20th century AD

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 21, 1999 | by Eli Lehrer

In the basement of a vaguely post-modern office building a short walk from the White House is a small warehouse of Nazi art that belongs to the U.S. government. There are four original Adolf Hitler watercolors, bronze busts of

leading Nazis, realist paintings that would look fine on the walls of a starved gothic 1930s post office and a pile of well-executed landscapes by a man who became a trendy New York City printmaker in the early 1970s.

The 450-piece compilation, part of the art program at the Center of Military History in Washington, represents only a small remnant of a collection that once numbered 8,500 works. Forty-three days after Nazi Germany's surrender, the Allied command put Oregon-printmaker-turned-Army-Air-Corps-intelligence-officer Gordon Gilkey in charge of collecting Germany's war art.

While the paintings always portray the Nazi regime in a positive (or at least neutral) light, little of what Gilkey collected seems blatantly offensive at face value. "These weren't paintings intended for mass consumption, so you don't see the crude caricatures of Jews or anything like that" explains Marylou Gjernes, the collection's manager. "These were the battlefield and war paintings intended as more solid and permanent reminders of the war."

On the whole, war artists had relative freedom when it came to choice of style and even subject matter. Because war painters generally work among combat troops, they require portable materials. As a result, nearly all war art, German and otherwise, consists of small-scale oil or watercolor paintings. During the war, all of the major powers maintained art programs and, despite Hitler's own failed career as an artist, the Nazi program didn't stand out. "Hitler was personally interested in the program, but Churchill and Eisenhower were also painters, so even that wasn't all that unusual," explains Gjernes.

For a few years after the war, America's collection of Nazi art sat more or less unstudied. Beginning in the 1950s, however, the collection went out on loan from time to time. In the much-changed world of 1982, what then was West Germany asked the United States to return the art.

Without anyone speaking against the art's return, Congress passed a bill that the Germans had requested. In 1985, after a three-year review process, two Lufthansa jumbo jets crammed to the gills with paintings lifted off for West Germany. "The presumption was that the Germans got everything and we would justify whatever we kept" says Gjernes. The United States kept a handful of pieces considered blatant propaganda, portraits of leading Nazis and a broad cross-section of the rest of the collection intended for historical purposes.

Pieces still travel occasionally (although nothing was out on loan when Insight visited the collection near the end of May). Aside from Gjernes, however, nobody living knows the collection in full detail. She says some of the art is pretty good. "These are the people who ended up being college professors," she says. "We've never had the money or staff to track down all of them, but they were people with artistic skills who probably were not .working full time as artists before the war." Many of the artists in the collection are known only by last names they signed to their paintings.

Keith Dills, an art historian at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, wrote the introduction to a book about the collection 25 years ago. He believes that much of the art deserves a sympathetic treatment. "A lot of artists are opportunists" he explains. "Under a regime like that you have the choice either to paint or deliver the mail."

Indeed, a few of the polemical artists show undeniable talent. Kurt Kranz, an artist who Gjernes says is one of her favorites in the collection, executed interesting, ideologically neutral landscapes. He shows a fine sense of color and proves almost playful in his use of light. Moving to the United States after the war, he taught at Washington's Corcoran Gallery and the University of Hawaii before ending up as a successful New York City printmaker. A catalog of his American work, taken from a Montreal show in the early 1970s, shows that his skill as a colorist never left him. But the collections of asymmetrical blobs he produced in New York look like something that might have hung on the wall of a trendy art-buyer's condo on the Upper West Side of 1970s Manhattan.

The rest of the collection runs the gamut: H. Von Hayek painted bleak, spooky war-torn landscapes in an expressionist style; an artist named Erler produced skilled but ultimately horrifying crowd scenes that evoke the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will.

Hitler, most of whose paintings dealt with World War I, also figures in the collection. Gjernes says she finds some merit in the dictator's art. While none of his paintings ever would be worthy of display in a serious museum, Hitler's work easily could pass muster in second-tier galleries around the country.

Dills, however, has little praise for the artist. "Hitler was a terrible, terrible painter" he declares. "There's this awful spidery treatment of the human form." Whatever horror a viewer might express at Hitler's use of the human figure (in fact, only one of the four Hitler pictures in the collection shows people), it pales in comparison with the rest of the collection.