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Power, trials and nazis: the controversial story behind Gustav Klimt's "Adele Bloch-Bauer I"
Maria Altmann was in her 80s when she entered into a legal battle with the Austrian government in order to reclaim Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” and other Nazi-plundered Klimt paintings. The artwork had been stolen from her family’s home after she escaped from Austria as a Jewish refugee of the Holocaust during World War II. Never certain she would even live to see a verdict, Altmann’s fight wasn’t about money or revenge. According to her, she simply wanted to preserve the truth of what had happened to her family. So the history goes, the paintings in question were originally confiscated by Nazi authorities from Altmann’s uncle, Ferdinand…
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De la degeneración artística y política
Un acontecimiento que ha pasado a los anales de la historia del arte es la famosa exposición ‘Entartete Kunst’, celebrada en Múnich en 1937. Hitler encomendó a expertos acólitos reunir todo el arte ‘degenerado’ que encontraran para celebrar una gran muestra donde dejar constancia del riesgo de decadencia que vivía la cultura europea por culpa de los artistas de vanguardia. Al año siguiente organizó otra exposición, esta vez con un elenco de artistas que representaban lo que él consideraba el gran arte alemán, basado en una especie de revival neoclásico. Huelga decir que la primera exposición la visitó infinitamente más gente que la segunda. Uno de los artistas presentes en…
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Filth for Filth’s Sake
It is not the mission of art to wallow in filth for filth’s sake, to paint the human being only in a state of putrefaction, to draw cretins as symbols of motherhood, or to present deformed idiots as representatives of manly strength. So declared Adolf Hitler in 1935, leaving no uncertainty over his views on much of modern art. Many German and Austrian artists at the time were trying to express their own views of the world and their anger and despair towards society following the horrors of the First World War, yet Hitler saw only intolerable statements undermining his vision of a perfect German society. In 1937, the Degenerate…
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