Hitler hated, aide valued

Michael Glover 

This month a sensational story about art, the Nazis and a part-concealed Jewish identity, stutters to a fascinatingly inconclusive conclusion in Germany with the opening of two exhibitions, one in Bonn and the other in Bern. The story began in 2012 when an old man called Cornelius Gurlitt was accused of tax evasion by the authorities. The accusation led to discovery of a trove of art in his Munich apartment. For months the authorities kept the story to themselves. Then the press got wind of it.

The art had belonged to his father Hildebrand, who had been a museum director and art dealer from the time of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, and throughout the Third Reich and on. Hildebrand had died in a car accident in 1956. It was presented as nothing less than the story of the wheelings and dealings of Hitler’s principal art dealer — and here was the loot perhaps, in the custody of his 80-year-old, reclusive son, in the full dazzle of publicity.

The two exhibitions put on display 400 of the 1,500 works in the Gurlitt collection, 250 in Bonn and 150 in Bern. They also tell the immensely complicated story of that seizure and its impact, demonstrate how the provenance experts of Germany and Switzerland responded to its shock waves, and show off some of its best works by modern masters as Klee, Munch, Dix, Marc, Nolde. Most interesting of all, they present in great detail the convoluted, morally dubious story of Hildebrand Gurlitt himself within the context of the tumultuous times through which he lived.

Yes, it was one respectable man’s fear of the consequence of having been condemned as a Mischling (a man of mixed race, one quarter Jew) and sent to the camps, which caused the Dresden art dealer and museum director Hildebrand Gurlitt to work with the Reich Ministry in order to save his own skin. A Nuremberg Law of 1935 had characterised him as a ‘second-degree half-caste’. He was a vulnerable man, aware of the pressing need to survive in an ever more dangerous world. The only answer was to cosy up to the regime. He perjured himself by dealing in and disposing of works that Hitler condemned as degenerate, which were snatched from public museums, and looted from Jewish collectors.

Hildebrand’s skills as an art dealer were extremely useful. The Reich desperately needed foreign currency to fund the war effort. He bought, sold and acquired work for German museums and other collectors, and amassed works for his own private collection, enriching himself in the process. He became Hitler’s art dealer. And after the war, under close scrutiny at the denazification tribunal, he slipped through the net that appeared to be closing around him by characterising himself as a victim. 

In the basement of the Kunstmuseum Bern, 150 of the 1,500 works in the Gurlitt estate have gone on display, all examples of what Hitler and his cronies characterised as ‘degenerate art’. What exactly does it mean though, this word degenerate? “There is no logical explanation because it was not logical,” said Nina Zimmer, director of Bern museum. “It was an ideological impulse.”

What fascinates us is the realisation that Hitler, a poor artist himself, believed in art’s power to transform lives. He thought these works were so dangerous because they had the power to deprave the human spirit. Hitler believed art should be elevating, noble, in tune with the aristocratic principle. The art here is, by comparison, full of bodily distortion.

At the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, we see a much broader range of works from the Gurlitt trove altogether, from Durer and Holbein to Monet, Degas and Picasso. Here are many works which Hitler himself would have favoured, 18th-century French paintings, for example, of which his own hero, Frederick the Great, would have approved, and consequently the kinds of art that might yet be shown in the Fuhrer Museum in Linz, a grandiose scheme which was never realised.

Himself, Gurlitt was a tissue of contradictions, an opportunist. Before and after the Second World War, he had championed the cause of modern art but denounced it during the years of the Reich. He was to champion it yet again after the war. 

— The Independent