For those of you who are not up on your basic art or world history, during the 1930s Adolph Hitler had over 16,000 paintings that he considered "degenerate art" destroyed or confiscated. Pretty much all modern art was considered to be Communist, or it had some connection to Jewish artists, so it had to go. There was even a traveling "Degenerate Art" exhibition with over 600 of the paintings which was meant to show people what was unacceptable, while Hitler-approved art was exhibited in another location to help define what art should be.
Over the decades, some of the works have been recovered (like the stash of 1,500 works found in an apartment in Munich), but others that were sold off are still unaccounted for. Last year, the V&A Museum published documents that included handwritten lists of all of the art that was taken by the Nazis, including works by Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Degas, and other famous artists. Huffington Post reports that an exhibition titled "Degenerate Art According to Hitler" opened recently at the Cité Miroir in Liège, Belgium that brings together a large number of the works for the first time ever, borrowed from private collections around the world.
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It's easy to love anything that Hitler hated, but exhibition also includes historical information about the Nazi plunder and about the artists whose work was considered un-German and not worthy of the world's attention. The exhibition runs through March 29 in Belgium. For more info, head to the Cité Miroir website.
[via Huffington Post]
