Hitler versus Picasso and the Others
HITLER VERSUS PICASSO AND THE OTHERS, not rated, in English and Italian with subtitles, The Screen,
3.5 chiles
During World War II, the Nazi regime amassed an estimated 600,000 artworks, stolen mostly from Jewish art collectors, dealers, galleries, and museums. In Hitler versus Picasso and the Others, director Claudio Poli uses the openings of several recent exhibitions developed around works that have been recovered in the decades since the war — shows in France, Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands — as the backdrop to a narrative of the Nazi obsession with art.
Throughout the war, artworks were often stolen from families deported to concentration camps, and the theft was justified by false claims that the art had been abandoned, a point French journalist Pierre Assouline, one of the film’s many interview subjects, calls “macabre sophistry.” Hitler’s view that the modernists created works that undermined his vision of an ideal society led to the 1937 exhibition on “degenerate art” in Munich and was reflected in the Nazi persecution of artists and intellectuals. Still, Hitler, an unsuccessful painter in his early life who was twice rejected from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, seemed intent on making the great art of Europe his own. His hope, never realized, was to build a collection for his hometown of Linz to rival that of the Louvre. The 1937 exhibition included works by Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and many others. A second exhibition that year, of works considered to be esteemed examples of Germanic art and culture, The Great German Art
Exhibition, was held up as a counterpoint, but represented the stolen patrimony of Germany’s neighbors.
Private citizens were pressured or forced to sign over their collections or face deportation to concentration camps. Often, they were sent to the camps anyway, as was the case with Fritz and Louise Gutmann, high-profile aristocrats who had amassed a large collection of works by Old Masters and Impressionists. The Gutmanns, Jews by birth, appealed directly to SS leader Heinrich Himmler for protection. Himmler’s officers promised them safe passage to Berlin, but they sent Fritz to Theresienstadt and his wife to Auschwitz. Neither of them survived. The film, with a calm, sobering narration by Italian actor Toni Servillo, covers these events deftly, humanizing its story of state-sponsored mass art theft. But it is most revealing in the stories it tells of recent exhibitions such as 21 Rue La Boétie, which opened in Paris in 2017 and retraces the history of influential French gallery owner Paul Rosenberg, a dealer in modernist European and American art who smuggled some of his collection out of France before the German occupation but still lost much of it to the Nazis. Another interesting case concerns the Gurlitt Collection, an installation of works recovered in 2012 when Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of infamous German art dealer and profiteer Hildebrand Gurlitt, was discovered to be hoarding more than 1,300 stolen artworks in his Munich apartment. Gurlitt’s father, when apprehended by the Allies at the end of the war, said the artworks had been destroyed by bombing. An art patron with some legitimately acquired works, Gurlitt aroused suspicions when customs officials found him with large amounts of cash on a train bound for Munich. His apartment was raided and the artwork found by chance. The discovery of the treasures Gurlitt had tucked away, which included masterworks such as Matisse’s Portrait of a Lady and other items from Rosenberg’s collection, made headlines around the world. Gurlitt’s collection ended up in the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern, Switzerland, which organized the exhibition.
Hitler versus Picasso delves into the wartime collusion by artists and dealers who secured their own safety at the expense of friends and neighbors, some of them even claiming their actions were purely business as usual. Never mind that their clients were mass murderers, such as Reichstag leader Hermann Göring. Göring’s secretary, Gisela Limberger, and personal curator, Walter Hofer, who oversaw his pilfered collection of approximately 1,800 works. The documentary describes a tragedy linking past to present, and it underscores the possibility that, while some of this history is well known, the task of locating and recovering looted art is slow to yield results. The Gurlitt revelation is an exception, and much remains hidden in the shadows.