The filmmaker associates Third Reich ideology with the potential to lose oneself in fascination and obsession.
Nazi Germany
Posted inArt
The Fascist Messaging of the Trump Campaign Eagle
Trump and his surrogates have repeatedly and blatantly integrated fascist aesthetics into the campaign. This T-shirt design is only the latest example.
Posted inFilm
Jojo Rabbit, Billed as a Satire About Nazis, Lacks Any Actual Satirical Wit
Writer-Director Taika Waititi’s latest falls into the same trap of films like Green Book — that marginalized people have to work to prove their humanity
Posted inFilm
How and Why Art Became “Degenerate” in Nazi Germany
Narrated in Italian by actor Toni Servillo and directed by Claudio Poli, the film somewhat drowsily recounts the madness of the Nazi’s quest to first sanitize, and then steal the art of Europe.
Posted inHistory
The Disturbing Force of Early Color Photos of Nazi Camps
12 Nazi Concentration Camps is a body of work by James Friedman who, in the early ’80s, took the largely unprecedented step of documenting Nazi camps in color photography.
Posted inNews
Nazi Artifacts Found in Secret Room at Collector’s Home in Argentina
Over 75 Nazi artifacts were discovered hidden behind a bookcase in a suburban Buenos Aires home.
Posted inArt
The Many Lives of Degenerate Art
It’s not often that a museum gets to directly respond to front-page, bolded-headline media coverage with an exhibition that both nourishes the public’s curiosity about the reported phenomenon and expands the perception of it as well. Deliberately or otherwise, Neue Galerie couldn’t have timed it better.
Posted inNews
Nazi-Era Munich Trove Includes 39 Toulouse-Lautrec Works
Among the 1,406 artworks discovered throughout the Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt are 39 pieces by French painter and printmaker Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The works are all drawings and prints.
Posted inNews
1,500 Works of Nazi-Looted Art Discovered in Munich
First reported in the German media, news broke yesterday of an estimated €1bn ($1.35bn) of Nazi-seized art uncovered during a raid on an octogenarian’s Munich apartment in 2011. A total of 1,500 works — paintings by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Max Beckmann, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka — are reported to have been stashed in a dark room, sharing space on homemade shelves with “juice cartons and tins of food.”
Posted inOpinion
The Nazi Ties of Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys is a canonical postwar artist, but was he really as progressive and enlightened as we’ve come to believe, and as he led us to think? A new biography of the artist, written by German-born Swiss author Hans Peter Riegel, kicks up the age-old debate about the separation of the artist and the art by contending that Beuys was actually a dedicated follower of the occultist and racist ideas propagated by philosopher Rudolf Steiner, and that he hung out with quite a few former Nazis.
Posted inOpinion
Required Reading
This week on Required Reading … a look back to Napoleon in Egypt … a history of mural whitewashing in Los Angeles … the preservation of the Watts Towers … Steven Heller tracks dowing the master style guide to the Master Race … what is “The Future of Art” … are you ready for the Singularity?
Posted inArt
Anselm Kiefer Talks Religion, Politics, Ruins at 92Y
When Anselm Kiefer took the stage at 92nd Street Y last night, it wasn’t as the artistic-political bad boy the artist became famous as in the 60s and 70s, nor was it the epic mythologist of the 80s and 90s. Now, Kiefer cuts a figure of mischievous respect, a patrician of the contemporary art world whose work, unlike most of his peers, has actually retained its vitality and provocative nature over the years.
Kiefer’s conversation covered everything from the influence of religion on his work to the inspiration of ruins, the artist’s birth in a cave during World War II, and his opinion that all art produced during the Third Reich is “shit.”
