Nazi Art Looting and Its Legacy PDF Download

Author: Stephanie D'Alessandro
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780865592032
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Simon Goodman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451697643
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
The passionate, true story of one man's quest to reclaim what the Nazis stole from his family--their beloved art collection--and to restore their legacy. Simon Goodman's grandparents came from German Jewish banking dynasties and perished in concentration camps. And that's almost all he knew--his father rarely spoke of their family history or heritage. But when he passed away, and Simon received his father's papers, a story began to emerge. The Gutmanns, as they were known then, rose from a small Bohemian hamlet to become one of Germany's most powerful banking families. They also amassed a world-class art collection that included works by Degas, Renoir, Botticelli, and many others, including a Renaissance clock engraved with scenes from the legend of Orpheus. The Nazi regime snatched everything the Gutmanns had labored to build: their art, their wealth, their social standing, and their very lives. Simon grew up in London with little knowledge of his father's efforts to recover their family's possessions. It was only after his father's death that Simon began to piece together the clues about the stolen legacy and the Nazi looting machine. He learned much of the collection had gone to Hitler and Goring; other works had been smuggled through Switzerland, sold and resold, with many pieces now in famous museums. More still had been recovered by Allied forces only to be stolen again by bureaucrats-- European governments quietly absorbed thousands of works of art into their own collections. Through painstaking detective work across two continents, Simon proved that many pieces belonged to his family, and successfully secured their return-- the first Nazi looting case to be settled in the United States. Goodman's dramatic story reveals a rich family history almost obliterated by the Nazis. It is not only the account of a twenty-year long detective hunt for family treasure, but an unforgettable tale of redemption and restoration.

Author: Nicholas M. O'Donnell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781634257336
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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The organized theft of fine art by Nazi Germany has captivated worldwide attention in the last twenty years. As much as any other topic arising out of World War Two, stolen art has proven to be an issue that simply will not go away. Newly found works of art pit survivors and their heirs against museums, foreign nations, and even their own family members. These stories are enduring because they speak to one of the core tragedies of the Nazi era: how a nation at the pinnacle of fine art and culture spawned a legalized culture of theft and plunder. A Tragic Fate is the first book to seriously address the legal and ethical rules that have dictated the results of restitution claims between competing claimants to the same works of art. It provides a history of Art and Culture in German-occupied Europe, an introduction to the most significant collections in Europe to be targeted by the Nazis, and a narrative of the efforts to reclaim looted artwork in the decades following the Holocaust through profiles of some of the art world's most famous and influential restitution cases.

Author: Lynn H. Nicholas
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307739724
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award The real story behind the major motion picture The Monuments Men. The cast of characters includes Hitler and Goering, Gertrude Stein and Marc Chagall--not to mention works by artists from Leonardo da Vinci to Pablo Picasso. And the story told in this superbly researched and suspenseful book is that of the Third Reich's war on European culture and the Allies' desperate effort to preserve it. From the Nazi purges of "Degenerate Art" and Goering's shopping sprees in occupied Paris to the perilous journey of the Mona Lisa from Paris and the painstaking reclamation of the priceless treasures of liberated Italy, The Rape of Europa is a sweeping narrative of greed, philistinism, and heroism that combines superlative scholarship with a compelling drama.

Author: Mary M. Lane
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610397371
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Adolf Hitler's obsession with art not only fueled his vision of a purified Nazi state--it was the core of his fascist ideology. Its aftermath lives on to this day. Nazism ascended by brute force and by cultural tyranny. Weimar Germany was a society in turmoil, and Hitler's rise was achieved not only by harnessing the military but also by restricting artistic expression. Hitler, an artist himself, promised the dejected citizens of postwar Germany a purified Reich, purged of "degenerate" influences. When Hitler came to power in 1933, he removed so-called "degenerate" art from German society and promoted artists whom he considered the embodiment of the "Aryan ideal." Artists who had produced challenging and provocative work fled the country. Curators and art dealers organized their stock. Thousands of great artworks disappeared--and only a fraction of them were rediscovered after World War II. In 2013, the German government confiscated roughly 1,300 works by Henri Matisse, George Grosz, Claude Monet, and other masters from the apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, the reclusive son of one of Hitler's primary art dealers. For two years, the government kept the discovery a secret. In Hitler's Last Hostages, Mary M. Lane reveals the fate of those works and tells the definitive story of art in the Third Reich and Germany's ongoing struggle to right the wrongs of the past.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art thefts
Languages : en
Pages : 4

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Author: Darsie Alexander
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300250701
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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A strikingly original exploration of the profound impact of World War II on how we understand the art that survived it By the end of World War II an estimated one million artworks and 2.5 million books had been seized from their owners by Nazi forces; many were destroyed. The artworks and cultural artifacts that survived have traumatic, layered histories. This book traces the biographies of these objects--including paintings, sculpture, and Judaica--their rescue in the aftermath of the war, and their afterlives in museums and private collections and in our cultural understanding. In examining how this history affects the way we view these works, scholars discuss the moral and aesthetic implications of maintaining the association between the works and their place within the brutality of the Holocaust--or, conversely, the implications of ignoring this history. Afterlives offers a thought-provoking investigation of the unique ability of art and artifacts to bear witness to historical events. With rarely seen archival photographs and with contributions by the contemporary artists Maria Eichhorn, Hadar Gad, Dor Guez, and Lisa Oppenheim, this catalogue illuminates the study of a difficult and still-urgent subject, with many parallels to today's crises of art in war.

Author: Andreas Huyssen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780822368649
Category : Art thefts
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This issue examines the legacy of Nazi-looted art in light of the 2012 discovery of the famous Hildebrand Gurlitt collection of stolen artwork in Germany. When the German government declassified the case almost two years later, the resulting scandal raised fundamental questions about the role of art dealers in the Third Reich, the mechanics of the Nazi black market for artwork, the shortcomings of postwar denazification, the failure of courts and governments to adjudicate stolen artwork claims, and the unwillingness of museums to determine the provenance of thousands of looted pieces of art. The contributors to this issue explore the continuities of art dealerships and auction houses from the Nazi period to the Federal Republic and take stock of the present political and cultural debate over the handling of this artwork. Special topic contributors. Konstantin Akinsha, Meike Hoffmann, Andreas Huyssen, Lawrence M. Kaye, Olaf Peters, Jonathan Petropoulos, Anson Rabinbach, Avinoam Shalem, Julia Voss, Amy Walsh

Author: Kenneth D. Alford
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786489553
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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During World War II, the Nazis plundered from occupied countries millions of items of incalculable value estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Spearheaded by Hermann Goring the looting program quickly created the largest private art collection in the world, exceeding the collections amassed by the Metropolitan in New York, the British Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris and the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow. By the end of the war, the Nazis had stolen roughly one-fifth of the entire art treasures of the world. This book explores the formation of the Nazi art collection and the methods used by Goring and his party to strip occupied Europe of a large part of its artistic heritage.

Author: Arthur J. McLaughlin, Jr.
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476666415
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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This first comprehensive analysis of the Third Reich's efforts to confiscate, loot, censor and influence art begins with a brief history of the looting of artworks in Western history. The artistic backgrounds of Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goring are examined, along with the various Nazi art looting organizations, and Nazi endeavors to both censor and manipulate the arts for propaganda purposes. Long-held beliefs about the Nazi destruction of "degenerate art" are examined, drawing on recently developed university databases, new translations of original documents and recently discovered information. Theft and destruction of artworks by the Allies and looting by Soviet trophy brigades are also documented.