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.}