The Berlin Masterpieces in America

The Berlin Masterpieces in America
Author: Peter J. Bell
Publisher: Giles
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2020-07-21
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781911282631

This new volume tells the story of some of the paintings rescued by the the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) organization, the so-called "Monuments Men." In December 1945, 202 paintings, found in German salt mines 2,100 feet underground, where they had been hidden to escape the allied bombing of Berlin, were brought to the United States "for safe keeping" by the Department of the Army. They were exhibited in 1948 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, before some of them were sent on a whistle-stop tour of 13 US cities, despite furious opposition from museum directors, Gallery staff, the public, government officials, and a resolution from 98 leading art authorities demanding the immediate return of the works to Germany. All the paintings, examples of Flemish, Dutch, German, French, English, and Italian Schools, were from museums in Berlin, and had been found in April 1945, along with 100 tons of Reichsbank gold, by the special team of art historians and experts, seconded in the US army, and charged with locating and restituting works of art looted by the Nazis. This book is the first to consider the paintings themselves; it features 22 artworks that were in the original NGA exhibition, including four paintings on loan from Berlin, augmented by others from Cincinnati Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Washington, The Getty Museum, Miami University (Oxford, OH), and the Taft Museum.

The Lost Museum

The Lost Museum
Author: Julien Chapuis
Publisher: Michael Imhof Verlag
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Lost works of art
ISBN: 9783731903215

"[In this exhibition] only a minority of the works were original ... primarily ... photographic reproductions of paintings, plaster casts of sculptures, objects that had suffered varying degrees of damage, and even the remains of works of art ... [bearing] witness to the damaged or lost treasures that belonged to the Kaiser Friedrich Museum until 1945"--Director general's foreword.

Tal Sterngast. Twelve Paintings

Tal Sterngast. Twelve Paintings
Author: Michael Eissenhauer
Publisher: Hatje Cantz Verlag
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2020-12-04
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3775749098

Berlin's Gemäldegalerie is known for its outstanding collection of European paintings from the thirteenth to eighteenth century. Each chapter in this book is dedicated to one painting from the collection. In the breadth of this idiosyncratic selection, painting, as it discovers itself becomes a medium for the formulation of modern subjectivity. Each painting in focus unfolds its own making and its artistic concerns as they reflect contemporary issues, today. What are the paradoxes within which art is made by women? How does the primordial drive to destroy works of art affect today's art discourse? Where did the modern struggle of painting against the picture begin? Why does the Wild Man from early German Renaissance still haunt us? And why doesn't it matter whether Jan Vermeer used an optical device for his paintings? Twelve Paintings highlights the currentness of the Old Masters.

Art of Central Africa

Art of Central Africa
Author: Hans-Joachim Koloss
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Total Pages: 89
Release: 1990
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0870995901

Kirchner and the Berlin Street

Kirchner and the Berlin Street
Author: Deborah Wye
Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2008
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780870707414

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's remarkable series of paintings known as the Berlin Street Scenes is a highpoint of the artist's work and a milestone of German Expressionism, widely seen as a metaphor for modernity itself through their depiction of life in a major metropolis. Kirchner moved from Dresden to Berlin in 1911, and it was in this teeming city, immersed in its vitality, decadence and underlying sense of danger posed by the imminent World War I, that he created the Street Scenes in a sustained burst of creative energy and ambition between 1913 and 1915. As the most extensive consideration of these paintings in English, this richly illustrated volume examines the creative process undertaken by the artist as he explores his theme through various mediums, and presents the major body of related charcoal drawings, pen-and-ink studies, pastels, etchings, woodcuts and lithographs he created in addition to the paintings. The volume also investigates the significance of the streetwalker as a primary motif, and provides insight on the series in the context of Kirchner's wider oeuvre.

George Grosz in Berlin

George Grosz in Berlin
Author: Sabine Rewald
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2022-06-06
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1588397548

This overdue investigation of George Grosz’s (1893–1959) most compelling paintings, drawings, prints, and collages offers a reassessment of the celebrated German Expressionist during his years in Berlin—from his earliest artistic endeavors to the trenchant satirical images and searing depictions of moral decay between the World Wars for which he is known today. Menacing street scenes, rowdy cabarets, corrupt politicians, wounded soldiers, greedy war profiteers, and other symbols of Berlin’s interwar decline all met with the artist’s relentless gaze, which exposed the core social issues that eventually led to Germany’s extreme nationalist politics. Featuring masterpieces as well as rarely published works, this book provides further insight into the artist’s creative pinnacle, reached during this critical and ominous period in German history.

The Rape of Europa

The Rape of Europa
Author: Lynn H. Nicholas
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2009-12-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307739724

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.