"Entartete" Straßenbahn ~ Tuesday, November 12, 2013

There is a story in the news about a huge cache of modern art found in an apartment in Munich. The collection comes from a show of modern "degenerate" art put on by the Nazi regime in 1937, with pieces confiscated from museums and from Jewish and/or left-wing collectors, intended to shock the public and make them associate aesthetic and intellectual freedom with mental illness (modern art was shown side-by-side with pictures drawn by inmates of asylums).

Ironically, official disapproval of the works did not prevent some of the organizers from appreciating them (at least their value), and the recently discovered cache (worth probably in the billions) ended up in the possession of the son of one of them.

The authorities have begun releasing pictures of some of the pictures, and they are shockingly unshocking for the most part (and I'm saying this as someone who has, in fact, seen a few pieces of art that I questioned the merits of--a wedding dress made of used and apparently unwashed underwear we saw at SFMoma comes to mind). Plenty just seem like nicely done pictures, such as the example below which I came across browsing through the collection online, which will readily explain my posting about such a heavy subject in an otherwise fairly frivolous blog!

Bernhard Kretschmar: „Straßenbahn“, undatiertes Aquarell