Catalog of an exhibition held at the Kunstmuseum Basel, October 22, 2022-February 19, 2023. Includes bibliographical references.
Summary:
In 1937, the Nazi cultural policy denounced thousands of works as degenerate and forcibly removed them from German museums. The Third Reich's Ministry of Propaganda assumed that a portion of such works would find buyers abroad. In this way certain artworks deemed internationally "exploitable" reached the art market through various channels. In 1939 Georg Schmidt (1896-1965), the Kunstmuseum Basel's director at the time, managed to acquire the painting Fate of the Animals by Franz Marc and 20 other avant-garde works. In this catalogue, the authors trace the events based on the seizures from German museums and explain the historical context presenting the protagonists from the institutions involved and the art market, as well as revealing how the Nazi regime's act of cultural violence that resulted in an artificial fragmentation of modernism into art that was "exploitable" on the one hand, and art that has been destroyed or forgotten on the other. The various contributions bring the specifically Swiss aspects of this story into focus, such as on the auction of the Galerie Fischer in Lucerne, on Georg Schmidt's approach, and on the classification of the acquisitions in the context of Basel's collection history.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.