Lucy Wasensteiner - Böcker

This book represents the first study dedicated to Twentieth Century German Art, the 1938 London exhibition that was the largest international response to the cultural policies of National Socialist Germany and the infamous Munich exhibition Degenerate Art. Provenance research into the catalogued exhibits has enabled a full reconstruction of the show for the first time: its contents and form, its contributors and their motivations, and its impact both in Britain and internationally. Presenting the research via six case-study exhibits, the book sheds new light on the exhibition and reveals it as one of the largest émigré projects of the period, which drew contributions from scores of German émigré collectors, dealers, art critics, and from the ‘degenerate’ artists themselves. The book explores the show’s potency as an anti-Nazi statement, which prompted a direct reaction from Hitler himself.

This book represents the first study dedicated to Twentieth Century German Art, the 1938 London exhibition that was the largest international response to the cultural policies of National Socialist Germany and the infamous Munich exhibition Degenerate Art. Provenance research into the catalogued exhibits has enabled a full reconstruction of the show for the first time: its contents and form, its contributors and their motivations, and its impact both in Britain and internationally. Presenting the research via six case-study exhibits, the book sheds new light on the exhibition and reveals it as one of the largest émigré projects of the period, which drew contributions from scores of German émigré collectors, dealers, art critics, and from the ‘degenerate’ artists themselves. The book explores the show’s potency as an anti-Nazi statement, which prompted a direct reaction from Hitler himself.

Early twentieth-century Germany was a site of extremes, in which cultural production was entangled in the swiftly changing political and economic landscape. Radical utopias and pragmatic solutions for life and culture were proposed, modernism embraced and dramatically rejected. Britain in the same period can seem comparatively stable, a nation wedded to established cultural forms in the face of social change. Yet throughout the period, there remained a lively interchange between the two countries. This collection of essays, by scholars working between Britain and Germany, elsewhere in Europe and in North America, looks anew at the complicated cultural relationship between Britain and Germany in the years between 1919 and 1955. It sets out to explore the connections between the two countries during this time in the fields of fine art and arts institutions, architecture, design and craft, photography, art history and criticism. It explores how practitioners in the two countries learned from and influenced each other, seeking to highlight the relevance of these interchanges today.

Almost three decades since the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets, a new awareness of provenance research and practices of restitution has taken hold. This volume brings together voices from academia, museums and the art trade for a critical consideration of these developments, including essays that analyze restitution cases from a legal perspective in the UK, France and Germany, explore provenance as a form of knowledge and through its materiality, and question how international museums and the art market have dealt with provenance and restitution practices in Munich, Vienna, and London. The volume contributes to current debates about the theory and methods of provenance research, today seen as an expanded and multidisciplinary field at the intersection of law, history, anthropology and the art world.A critical look at provenance research and restitutionMultidisciplinary approaches and methodology