich medieval imagination—look like they could once have lived, even if only in his nightmares.

This beautiful and priceless volume—when next the Met displays it—will have been rebound. That means that only two facing-pages can be exposed at a time. And at very low light levels. It is part of the medieval collections of the Met's Cloisters Museum.

You can, of course, also see priceless medieval illuminated manuscripts at the Morgan Library. But usually only two facing-pages of each book, unless one has been dismantled for repairs or reproduction.

These fascinating pages have already been shown at the Getty Museum in 1998. If you do not get to the Met by end of summer, you can still savor some of this optical experience on a special Met Museum CD: The Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux. It is available in the Met's shops for $19.95.

Narrated by the Met's director, Phililppe de Montebello—who also reads from the sacred and secular texts—the disk includes medieval chants to heighten your visual enjoyment of the illuminations. You can even point-and-click to vary your own exploration of this treasure.

Soon the facsimile edition of the Hours will be available—in a very costly and limited edition—from Faksimile Verlag Luzern. Every summer, they have examples of their other facsimiles of famed illuminated books on display at the Salzburg Festival. These are remarkable works of reproduction, often on vellum or hand-made paper resembling the surfaces of the originals.

Because the page-sizes of the Hours are only 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 inches, Jean Pucelle's achievement seems all the more remarkable. Magnifying glasses are provided with each set of pages at the Met.

It's clear—from the cropping of some painted images—that Jeanne d'Evreux's prayer-book was originally slightly larger. But not by much.

One awkward problem with rebinding incunabula is that the sections usually do not align exactly as they did before being unbound. So bookbinders trim the uneven edges. This kind of damage has diminished the actual page-sizes of a number of famous books, infamously rebound several times over the centuries.

The outer margins of rare books and manuscripts—especially frequently used prayer-books—also become worn, foxed, torn, greasy, and grimy over the centuries. Binders have often cropped rebound pages to remove or disguise this damage.

Way back in the mid-Fifties, I had the opportunity to purchase Hartmann Schedel's 1493 Nuremberg World Chronicle in Barcelona for only $250. In perfect condition, but with the margins of the pages reduced close to the printed text and woodblock illustrations.

I did not buy it. But not because of this cropping.

I did not have $250, as I was saving to buy a Volkswagen Beetle—my first car! Also, at that time, I knew nothing about rare books. Nor did I have any idea how much a copy of this book would cost at auction 40 years later. Not that one is often on the market.

After Queen Jeanne's death, her Hours passed to King Charles V. Eventually, they came to the king's brother, Jean, Duc de Berry. His larger and even richer Les Trés Riches Heures have been widely displayed and reproduced.

In the 19th century, the Queen's Hours came into the collections of the Paris branch of the House of Rothschild. Hitler's Art-Loot henchmen seized it in World War II. When it was returned to the Rothschilds, it was put on the art market in 1947.

And now it has a permanent home at the Cloisters. The Hours there, however, are more apt to be checked on the time-clock—rather than prayed. [My God, when is it finally going to be five o'clock!?

Queen Jeanne's beautiful prayer-pages are enhanced in the three small chambers of the exhibition with nearly seventy woodcuts, metalcuts, and rare illustrated books from the late Middle Ages. These are all from the Met's own considerable collections.

Included is a fine copy of Schedel's World Chronicle, which surely must have cost the Met or a donor more than $250. These selections mark a great change in the history of the book, thanks to the invention of the printing-press and movable type.

Some of the woodblocks and metalcut images are far more crude than the delicate illustrations of Jean Pucelle. But they were intended for a wide public market, not an image of a saint, fit for a queen.

Meanwhile, important and/or interesting exhibitions will be opening—which will be reported later. They include:

May 18—The Medieval Housebook: A Fifteenth-Century View of Life, at the Frick Collection.

May 20—New York Collects: Drawings & Watercolors, 1900-1950, at the Morgan Library.

May 25—Cézanne to Van Gogh: The Collection of Dr. Gachet, at the Metropolitan Museum.

May 28—Impressionists in Winter: Effects de neige, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. This charming show— already seen in San Francisco—is complemented by Snow Scenes, at the Wildenstein Gallery. This handsome selection of works by Monet, Seurat, Vlaminck, Stieglitz, Gowin, and other artists opened May 8.

June 1—Gustave Moreau: Between Epic and Dream, at the Metropolitan Museum.

MANIPULATING CULTURAL POLITICS
FIFTY YEARS AGO IN CENTRAL EUROPE

Coca-Colonization and the Cold War, by Reinhold Wagnleitner. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. 367 pp. [Some centerfold black & white illustrations] Cloth: $59.95/Paper: $24.95.

[You can order both of these from your local Barnes & Noble bookstore.]

In the 1950s, one of the most frequently heard complaints about American Forces in Central Europe was that they were: "Overpaid, Oversexed, and Over Here!" Nonetheless, many semi-starving Germans and Austrians were grateful for the generosity of the open-handed and soft-hearted GIs.

Reinhold Wagnleitner was an impressionable young boy when World War II came to an end. He and his Austrian family had endured the Nazi Occupation of his homeland—which had become part of Grosses Deutschland, or Greater Germany.

So the arrival of American Occupation Troops in the Salzburg area was a real liberation for many Salzburgers. And great was his joy when he got a pair of real American Levi's™!

In his incisive and fact-packed study of the virtual Americanization of Europe in the wake of the Second World War, he chides those who complained of the destruction of native culture by the vulgar, uncultivated "Amis." If Germany had not offensively launched not one, but two, World Wars, the Americans wouldn't have been on Sacred German Soil to pollute it with Coca-Cola™ and Hershey Bars™.

Wagnleitner—who is a Professor of History at the University of Salzburg—documents the tremendous appetite for American Popular Culture, especially among younger Austrians and Germans. The appeal of fast-food, fizzy sodas, rock 'n' roll, US styles, the Wild West, and American films in general was tremendous.

Younger Austrians had been born into and grown under a repressive Nazi dictatorship. The various avenues opening to new freedoms were immensely attractive. Even most grumpy oldsters—not to overlook ex-Nazis, hiding their pasts—were glad to receive CARE Packages.

What may be unsettling to some American readers about this analysis is Wagnleitner's contention that this Americanization was not achieved through simply by osmosis: Not merely through Market-Forces and the rampant Consumerism of people long denied choices in profusion.

Instead, he insists it was a deliberate plan, a systematic campaign of the United States, at the highest levels, to create an important—if not dominating—economic, political, and cultural role in Post-War Europe.

Initially, the State Department and other agencies sought to impress both the Recently Conquered/Liberated—and our World War II Allies—with the excellence of America's High Culture. In fact, American Elitists agreed with their European counterparts that much of our Popular Culture was debased, vulgar, disgraceful.

But the European Masses weren't thirsting for tours of the New York Philharmonic. They got what they wanted: Downscale Culture. Even if they didn't know what that was before American agencies, industries, and advertising made them aware of their previously unknown needs.

Thanks to US Information Centers, dispersion of American literature and magazines, touring exhibitions, radio-broadcasts, and imported films, American Lifestyles were quickly assimilated. US Education programs established American innovations in teaching and training. English-language programs also aided, as did exchange programs.

For those Americans who still can't believe we planned all this—that was, after all, more than fifty years ago—Wagnleitner shows how it was devised and executed. He has found the documents, orders, protocols, reports, and letters in many archives.

His research is thorough, even daunting. His bibliography and footnotes are a quarter of the book!

Separate chapters could be small books in themselves. Each is effectively developed, full of impressive facts, and often interesting anecdotes.

His chapter on American movies, "The Influence of Hollywood," goes back to the beginnings of film-making in Europe. To the dominance—even in the United States—of French films, until the advent of talking-pictures.

Of course he deals with the tremendous cultural and economic impact of American films on young, impressionable Austrians and their elders. But he also documents the prewar cinema developments in German-speaking lands, even before the Nazis and Dr. Goebbels.

American dramas and music are also surveyed. As are the subtle and not-so-subtle influences of American advisors—and examples—on postwar Austrian media. It was a surprise to me to learn that Vienna's famed daily, the "Kurier," was early subsidized by the Americans.

This is a most informative book, but it's not entirely an easy-read. It is so packed—sometimes choked—with statistics, some paragraphs can be slow-going. Graphs might have served the purpose better, but, alas, most people don't bother to study them.

Why review a book published in 1994? Because I wasn't aware of its existence until a few weeks ago, when Wagnleitner provided an attention-getting extract in a current Austrian Information publication.

And because it is still an important topic, in a treatment little known to most Americans. Thanks to Diana Wolf's fine translation, it reads like the work of an intelligent American academic—with a sense of humor. The towering syntactical turgidity of most Germanic scholars—even the younger ones—is totally lacking.

In Art As Politics in the Third Reich, Jonathan Petropoulos has provided a similarly outstanding analysis of another deliberate government program to shape the culture, tastes, desires, and emotions of a nation.

This program had its planning-phases in Berlin, not Washington, DC. But it was conceived in broad outlines when Adolf Hitler was writing Mein Kampf in Landsberg Prison.

Considering the long decades of disinterest in the Arts by American lawmakers and leaders—not to overlook the outright aversion shown currently in Congress—it is amazing that both the High Arts and Popular Culture were considered central to the Nazis' propaganda program for welding individual Germans into a unified mass of ardent workers and warriors.

This is even more unusual in World History—which has had its share of Imperial, Royal, and Dictatorial Arts Patrons, who used the arts as instruments or symbols of policy & power—because most of the Nazi Leaders were hardly educated, informed connoisseurs of the arts.

They did know, however, that a Rembrandt was worth more than a painting of the Bavarian Alps by some Oberammergau craftsman. Not that they wouldn't be pleased to have such an authentically German Alpine View—at least in the kitchen.

This highly readable book is divided in two sections. The first documents the development of cultural policies. And interdepartmental struggles for control over certain areas of the arts and programs relating to their educational uses, collection, and exhibition.

This in turn leads to examinations of the Aryanization of German Art, the proscription and destruction of "Degenerate Art," and the confiscation or forced-sale of important works of art at home and abroad.

The second section details the art-collecting of major Nazi figures: what they admired, what they succeeded in obtaining, and how and why they acquired such treasures.

Among the collectors examined are Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Von Ribbentrop, Von Schirach, Ley, Speer, Frank, and Bormann.

Clearly, for some of these deeply insecure men, pretensions to High Culture defined their new-found status as an Aryan Elite. There are vintage photos accompanying the text showing the formal presentation of paintings to Hitler and others.

Not to overlook photographs of ceremonial occasions such as an elegant luncheon with candelabra at Dachau Concentration Camp. Or Adolf Hitler in formal attire at the Bayreuth Festival, escorting Festival Director Winifred Wagner—and one of his earliest admirers.

Special Companion-Feature:

SCHINDLER HAS A LIST:

HITLER’S ART COLLECTION

MALE NUDES BY HITLER'S FAVORITE SCULPTOR--This is a sculpted relief by Arno Breker—Kameraden or "Comrades"—whose works are still on public view in cities such as Bayreuth, reproduced from the 1940 Nazi exhibition catalogue.

[When I taught in Europe in the late 1950s for the Americans, I often found old Nazi art publications or catalogues in junk-shops for the equivalent of a dime or a quarter. I thought it might be interesting one day to write a study of some of them. When I finally realized this was not going to happen, I tried to donate them to various university libraries. No one would accept them, and librarians I knew personally were shocked that I'd give shelf-space to anything the Nazis had published. They were finally sold at auction by Charles Hamilton.

[This report has been, however, illustrated with reproductions from selected catalogues for the Great German Art Exhibitions in Munich's Haus der Deutschen Kunst. I didn't give everything away. GML]

Herr Schindler has a list indeed, but his name is not Oscar, and he has nothing to do with Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning film. He is Helmut Schindler, an official in Munich’s regional Oberfinanzdirektion, a Bavarian version of the IRS. The list outlines surviving holdings in what may be called Adolf Hitler’s Art Collection. These are the megalomaniacal Führer’s personal choices, free of the Un-German taints of Expressionism or Abstraction.

But first a word about the art Hitler hated. Entartete Kunst, or Degenerate Art, was the title the Nazis gave to a shocking exhibition they staged in Munich in 1937. It was shocking for two quite different reasons. They hoped to horrify “decent Germans” with the excesses of Modern Art, which Adolf Hitler and his Propaganda Minister, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, so detested. In this they certainly succeeded with some conservative spectators. And entry was free, after all.

Others who saw this infamous show were also truly horrified, but for the opposite reason. Munich has always been the city of artists, and many realized that this exhibition marked the close of a wonderful period of experiment in avant-garde art, not only in Munich, but all over Germany. Some took the hint and rapidly went abroad. Others, intimidated, remained and kept their opinions very much to themselves. Soon, it was impossible to get exit visas. They could no longer leave Germany. The Police State was well underway.

It was not the Nazi’s intention, however, that painting and sculpture should come to a sudden end in Germany. Quite the contrary: artists would be subsidized—in a Teutonic version of the American WPA 1930s art projects. But all the art produced would be in service of the new Socialist Workers’ State, which was supposed to endure for a thousand years.

As with Stalin and his mandate for Socialist Realism in all aspects of art, Hitler and Goebbels wanted a similar kind of art, free of innovative distortions of reality, and glorifying the German worker, farmer, soldier, youth, and mother. This is, in fact, the basic art-program of most modern totalitarian states. It was certainly also the rule in the DDR under Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker.

The importance of the arts and architecture—including the performing arts, notably music—can hardly be underestimated in the establishment of the Nazi State. Not only could the arts be used to generate fierce national pride and a strong sense of unity, but they also could show the world the worth of German—as opposed to "International"—Culture. Of course, international did not mean merely artworks from London, Paris, Rome, and New York. It was a code-word for "Jewish."

PROFESSOR PAUL TROOST--The architect of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, with the museum seen through the window and a drawing of it on the wall, reproduced from the 1937 Nazi exhibition catalogue.

As a frustrated artist, Hitler had very clear ideas of the kind of art he wanted for Germany. To provide examples—and to inspire native artists to enlist in his program—he launched the first of an annual series of exhibitions of "German Art" in Munich’s monumental new art-gallery, the Haus der Deutschen Kunst. Designed by a Hitler favorite, Dr. Paul Ludwig Troost, this impressive structure is a prime example of what may be called Fascist Art Deco, with classical Roman architectural concepts rendered in a severely simplified form. The Grosse Deutsche Kunstaustellung opened in this building at the same time that the Degenerate Art show was on view nearby in the Hofgarten.

In the recent film documentary, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, a short clip is shown of Hitler and his entourage at the inauguration of the building and the opening of the exhibition. Riefenstahl then comments that the art was Kitsch, or sentimental trash, an opinion she surely didn’t share with Hitler at the time.

Over the decades, her recent and dismissive estimation of the works shown in the late 1930s seems to have solidified into Received Opinion. But were the paintings and sculptures really all that bad? Were all the themes repulsively Nazi? Were the painters and sculptors totally devoid of talent?

Several years ago, some examples of these artworks were presented by the New York Public Library in a fascinating and cautionary show: Assault on the Arts/Culture and Politics in Nazi Germany. A reconstituted version of the original Entartete Kunst exhibition had already been seen in Germany, Los Angeles, and Washington, D. C., and could not come to New York. So the NYPL mounted one of its own, drawn largely from its own collections.

In addition to documenting what the Nazis banned, this challenging show also presented pictorial examples of what they admired, including the semi-classical sculpture of Arno Breker, who seemed obsessed with heroic male nudes. Sculptures by Breker can still be seen in Germany, but the art-tourist or cultural-historian may find it more difficult to identify examples of paintings done during the Third Reich, unless he closely checks the dates on the labels.

A large collection of this approved Nazi art still exists, but it won’t soon be shown to the public. These are the artworks on Herr Schindler’s list.

I would never have discovered this, had I not taken a summer trip to the ancient Bavarian town of Straubing. Each summer, Das Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte —the House of Bavarian History—mounts a major exhibition in a different Bavarian locale, to highlight some aspect of its history.

[In 1993, the focus was Kloster Andechs, where composer Carl Orff, of Carmina Burana fame, is buried. Lucas Cranach in Kronach was the show to see in 1994. But in 1995, the focus was on the mining of salt in Traunstein, Bad Reichenhall, and Rosenheim.]

Straubing was once a prosperous Roman farming settlement; remains of spacious villas have been excavated there. So the relevant show was Bauern in Bayern, or Farmers in Bavaria. Venues ranged all over town, covering periods from the prehistoric to the present. All very interesting, but, in a chamber devoted to agriculture before World War II, I was astonished to find a painting of an heroic Aryan farmer, much in the National Socialist style, and a large oil showing the construction of an Autobahn bridge over a wide, deep valley.

This was especially fascinating, as it showed the rather primitive construction methods necessary at that time. I had press permission to photograph items in the show, but my guide immediately stopped me as I raised my camera: "I'm very sorry, but it’s forbidden to photograph those pictures!" He explained that they were from a special collection of Nazi-era artworks, kept in Munich under lock-and-key and only obtained on loan with great difficulty.

Back in Munich, Dr. Michael Henker, who had organized the Straubing exhibition, suggested I call Frau Von Aalst at the Oberfinanzdirektion, which was custodian of the collections. She was gracious, but told me that the pictures could only be inspected by bona fide researchers. If I wanted to see one of them, I would have to specify which one, by title and artist. I had no idea what was in the collection, so this seemed like Catch 22. Asking for "anything by Arno Breker"—whose sculptures I had seen occasionally—wouldn’t be specific enough.

As for the Verbot on photography in Straubing, the problem was—and still is—one of copyright. Some of the artists are still alive, or their copyrights have passed to their heirs, so the actual artworks cannot be reproduced.

This reminded me of the time, in 1973, when I had interviewed Leni Riefenstahl in Munich, and she complained bitterly of the thousands of dollars she insisted were owed her by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. They had never paid her, it seemed, for the countless times they’d rented her films to schools and colleges. I had myself shown The Triumph of the Will to communications classes at Brooklyn College as an example of an insidious propaganda film—masquerading as a documentary—and as a stern warning about the rise of totalitarian states. I had always thought this film and Riefenstahl’s remarkable Olympic footage were seized Nazi property. She assured me that the films are her own, privately financed from Hitler’s personal funds.

A decade after World War II, I was teaching in Europe, often stationed in Munich. Poking around in Schwabing junk-shops, I found original Piranesi engravings for $10 and old Thirties cigarette-card albums for only a few D-Marks. There were even catalogues from the Nazi Haus der Deutschen Kunst shows. These I bought for about a quarter each, but I’d never really looked closely at them.

After my conversation with Frau Von Aalst, on my return to New York I decided to make a list of artists and titles, on the chance that some of the works shown in the catalogues would have been bought by Hitler and might be in the closed collection. The first catalogue I opened, that for the inaugural in 1937, contained a flyer for the Entartete Kunst exhibition, with derogatory notations about the banned art-works such as "crowned with prizes by Jewish cliques."

When I returned to Munich a year later, I called Frau Von Aalst again, and this time she said there would be no difficulty. Dr. Henker had apparently vouched for me as a serious researcher. The reason security has been so strict, I was told, is that journalists and TV crews are eager to make some headlines with these artworks.

So I was asked to be "objective" in my reporting, which I have tried to do, putting all this in context. I was to be taken to the storage space of the Hauptzollamt West, where the paintings were preserved. They were shortly to be removed to the German Historical Museum in Berlin.

In Helmut Schindler’s briefing about the collection, I learned that there was, in fact, more than one group of art-works. Just as Hitler had planned grotesquely monumental new buildings for Berlin, Nuremberg, and Munich, so also had he envisioned the World’s Greatest Art Gallery, to be opened in Linz, Austria.

Aside from the Linz Bruckner Symphony Orchestra, this industrial city has little to recommend it, even today, as a center of culture. But Hitler was born in Braunau, a village near Linz. He was attempting to give more status to his natal area.

Helmut Schindler noted that Hitler intended his new museum should be—if not greater than—at least on a par with the Louvre. But German museums and galleries had already been stripped of important modern works, prior to the "worst" examples being shown as Degenerate Art, so their resources were at all-time lows. To create a world-class collection, which would of course include nothing degenerate, Hitler had to have his agents look elsewhere. "The paintings were purchased first in Germany, then, after the Anschluss, in Austria, and later in the conquered lands, such as Holland, Belgium, and France," Schindler explained.

"Purchased?" I asked in disbelief. Given the Nazis’ reputation for seizing valuable objects, destroying what they hated, and keeping what they coveted, this seemed an ironic euphemism. Schindler did note that some of the artworks were bought from Jewish owners, which implies a degree of coercion.

Lynn Nichols has since documented—in her prize-winning report The Rape of Europe—many of the dubious, devious, dishonest, and downright criminal methods used by Hitler and Goering's agents to acquire works of fine art.

Although Hitler's chief architect, Albert Speer, had already designed a number of immense Nazi monuments, it was clear that the Linz Museum, among other huge projects, could not be built until Germany had won the war. As it became increasingly clear that the war was going very badly, the paintings were stored in various safe locations, among them salt-mines. Some were hidden at Alt Aussee, near Salzburg. The American forces found them, however, and, as Schindler phrased it: "They busied themselves with making restitutions, not only from this collection, but from others they had found."

MAN OF MANY TITLES--Here that avid hunter, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, is represented with double-barreled shotgun and boar's brush in his hat, in his additional role as Reichsjägermiester, reproduced from the 1938 Nazi exhibition catalogue.

It was especially important for the Occupation Forces to ensure that all paintings acquired outside Germany be returned to their original owners or heirs, so far as possible. [Some works were brought to the United States for safe-keeping, and there was even an impressive American touring exhibition of paintings found in the salt-mines.]

This restitution process continued until 1949, at which time the Americans turned the remaining collections in Germany over to the Treuhand Verwaltung fur Kulturgut, a West German trustee-organization empowered to make further restitution and disposition of the artworks. In 1962, what still remained passed into the control of the Oberfinanzamt in Munich from the Treuhand.

Apparently, three separate collections were involved. One was a series of pictures of the battles in Eastern Europe. These had been commissioned by the National Socialist government or entities such as the Wehrmacht, but, because they therefore had some Nazi associations, they were brought to America, partly to prevent them from being exhibited in Germany after the war.

Some 6,000 have since been returned and are now in the Bavarian Army Museum in Ingolstadt. At present, these are being studied and catalogued, but they are not yet available to outside researchers. Schindler added: "When that work is finished, the federal government has to decide when—or if—they will be exhibited."

The Linz Collection originally had as many as 10,000 artworks, though figures as high as 20,000 have also been cited. In the past, returns were arranged with the Bonn government through the U. S. Department of State. Bonn later designated some 1,600 paintings as Federal Property, loaning them out to museums and galleries all over Germany.

"They are mostly 19th century paintings, but there are also Rubens, Botticelli, Tintoretto, and even Impressionists," Schindler noted. "The Linz Museum was to be a World History of Art, but Hitler didn’t want any pictures from the 20th century."

The third collection, the one researchers have been able to visit in Munich, consists of paintings and sculptures bought by Hitler or his aides, mainly from the annual approved "modern art" exhibitions in Munich. Apparently to encourage approved artists, Hitler bought most of what was sold at these shows; others—even those in his inner circle—were not so eager to own such works.

The art-works were then used to adorn the Reichs Chancellery in Berlin and other official venues, such as the Nazi Party Headquarters in Munich, just across the avenue from Hitler’s local residence, the Führer Gebaüde.

Some 800 pictures are said to be still in America, in the care of the Department of Defense, according to German-born art expert Peter Adam. One of these—the infamous painting of Hitler as a White Knight on horseback, the Savior of Germany—was, in fact, recently on view in Vienna, on loan from the Department of Defense, in the Künstlerhaus show: Kunst und Diktatur, or Art and Dictatorship. A painting Herr Schindler had shown me in the Munich vaults—supposedly representing a nude Eva Braun—was in the same show, but not identified as such.

Peter Adam’s Art in the Third Reich (Abrams, 1992) not only reproduces a wide range of approved art—some of which is in the Munich vault—but also offers a fascinating analysis of the importance of art to Hitler and the Nazi leadership. Artworks were central to their political and cultural programs, which certainly has not been copied in the United States. This excellent volume sums up the two-part TV series on the subject Adam made for the BBC.

There are about 600 pieces in the Munich group, all of which belong to the German Federal Government. They are heavily protected at Central Customs storage. Despite that, some have been loaned out to exhibitions when relevant, as in Straubing and in Vienna.

In 1993, it was announced that this collection—or parts of it—would be shown to the public when it was moved to the German Historical Museum in Berlin. A 1994 exhibition date was noted. To check this out, I went to Berlin to see Christoph Stötzl, the director, who was formerly chief of Munich’s City Museum. He told me, point-blank, that these pictures would not be shown. Since that time, he also agreed not to display a Munich exhibition: Hoffmann and Hitler: Photography as a Medium of the Führer Myth.

This, however, was at the request of Berlin’s Jewish Community, who felt that showing a great many photographs of Hitler would be offensive to Jews. The serious purpose of the show was not in dispute: to demonstrate how Heinrich Hoffmann used photography to help build the Hitler Myth. Director Stötzl insisted the show had much to offer in understanding the origins and success of the phenomenon of Nazism, but he deferred to the sensibilities of the Jewish Community of Berlin.

With the rampant rise of a vicious Neo-Nazism, marginal though it may be, no German official, especially in the arts, wants to give any kind of encouragement to the new fascists.

The recent discovery of some 1930s murals in the Berlin bunker used by Hitler's drivers—not the Hitler Bunker itself, which was destroyed at the end of the war—provoked a furious controversy: Should the murals be preserved, in the bunker or outside in a museum, or should both bunker and murals be destroyed?

The fear was that some might want to make this a Nazi Shrine, a place of pilgrimage. Berlin’s Culture Senator at that time, Ulrich Roloff-Momin, decided that the murals were, in fact, a witness to those terrible times, an historical artifact to be preserved in an interpreted context.

The 60th anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power in Germany was widely marked in 1993. Many German cities and towns planned exhibitions, films, and lectures to come to terms with the Nazi era in their respective histories, a past which had long been ignored or de-emphasized.

Nuremberg mounted an impressive show in the innards of Hitler’s great Tribune where workers and soldiers in their hundreds of thousands marched by at the annual Party Congresses. In Munich, one could look at the chamber which was once Hitler’s office, among many witnesses to the past.

But there was a danger implicit in all of this. Especially if the beholders did not recognize such things as vivid evidences of a vicious totalitarian regime which almost destroyed Germany as well as Europe. Neo-Nazi youths know little of the past and could learn the wrong lessons from looking at photos of Old Imperial Nazis in their Monumentality Mode.

BOY BARELY BIGGER THAN DRUM--This sculpture of a Hitler Jugend-Trommler was admired by Nazi Leaders in the 1938 Munich show, here reproduced from the 1938 exhibition catalogue.

Hannah Arendt, discussing Adolf Eichmann's methodical procedures in attempting to exterminate European Jews—the so-called "Final Solution"—wrote of "the banality of evil." This immensely distressed some concentration-camp survivors, who did not think their horrific experiences were by any means banal.

But Arendt was discussing the methodical routines of the persecutors in this instance, not at the sufferings of their victims. There was much that was banal in the Nazi Era—and not only in the Death Camps. The art that Hitler admired was also certainly banal, if not merely the Kitsch Leni Riefenstahl found it to be.

When Helmut Schindler and I had reached the outskirts of Munich and gone through a number of locked doors, through rooms with customs merchandise secured in them, we finally reached the chamber with Hitler’s paintings.

Some had been removed from storage racks and placed at an angle to catch the light. Foremost was the painting I'd seen in Straubing, of the Autobahn bridge under construction. There were the obligatory paintings of factories in full blast, portraits of functionaries, of hardy farmers, their wives and families, of heroic soldiers.

The artists were not inept nor completely untalented, but no one had dared to try an unusual angle or a startling color-combination. If anything, these paintings were indeed banal, routine, unsurprising. Hitler didn’t like surprises for himself, of course; he preferred to visit them on others.

One painting must have been an unpleasant surprise, for, it's said, he bought it on the spot to get it out of public view. This is the nude portrait of Eva Braun. The painter apparently thought this would delight Hitler. It was not painted from life, of course, but was in fact a generic nude body with Braun’s head added.

It looks a bit like Bougereau’s famous September Morn. In Volker von Schloendorff’s cinematic satire of old Nazis undercover and new Nazi admirers very visible, Schtonk! , this idea was cleverly employed. The film focuses on a fictionalized version of the forger of the so-called "Hitler Diaries," which created a stir a few years ago. Amazed that his crude forgeries were so eagerly accepted, the failed artist decided to paint an "authentic" nude Eva Braun portrait for a rich client. Which suggests of course that Schloendorf knew such a painting actually existed, even if few had ever seen it.

Erwin Leiser, in his 1992 film, 1937—Art and Power, examines Hitler and Goebbels’ uses of art in the practice of power. Footage of the opening of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst is deftly interwoven, along with interviews of survivors, people who were both appalled and frightened by the Degenerate Art exhibition and incredulous at what Hitler approved.

Some interviewees, involved with getting rid of Degenerate Art, insisted they were only were only "doing their duty." One revealing interview, with a female functionary of the Haus der Kunst—which stands today as Munich’s showcase of the most avant-garde in the arts—considers the plight of Emil Nolde.

Nolde went to complain about not being accepted for the opening show in the new gallery. As a large number of his paintings, removed from German museums, were included the Degenerate Art show, it’s surprising he didn’t quite get the message. When told that his work was unsatisfactory—at least as recalled by this witness—he insisted he had been a member of the Nazi party from its earliest days, and that he had always been an ardent anti-Semite. Even for Hitler, these were not sufficient recommendations.

The result was that Nolde’s identity card showed that he was not to be sold or provided with any art-supplies. Whatever his anti-social feelings about some of his neighbors—who soon disappeared definitively—he went into a private underground himself.

In a series of tiny sketches, he created "Unpainted Paintings," which he hoped someday to be able to execute full-sized. This he was partly able to do, but only after the Nazis had been defeated. But, by then the original inspiration was greatly diminished.

In addition to Erwin Leiser’s admirable film, Peter Adam’s Art of the Third Reich offers a valuable fund of information, visual and textual. Adam insists: "One can only look at the art of the Third Reich through the lens of Auschwitz."

Adam also notes that the art Hitler approved was mediocre and undemanding, meant solely as a tool "to transcend class differences and unite the nation." He has observed that German museums say they don‘t want to exhibit these paintings and sculptures for fear that this would give artistic validation to the works. Clearly, that is not their only fear.

Adam says the art should be seen as "the artistic expression of a barbaric ideology." He insists: "What is frightening about all these works of art is not so much what was Fascist about them, but what was normal, a normality which pleased so many. …it is impossible to look at these pictures without remembering their actual function."

Curiously, though the Degenerate Art Exhibition occasionally has been cited as an attack on Jewish artists, in fact only six of the ll2 artists singled out for confiscation were Jewish. In the purge which preceded the infamous Munich show, 16,000 artworks were seized and removed from museums and other venues. In many cases, the museum directors themselves withdrew the "offensive" works even before they received orders to do so.

Some 650 allegedly degenerate works were placed on view in Munich and on tour. Eventually, three million Germans saw this shameful show, but they didn’t have to pay, so that may account for the impressive statistics. Some surely sensed this would be their last opportunity to see really outstanding examples of modern art.

Works of internationally known artists, such as Picasso, Chagall, and Klee, were sold at auction in Switzerland, enriching Nazi bank-accounts. Only recently have we learned what became of the proceeds from these auctions.

Then, in 1939, the Nazis staged a tremendous bonfire of the remaining condemned artworks, similar to the shocking book-burning in the square next to the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin.

In a very long formal address at the 1937 dedication of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, Hitler outlined his aesthetic principles. This speech—"Art Has Its Roots in the Nations: National-Socialist Germany Desires a German Art"—was published in English, French, and German in an international Nazi propaganda publication, Robert Ley’s Strength Through Joy magazine.

It is by no means the ranting, rambling discourse most often associated with Hitler as an orator. Rather, it is very closely—if somewhat insanely—reasoned, Hitler's point being that most modern art was "international," seducing Germans and others in other nations into losing their sense of being Germans, French, or English, forgetting their own roots and culture. Of course, "international" was a Nazi euphemism.

Instead of attacking Jewish artists for this state of affairs, Hitler instead blamed those Jews who, he insisted, had "…secured control of those means and institutions whereby public opinion is formed and which in the last resort govern this opinion." In the press, he said, "…through the agency of so-called artistic criticism, the Jews succeeded not only in gradually confusing natural ideas of the essence, duties, and purpose of art, but also in destroying altogether the general healthy feeling in this sphere."

For Hitler, this was clearly a conspiracy: "…the press managed to corrupt the views of its readers to such an extent that, partly out of uncertainty, partly out of cowardice, they simply no longer dared to offer resistance to this kind of cultural ruin. For only then could the business-like Jewish art dealers succeed in handing out the most blatant daubs simply as the creations of a new and thus modern art, and above all in setting high prices on them, while on the other hand highly-valued works were disposed of off-hand and their creators simply annihilated."

Unfortunately, without the anti-semitic slurs, Hitler's views sound disturbingly like the "art-criticism" practiced by some conservative Americans politicians. But perhaps American citizens need not worry, for Culture—with a capital C— has never been very important to the free-market economy. Or even to the so-called "Red-Blooded American Way of Life," which itself has vaguely nationalistic overtones.

Considering the militant lack of interest in—or open hostility to—the arts in general, and avant-garde arts in particular, by many American lawmakers, it may today seem astonishing that Hitler could devote so much time and thought to questions of art.

But then he was himself a disappointed artist. Some of his surviving sketches are, in fact, competent and even attractive. He was a good draftsman, at the very least. But the mark of genius is not there.

Nonetheless, if only they had admitted the young Hitler to the Art Academy in Vienna, the 20th Century might have turned out rather differently.

PS: The artworks were still in Munich storage, at last report. [Loney]