Art Criticism - The State University of New York

y old masters that were more suitable to Nazi tastes. Each step of the exchange
profited, Goering himself using money he obtained from the deal to
purchase tapestries for his home. This personal gain was hidden by the simultaneous
buying and selling of works for Hitler, which gave Goering the appearance
of disposing of the works in a proper manner for the greater purity of
Germany. It is also important to recognize that it was Goering's idea to sell the
degenerate works, suggesting that he had plans to gain from their selling all
along.
The selling of degenerate art by the Nazi party would last until 1942,
with the war making art dealings increasingly difficult. Most of the capital that
was accumulated through these sales went into special party accounts that
could be used for arms purchases or to buy works aesthetically acceptable by
party standards.40 The biggest of these sales would be an auction that would
take place at the Grand Hotel National in the Swiss town of Lucerne. However,
the Nazis' lack of respect for the art worked against them, as they continually
sold the work for prices far under the possible market value. For example, the
Nationalgalerie sold Beckman's Southern Coast for $20, Kandinsky's Ruhe,
now owned by the Guggenheim Museum in New York, for $100, and Kirchner's
Strassenszene, now owned by MoM A in New York, for $160. 41 The prices
show how eager the Nazi sellers were to get the works out of their possession.
In November of 1941, the Degenerate Art Exhibition, whiCh had been touring
Germany and Austria, came to its thirteenth and la~t venue. At this time, only
eight paintings, one sculpture, and thirty-two graphic works remained of the
original exhibition. 42 The rest of the 650 works had been sold for foreign currency
and replaced by confiscated works. Of the works for which Goebbels
was responsible, 300 paintings and 3,000 graphic works were sold between
1938 and 1941.43 The attitude the Nazi sellers had towards modern art is without
doubt disrespectful, but they also paid it a compliment. The hurried pace
with which they sought to get rid of the work suggests a fear of the art; their
need to get rid of the art acknowledges that the art is powerful, and if their
measures are an indication of their fear, then they must have thought the work
to be among the most powerful in history.
But the exportation of undesirable works was only half of the task set
forth by Hitler. The other half was the building of a national collection of pure
German wor~ that would make all other collections pale in comparison. Hitler
dreamed of making his hometown ofLinz the "German Budapest."44 In 1941,
just as the Linz project began with 497 paintings, Washington's National Gallery
opened with 475. Fifty years later, the Washington National Gallery had
3,000 works of art. By 1945, Linz had acquired (through the looting of foreign
territories and the confiscation Jewish families' possessions) 8,000 works, not
including those of other affiliated agencies on which it could call at any time. 45
That is an acquisition rate of five or six major works, such as by Vermeer, Durer,
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Art Criticism