Catherine Hickley

That 1990 painting by Norbert Wagenbrett, called “Aufbruch” (“Awakening”), is part of a sweeping new exhibition staged for the 30th anniversary of the peaceful uprising that culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall. The show, running through Nov. 3 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig, is just a few hundred yards from the church where activists began regularly gathering in 1989 to push for change in the stifling, authoritarian East Germany, officially known as the German Democratic Republic, or GDR.

The exhibition, “Point of No Return,” is billed as the biggest so far of East German art, featuring 300 works by more than 100 artists, including dissidents who defied the communist regime and established figures who taught in its institutions.

The range of perspectives on the fall of the Berlin Wall is correspondingly diverse. But the mood is almost universally somber — far removed from the fireworks and self-congratulatory speeches that usually accompany official anniversary celebrations.

Works like Wagenbrett’s “Aufbruch” are a reminder that what was largely perceived as a momentous, euphoric event in the West was, in East Germany, an era of great danger, anxiety and upheaval. The two young people in the earth are not experiencing a glorious rebirth; it is both perilous and painful.

After 1989, many East German state enterprises were sold to Western companies and taken over (or closed down); many museums and arts institutions also got new leaders from the West. A simmering resentment at these perceived indignities persists among older East Germans — a sense that the people of a country that vanished from the map were sidelined in the process of German reunification.

Paul Kaiser, one of the curators of “Point of No Return,” said that “30 years after the fall of the wall, the process of categorizing East German art within the Pan-German context is still conflict-ridden and incomplete.” The exhibition was “a further step in synthesizing the history of East German art into German art history,” he added, and in countering its “politicization and devaluation.”

After 1989, the art of East Germany was often dismissed in the West as the product of a totalitarian regime under which artistic freedom was severely limited. In 1990, in a debate that became known as the “bilderstreit,” or “battle over pictures,” painter Georg Baselitz said in a magazine interview that there were “no artists in the GDR.” Anyone who could paint had left, he said — as both he and Gerhard Richter, now the two top-selling German artists, had done before the Berlin Wall was erected.

Kaiser prompted a rancorous revival of the debate in 2017, when he wrote a newspaper opinion piece expressing dismay that the main showcase of modern art in Dresden, a city in the former East Germany, had consigned art produced under the dictatorship to the depot. The museum’s director, Hilke Wagner, who refuted Kaiser’s claim, was inundated with hate mail.

The debate became a proxy battlefield for a host of festering East German grievances. The Dresden museum, the Albertinum, responded by staging a show of East German art in 2018, accompanied by a program of talks and events aimed at bringing the public into the museum for open discussions.

Other institutions in the former East Germany, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig and the Moritzburg Art Museum in Halle, have picked up the baton, unearthing stores of East German art from their depots and retooling their permanent displays to raise the profile of the works.

But gaps in museum collections remain — particularly in the case of artists who were either dissidents or working under the official radar. More than 70% of works on show in “Point of No Return” are loans, many from the artists themselves. That allows for plenty of discoveries. One room in the show is dominated by a series of melancholy large-format paintings called “Passages” by Doris Ziegler, a Leipzig artist whose work has rarely been exhibited.

“In 1988, we all thought the GDR would stay as it was till we die,” Ziegler said in a recent interview. “The situation was ridiculous but also threatening. The climate was gray, it was moribund. Best friends and colleagues had left, and I was constantly asking myself whether I should leave, too.”

The “point of no return” referred to in the exhibition’s title is Nov. 9, 1989, the night when crowds of East Germans breached the Berlin Wall. The crowds streaming across the border are captured in a 1989 painting by Trak Wendisch as a river of light against a lugubrious violet and black cityscape.

But the show also examines what Kaiser called “the cracks in the wall” that began developing in the early 1980s. The East German regime was among the most rigid in the eastern bloc in rejecting the avant-garde in the 1950s and ’60s, dismissing art that was abstract or expressionist as “decadent,” “formalistic,” or “revisionist.” But it began to loosen its grip on creative activity, starting in the 1970s.

“The fall of the Berlin Wall was not an instantaneous change for artists; it was the symbolic culmination of a process,” Kaiser said in an interview. “There was a momentum toward it, a processing of winning back artistic freedom.”

From the early 1980s, pockets of relatively free artistic expression began to develop in ramshackle apartment blocks in dilapidated districts of big East German cities, he said, including Neustadt in Dresden and Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin.

Many of the artworks of this era address a feeling of entrapment and desperation to escape. A 1984 work by Stefan Plenkers, “Boat Cemetery,” depicts a beach strewn with fragments of boats and the heads of two people with their backs turned to the viewer, as though staring out to sea longingly, but stranded because the vessels are all broken. A 1983 work by Wendisch, “Man With Suitcase,” shows its subject crossing a demarcation line from East to West Berlin.

Yet freedom, when it came, was not unequivocally welcomed. Perhaps one of the most unnerving works in the show is by Willi Sitte, a committed socialist and the long-serving president of East Germany’s official artists’ association.

For some, he was the epitome of a “state artist,” but in the 1960s, he fought for greater artistic independence and was put under surveillance by the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police. His 1990 work, “Erdgeister” (“Earth Spirits”) shows the artist upside down, his head buried in the mud. All around him are East German workers in the same position. For, Sitte, the world had been turned on its head.

Point of No ReturnThrough Nov. 3 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig, Germany; mdbk.de.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/arts/design/east-german-art.html" id="39599248-efaf-36da-a989-f2bfc86a6f89">The New York Times</a>.

LEIPZIG, Germany — A young woman and man are submerged in dry, cracked earth. Only their hands and faces are visible; they seem to be trying to pull themselves out.

30 Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall, East German Art Gets Its Due

Hungry crowds stormed the Führerbau, the Führer’s building. First they looted the food, the liquor and the furniture. Then they turned to the air-raid cellar, which was filled with art, climbing over piles of Panzerfaust anti-tank grenades to get at the paintings.

“By the end of the second day,” Edgar Breitenbach, an art intelligence officer in the U.S. Army, wrote in a 1949 report “when the looting was finally stopped, all the pictures were gone.”

It was a moment of incongruity: Hitler, the man who turned the illegal seizure of art into a national trade, had his own plunder ransacked.

Now the Central Institute for Art History in Munich has conducted the first comprehensive investigation into the fate of the art that was stored in the Führer’s building and the adjacent Nazi headquarters.

A lot of it had been ferried there by dealers who scavenged for art across occupied Europe to help fill Hitler’s planned “Führermuseum” in Linz, his hometown. Most of those works were already stored in Austrian salt mines to protect them from bombings.

But the Munich buildings still held some 1,500 works, the researchers found, and at least 700 were looted in the two-day spree — many more than previously thought. Much of the art was already stolen property, having been confiscated by the Nazis from Jewish collections. Hundreds of the works stored there, for example, had been taken from the family of Adolphe Schloss, a French Jew who had collected the Dutch and Flemish old masters that Hitler revered.

In the aftermath of the looting, the authorities were able to recover almost 300 paintings, many in the weeks after the plunder. Some were found buried in a nearby potato patch. In 1948, 30 paintings were found in a house a few minutes’ walk from the Führerbau.

The recovery work was aided by the so-called Monuments Men, officers of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives unit of the U.S. Army, but there were not enough of them to trace so many missing objects.

And in the decades that followed, German officials did not do much to track the more than 400 works still missing, perhaps sheepishly avoiding making a state claim to objects that had been stolen by their predecessors in the Third Reich.

Now, though, the German government, spurred by the new research, is making a serious effort toward finding the works.

It is belatedly reporting the 1945 thefts, painting by painting, to Interpol and to the German Federal Criminal Police Office, and is also listing them on the Art Loss Register and lostart.de, two databases of missing art.

It is hoping that by posting details about the missing artworks, it will alert dealers to art that may have been looted from Jews, and possibly result in its return.

So far, the research has managed to find traces of some three dozen of the missing works. One is in the Fisher Museum of Art at the University of Southern California, which discovered 14 years ago that a painting in its collection had been looted from the Führerbau.

The painting by Gerard Dou, “Still Life With Book and Purse,” entered the collection in 1964 as part of a donation by Armand Hammer, who had purchased it in New York in 1947. But its prewar ownership history, and the circumstances of how it went to Hitler, remain unclear.

“We are always interested in receiving more information about the pieces in our collection that might be in any way problematic,” Selma Holo, the executive director of USC Museums, wrote in an email. The museum, she said, “will always do the right thing with respect to its holdings.”

One obstacle to the full restitution of works, even when they are found, is a principle of German law known as Ersitzung. It dictates that someone who acquires an item in good faith and possesses it for 10 years becomes the rightful owner. So in Germany, even in cases where the government seeks to restitute a work it has found, it can be difficult to dislodge it legally from a collector who bought it without knowledge that it was stolen.

Stephan Klingen, an art historian involved in the research project, said he would like the government, in such situations, to consider buying the works.

“It would be good if the government would take responsibility, acquire the works, do the provenance research and restitute where necessary,” he said. “This would also help the current holders, who may have purchased the works in good faith, but will now find them difficult to sell.”

The German government remains the owner of record for the hundreds of works that were, despite the U.S. Army’s first impression, left behind by the Munich looters in 1945. Since 2000 the government has restituted 54 of those works after concluding that they had been stolen from Jews.

Other efforts have been less successful.

Klingen said that in 2009 he spotted a painting by Frans Francken the Younger, “The Sermon on the Mount,” on the German TV equivalent of “Antiques Roadshow.” He recognized it as a work that had been destined for the planned museum in Linz and had been stolen from the Führerbau. He alerted the police.

There were some indications that the work had been seized from a Jewish collection, but they were far from conclusive. So the court returned it to the last holders of the painting, the descendants of a man, the caretaker of a German army barracks, who had lived in Munich in 1945. The court ruled that the heirs did not know it had been stolen, and thus were entitled to possess it through a good-faith inheritance under the Ersitzung rule.

From the disappointment of that effort was born the Central Institute for Art History’s decision to do extensive research into the entire set of works still missing from Munich.

“These works surface sporadically at auction, and it is likely more will come up,” Klingen said. “We think it is important to raise awareness of their history and develop a policy for dealing with them instead of starting from scratch each time one emerges. The legal environment is not favorable for restitution to the heirs of the original owners.”

In a case from 2017, the government tried to intervene when a portrait of two girls by Franz von Stuck that was destined for Linz appeared in a catalog for an auction in Cologne.

The government persuaded the auction house to withdraw it from sale so researchers would have time to examine the provenance. But they found no evidence that the painting had been looted from a Jewish collection and the private collector held good title to the work under the Ersitzung rule. So the sale to another private collection went forward. Down the road, if it emerges that the work was indeed looted from a Jewish collector, experts say it may prove difficult to find again.

As the decades pass, it is certainly true that multiple transfers and legal complexities in varying jurisdictions make it increasingly hard to trace looted art and to resolve tangled questions of ownership.

Breitenbach, the Army intelligence officer, saw the steep road ahead when, writing in 1949, he wondered whether much of this belated detective work could have been avoided with just a few minor bribes in the desperate days at the close of the war.

“It’s a pity,” he offered, “that Army regulations at that time did not permit the use of rewards in the form of food and cigarettes. This would almost certainly have been instrumental in recovering considerable parts of the stolen collection.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/arts/design/hitler-looted-the-art-then-they-looted-hitler.html" id="8a0aedcc-febc-3349-a773-5f98d7dd36e0">The New York Times</a>.

Chaos reigned in the bomb-ravaged streets of Munich on April 29, 1945. American troops were closing in. Adolf Hitler was a day away from killing himself in his bunker in Berlin. The Nazi guards who protected important buildings had fled.

Hitler Looted the Art, Then They Looted Hitler

Chaos reigned in the bomb-ravaged streets of Munich on April 29, 1945. American troops were closing in. Hitler was a day away from killing himself in his bunker in Berlin. The Nazi guards who protected important buildings had fled.

Her decision, widely discussed in German media, was interpreted as a symbolic gesture: a belated official rejection of an artist who yearned for Adolf Hitler’s approval and thought that banishing Jews from the country was a good idea.

One of the works, “Breakers,” from 1936, shows crashing dark green waves against a fiery evening sky; the other, from 1915, depicts a flower garden. The decision to remove them came just a week after Felix Krämer, an art historian and Nolde expert, questioned in a newspaper article whether “the works of a committed Nazi are appropriate” in the chancellery.

Merkel said at a news conference last Thursday that she was returning the paintings to their owner, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, because they were needed for an exhibition in Berlin. The show, “Emil Nolde. A German Legend: The Artist During National Socialism,” opens at the Hamburger Bahnhof museum Friday and runs through Sept. 15. It aims to dispel myths surrounding Nolde’s career and art in the Third Reich.

Since the end of World War II, Nolde has been cherished by a broad public for his radiant landscapes and vibrantly colored flowers. But Nolde’s checkered biography has been whitewashed over the decades. Many Germans got to know Nolde as a victim of the Nazis; the exhibition will show that while his art was persecuted, the artist himself was not.

The Berlin show is based on new research that only became possible after a change of leadership at the Ada and Emil Nolde Foundation, which the painter created to manage his archive and to run a museum of his work. Christian Ring, who took over in 2013 and is one of the curators of the Berlin exhibition, started to become aware that it had been involved in reputation-laundering during preparations for a 2014 retrospective in Frankfurt.

He decided to open the archives, containing some 25,000 documents, to independent experts to conduct an examination of Nolde’s life and work under the Nazis. “It was time to put all our cards on the table,” Ring said.

Nolde was an ardent anti-Semite and a fanatical Nazi. Yet he was also condemned by the regime as a “degenerate” artist. After World War II, he embellished and dramatized his victimhood and played down his complicity in his letters and interviews with journalists, and this was the story that caught on.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, Nolde was 65 and established as one of the most successful artists of the Weimar Republic, celebrated as a pioneer of “new German art.” A swastika banner hung over his home near the Danish border in 1933, and Nolde joined the Nazi party in 1934. He hoped to be appointed an official state artist and had many fans in the upper ranks of the National Socialists. Yet he also faced accusations that his work was “alien to the people,” and Hitler hated it, describing him in 1933 as “that pig Nolde.”

Nolde’s work “The Life of Christ” was the centerpiece of the infamous 1937 “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Munich, mounted by the Nazis to defame and ridicule art considered “un-German.” In 1941, the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts imposed a requirement that Nolde had to have any sales or exhibitions authorized.

In his memoirs, Nolde exaggerated and misrepresented the ban, saying that he had been forbidden to paint at all and that it was enforced by visits from the Gestapo. He called a series of small-format watercolors he produced toward the end of the war his “Unpainted Pictures,” and said they were studies for oil paintings that he had been prohibited from making.

These myths took root and grew. After his death in 1956, the Nolde Foundation exhibited the “Unpainted Pictures” in a special room at the museum and excised anti-Semitic passages from new editions of his memoirs. In 1963, a book on the “Unpainted Pictures” by eminent German art historian Werner Haftmann falsely claimed that Nolde turned away from Nazism in 1943.

But the biggest boost to Nolde’s image came with the 1968 publication of Siegfried Lenz’s best-selling novel, “The German Lesson,” which is still required reading in German schools today. It centers on an artist called Max Ludwig Nansen, widely understood to be based on Nolde, who produces a series he calls “invisible pictures” when he is banned from painting by the Nazis.

Particularly among the generation that grew up in the 1960s, embittered with their parents for enabling dictatorship and war, Lenz’s novel elevated Nolde’s “Unpainted Pictures” to symbols of heroic artistic resistance against a tyrannical regime. The foundation’s museum was flooded with visitors.

Until 2013, the Nolde Foundation “remained wedded to the Nolde legend, the story that had been selling so well,” said Bernhard Fulda, a Cambridge historian and one of the independent experts who examined the archive. “In a way, the foundation had started to believe its own propaganda.”

The other expert, Aya Soika, a professor of art history at Bard College Berlin, recalled writing an email to the foundation in 2003, asking whether there were letters in the archive referring to an ugly incident in 1933, when Nolde incorrectly reported the artist Max Pechstein as a Jew to the Propaganda Ministry.

The foundation never responded to Soika’s request. But when she finally gained access to the archive in 2013, she discovered a file labeled “E.N. and Jews.” The document at the top was her unanswered email.

The research by Fulda and Soika compelled the foundation to admit, in 2016, to “errors of judgment in the past.” Ring said he intended to digitize the entire archive and make it available online. He has also updated texts in the permanent exhibition at the museum to reflect the new research.

Whether Merkel’s decision to hand back her two paintings was motivated by the artist’s unsavory past is unclear. Only one was required for the exhibition, but a spokesman told reporters that the chancellor would not take either one back after the show ends. Other paintings will be displayed instead.

Krämer, the art historian who first questioned whether it was appropriate to hang Nolde works in the chancellery, said he thought it was the right decision. “The chancellor’s fast reaction speaks in her favor,” he said.

But Fulda wasn’t so sure. “If Angela Merkel had a picture of an eagle sitting on a swastika, we would say ‘Whoa, what is going on?’” he said. “But with Nolde, it’s very much a case of what you do with it. She could say to visitors, ‘The German past is a complex one. There is guilt, there is complicity, there is looking away, there is beauty.’”

So perhaps Nolde succeeded in being a quintessentially German artist — just not in the way he envisaged.

This article originally appeared in <a id="dd1d0fb3-139b-4cef-9485-12bdd7cf953e" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/arts/nolde-nazi-exhibition-berlin-merkel.html">The New York Times</a>.

Stripping away lies to expose a painter's Nazi past

BERLIN — Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said last week that she would be taking down two oil paintings by Emil Nolde, an expressionist whose work she greatly admires, from the walls of her office.

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Catherine Hickley

Articles written by the author

30 Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall, East German Art Gets Its Due

Hitler Looted the Art, Then They Looted Hitler

Hitler Looted the Art, Then They Looted Hitler

Stripping away lies to expose a painter's Nazi past