Displaced art - art seized from Nazi Germany by the Soviet Union after World War II

Art in America, Sept, 1995 by Jamey Gambrell

Fifty years after the end of World War II, the art confiscated by Soviet forces from occupied territory has finally entered the public arena. On Feb. 28, with virtually no advance notice, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow unveiled "Twice Saved," an exhibition of 63 paintings ranging from the late 14th to the late 19th century, from German and Hungarian private and museum collections. A month later, following an American and European media blitz, St. Petersburg's Hermitage Museum opened "Hidden Treasures Revealed," an exhibition of 74 mostly Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings by artists such as Degas, Renoir, Gauguin and van Gogh, almost entirely from private German collections.

Much more than "hidden treasures" was revealed by these exhibitions, however. The art seized by the Soviet Union is involved in a property dispute with political and moral ramifications, whose most salient motif is perhaps the continuing toll of historical guilt, both Nazi and Stalinist. The 137 paintings currently on display, like the hundreds of thousands of other objects in storage, still missing or destroyed in the war, are but props in a Larger historical drama.

That drama started with the Nazi campaign to purge German museums of "degenerate art" in the late 30s and continued, once the war began, with the confiscation and destruction of cultural objects in Nazi-occupied territory on a scale so massive as to be inconceivable. That part of the saga is told in awe-inspiring detail in Lynn Nicholas's recent book The Rape of Europa (Knopf, 1994). The history of the Soviet-held art is still emerging, but it win soon be the subject of a book by Russian art historians Konstantin Akinsha and Grigory Kozlov. The details are the labyrinthine stuff of which spy novels are made, but the broad outlines of the story are relatively straightforward.

In the concluding months of World War 11, the Allied armies were faced with the formidable task of rounding up the millions of art objects that the Nazis had confiscated from Jewish families, plundered from other countries or evacuated from their own museums in order to shield them from Allied bombing attacks. Specially designated monuments officers" - art historians, curators and architects in civilian life-attached to units of the British and American armies retrieved art works from over 1,000 hiding places in occupied territory, including bank vaults, castles and salt mines. The art was transferred to centralized "collecting points" where it could be protected from the elements and from looting by soldiers and civilians.

The Americans and British generally pursued a policy of "restitution in hand," i.e., cultural objects were returned to the prewar country of ownership, when such could be determined. Soviet policy vis-i-vis the caches of Nazi-held art that the Red Army uncovered was entirely different, however. As the Soviet Army advanced across Eastern Europe toward Berlin, so-called "trophy commissions" of art professionals were dispatched from Moscow with the express purpose of collecting art, archives and books and arranging for their transport back to the Soviet Union. At the time, the "trophy art" was seen by the Soviets not simply as spoils of war, but as just recompense for damages and losses inflicted on them by the German military. In Western Europe, the Nazis had devised various euphemistic legal strategies - forced sales and "safekeeping" being the most frequent - to obtain what they coveted for German museums (and Hitler's and Goering's personal collections). However, in Eastern Europe and the USSR no such ceremony was deemed necessary. the Slavic peoples ranked only a little higher than the Jews in the Nazi ideological hierarchy, and their culture was slated for destruction. The Nazis simply packed up and shipped out whatever dry desired; and their army looted and burned wantonly. The USSR lost upwards of 1,200 churches, 500 synagogues and 500 museums, most on what is now Belorussian and Ukminian territory. memory or dated news Applebroog compiles her imagery, the meanings of her work must earn their way amid the anxieties of the present. This piece might look to us today to be a terrible comment or allegory on the misery of AIDS. But when I questioned the artist, I learned of the image's source in newspaper reports of the accidental deaths of suburban masturbators whose belief that near-strangulation improves orgasm had gotten out of hand.

A relaxed man on a sofa cuddles a young woman and points a gun at her head in Orgiastic/romantic plastic, 1990. This, too, stems from the newspapers-an old photograph illustrating the story of a guy who posed for the camera in advance of the sex murder he was about to commit. And now his image becomes a particularly smug ancestor of the hostage photographs that are staples of our visual culture. The artist literally drew the gun, but it is 1, the viewer (as Scott McCloud remarks), who now fill in the blanks in the story. To be prompted by only a schematic line drawing into the reliving of a moment that happened long ago is an uncommon experience.