After WWII, the US Army took (i.e. looted) 9,250 Nazi-era artworks by Germans, bringing them to America. Most have been returned, but 450 objects remain in the Army’s possession. All of this art, in the US and Germany, is kept away from the public and very little of it has been seen.

Professor Gregory Maertz of St. John’s University has spent years tracking it down, and he has photographed every one of the 9,250 works and has amassed 50,000 related documents. He’s working on not one, not two, but five books about these controversial, unviewable works that form a lost chapter in art history:

His research on the real canon of Nazi art is appearing as a trilogy—The Invisible Museum: Unearthing the Lost Modernist Art of the Third Reich (forthcoming, Yale UP), House of Art: A Cultural History of Nazi Germany, and The Last Taboo: The Rehabilitation of Nazi Artists in Postwar Germany—and in two free-standing volumes, Modernism and Nazi Painting and Nazi Art: Images, Texts, and Documents.

You can listen to his lecture, “Nazi Art in Museums? Canonization and Controversy,” and read his article “The Invisible Museum: Unearthing the Lost Modernist Art of the Third Reich“:

The importance of these materials lies in their ability to shatter two of the most enduring myths associated with Nazi Germany and its post-war occupation. The first myth to crumble on contact with the evidence is that official American policy with respect to German cultural properties did not include art looting. The second and most stubborn Nazi-era myth dispelled by my discovery of the “German War Art Collection” is that of the complete ideological incompatibility of the National Socialist aesthetic with Modernist painting.

According to the master narrative of 20th-century German art history, the opening of the Entartete Kunstausstellung [Degenerate Art Exhibition] in July 1937 in Munich’s Haus der Deutschen Kunst [House of German Art] rang the death knell of the avant garde in Nazi Germany and the practice of “real art,” that is, Modernism, resumed only after the fall of the NS regime. The pages that follow will provide evidence for the startling fact that certain types of Modernist art not only survived in Germany after 1937, but that “Nazi Modernism” was produced under the official patronage of Adolf Hitler and the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht [the German Armed Forces High Command]. That the production of Modernist art could have been sponsored by the very institution responsible for the bloody conquest and brutal occupation of Europe is not inconsistent with the crucial role played by violent imagery and militaristic rhetoric in other strands of Modernism, such as Italian Futurism and British Vorticism. But until now evidence has been lacking or insufficient to support such an apparently counterintuitive concept as “Nazi Modernist” art.

{The image is Dunkirk by Otto Engelhardt-Kyffhauser, from Nazi War Art: 1940-1944. It is not necessarily one of the looted works covered by Maertz.}

{Thanks to Susan Maret, Ph.D.}

From the Washington Post:

Yes, she liked to read the Bible, but she devoured gothic romance novels, too.

The fact that so little is known about Martha and that she has been cast throughout American history as First Frump is, in part, her fault. In the days after George Washington died, she, as was the custom of well-known people of her time, burned all their correspondence. So we know George wrote two youthful love letters bursting with yearning and passion to Sally Fairfax, even though she was the wife of his good friend. We have a really bad poem he wrote as a teen to a young Virginia beauty (”Rays, you have, more transparent than the sun . . . “). We have no idea what he wrote to Martha.

Therapy, therapy is vomiting things up. Art is about eating your own vomit.

Comics legend Art Spiegelman (Maus) had this exchange with an interviewer from New York magazine:

I’ve always been intrigued by the amount of inner dialogue and self-analysis in your work. Is drawing a therapy of some sort for you?
She said on the phone, she asked yet again about art and therapy. He said in a fit of pique, as he had done to a journalist a mere month ago, “NO!” Therapy, therapy is vomiting things up. Art is about eating your own vomit.” There’s a therapeutic aspect to all making, but the nature of working is to compress, condense, and shape stuff, not to just expunge it. It’s not just an exorcism.

I hadn’t thought of it that way — therapy as vomiting.
I hadn’t either, until I snarled at someone asking me about therapy one time too many! I didn’t mean to give you a hard time. You asked about the meta, self-conscious awareness thing — I just went into an inner monologue, that’s all!

A dozen motivational poster spoofs featuring the words of Kurt Vonnegut. Ah, if only they were real and being hung up in workplaces around the world….

[via Readerville]

For the first time, the Louvre is exhibiting comics and graphic novels. The museum commissioned five artists to each create a graphic novel centered around the Louvre. Giant reproductions of some of the panels are on display, and two of the graphic novels have already been published (with the others on their way).

The two that have been published:

Museum Vaults: Excerpts from the Journal of an Expert by Marc-Antoine Mathieu (excerpts here):

Glacial Period by Nicolas de Crécy (excerpts here):

The other three artists are Éric Liberge (”Odd Hours”), Hirohiko Araki (”Rohan at the Louvre”), and Bernard Yslaire. Yslaire gave a live performance during the opening, according to this not-always-clear AP article:

In the hazy lighting and hollow stone walls of the Louvre’s Medieval hall, Bernar Yslaire brought the latest character from his comic strip “The Sky above the Louvre” — a tempestuous young revolutionary — to life.

The Belgian cartoonist, 52, invited the live audience into his digital world of comics, where images are created not with a sketchpad and crayon, but at the click of a mouse.

“My comic strip is done exclusively on a digital screen, there is no paper at all,” Yslaire says. “We are in the 21st century of communication.”

Using his “electronic pencil,” each carefully poised click slowly revealed his protagonist: first the raging, raven eyes, then a sharp, angular nose, unkempt curly hair and finally the broad shoulders.

Jeff at Crushing Krisis blog attended the opening day and gives his thoughts here.

The Louvre’s page about the exhibition.

[ADDED:] It’s great that the world’s most famous museum has finally allowed comics into its hallowed halls, but did they have to do it in such a half-assed, self-serving way? To get into the Louvre, these artists had to create new art … about the Louvre. It’s as if the museum is assuring people that comics artists can address serious topics like … the Louvre.  Never mind that they’ve been covering the Holocaust, Israel and Palestine, cancer, the Bible, 9/11, and other weighty topics. Weren’t the existing works of Eisner, Miller, Crumb, Ware, Barry, et al good enough? How about Maus, The Sandman, Watchmen, Lost Girls, Sin City, Love and Rockets, and the wordless graphic novels from the first half of the twentienth century, not to mention comic strips like Little Nemo, Prince Valiant, Peanuts…. Hopefully, this is just the first step. Once the Louvre’s gatekeepers see that this exhibition didn’t cause the walls to cave in, they’ll put together a serious exhibition, and maybe add comic art to their permanent collection.

Poets & Writers magazine highlights the work of artist Richard Baker, who paints still-lifes of books.

“As physical objects they are powerful fetishes, icons, containers of every conceivable thought and/or emotion,” Baker writes. “We cart them from home to work on our commutes and they accompany us on vacations. We move them carefully packed in boxes from one domicile to another, from one phase of life to another.”

“As our personalities are changed (or not) by them, so too do they absorb impressions of our lives,” Baker writes. “Each book becomes its own unique individual, most especially true of the lowly paperback.”

Over at GOOD magazine’s blogs, Anne Trubek ponders what they mean.

Edward Gorey - the illustrator and writer whose macabre, darkly humorous Edwardian-Gothic style is immediately recognizable, even if his name isn’t - wrote over a hundred small books, the best-known probably being The Gashlycrumb Tinies (an ABC book in which 26 children meet gruesome ends. A digital bootleg us here).

A lot of the late Gorey’s work has been reprinted over the years, but his etiquette-book parody The Recently Deflowered Girl (1965) isn’t one of them (and it doesn’t seem likely to be). Copies go for around $100 on the antiquarian market. Luckily for us, someone at LiveJournal scanned the entire thing, but it was pulled, whether for drawing too much traffic or for copyright violation, we don’t know.

Now it’s mirrored at the “Accordian Guy’s” blog here.