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  • The Invisible Museum:Unearthing the Lost Modernist Art of the Third Reich
  • Gregory Maertz (bio)

Forensic Art History

The existence of a collection of 9,250 Nazi-era works of art, which was formed by the U.S. Army in 1946–47, has long been suspected by journalists and scholars of fascism and the Third Reich, including Brandon Taylor (1990), Frederic Spotts (2000), and David D'Arcy (2007).1 Mysterious as its origins are, elements of the "German War Art Collection" have been featured in museum exhibitions, discussed in the mass media, and reproduced in books.2 But aside from a few familiar, frequently exhibited objects, such as Hubert Lanzinger's Der Bannenträger (1937) [The Standard Bearer] [Figure 1], knowledge of the whereabouts, the full contents, and the provenance of this collection, the largest surviving remnant of Nazi culture, has eluded researchers for over sixty years.

Legal, commercial, and scholarly interest in the restitution of Holocaust assets has mushroomed in the past decade. As a consequence, scholarship on U.S. handling of German cultural property has focused almost exclusively on restitution rather than on investigating the U.S. Army's official art looting campaign that targeted contemporary German art and functioned for two years in the American zone of occupation.3 Perhaps it is because the idea of sanctioned art theft conflicts with the heroic story of the U.S. Army's rescue and restitution of art treasures looted by the Nazis in occupied Europe that scholars have not observed how the same Army personnel that led the restitution effort—Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) officers—were also responsible for the confiscation of German art. They did so both [End Page 63] as a perpetrator—in forming the collection known as the NS-Reichsbesitz [National Socialist State Property]—and as a facilitator in the formation of the "German War Art Collection" by other Army personnel. Until now little work has been done on the confiscation and sequestration orders that resulted in a sanitized history of 20th-century art from which Nazi Modernist painting was excluded. Impounded and concealed from all but the most determined investigators, the contents of the U.S. Army's collection of Nazi art remained unexamined for 60 years.


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Figure 1.

Hubert Lanzinger (1880-1950), “Der Bannenträger” [“The Standard Bearer”] (1937), “German War Art Collection” (oil on board, Gilkey number G.O.1.4244.47), Army Art Collection, as photographed by the author in the vault of the U.S. Army Center of Military History, Washington, D.C. A more interesting painting, in terms of iconography and execution, than is usually acknowledged, “The Standard Bearer” is nevertheless the most recognizable image produced during the Third Reich. While Lanzinger served as a war artist in Italy and on the Eastern Front, he had made his pre-war reputation as a society portraitist, much like Christian Schad, another artist whose current reputation is based on the works he produced in the style of Neue Sachlichkeit, but who also worked in a more conservative idiom.

Of course, inspecting the Army's collection has been hindered by its complex disposition. Until recently the "German War Art Collection" was housed in three separate institutions—the U.S. Army's Center of Military History (450 objects), the Deutsches Historisches Museum [German Historical Museum] (1626 objects plus the 754 artifacts in the NS-Reichsbesitz), and the Bayerisches Armeemuseum [Bavarian Army Museum] (7,100).4 Complicating matters further are the access policies of the Nazi art repositories, which, even for well-credentialed researchers, range from the occasionally hospitable to the impossibly Kafkaesque. Attempts at divulging the contents of both collections [End Page 64] were also impeded by the disposition of related documents, few of which are housed in the expected and accessible confines of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration or the Bundesarchiv [German Federal Archives]. Some archives were sealed until fairly recently and others are stored in obscure locations without even the most basic facilities for conducting research. Still others, after their contents were studied and photographed, were moved to an unspecified location. Thus, illuminating the tangled provenance of the "German War...

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