Displaying items by tag: neue galerie

Cosmetics heir and museum patron Ronald Lauder has enlisted the  Washington, D.C. lobbying firm American Continental Group (ACG) to assist in his campaign to get museums to return Nazi-looted art to the heirs of its original owners, reports O'Dwyer's, based on a public filing.

Lauder is the president of the World Jewish Congress and the founder of New York's Neue Galerie.

“Russian Modernism: Cross-Currents of German and Russian Art, 1907-1917” at the Neue Galerie is a lively, scattershot exhibition, with numerous paintings of great interest, others of not so much and many by Russian artists most of us have barely heard of.

Containing 53 paintings and 21 works on paper, the show spans a decade when modern art movements were breaking out all over Europe — Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada and De Stijl. To the east, Russia was no exception. The show’s ambitious title introduces an immense subject that is beyond the resources of this small jewel-box museum.

In 2006, the art collector Ronald S. Lauder purchased Gustav Klimt’s “Adele Bloch-Bauer I” (1907) for $135 million, then the highest price paid for a painting, and made it the crown jewel of the Neue Galerie, the museum he founded in 2001. Since then other paintings have sold for considerably higher sums, adjusted for inflation, including those by Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin.

If some of the luster was lost from Klimt’s masterpiece as other works eclipsed its sale price, it is being renewed with the release of the movie “Woman in Gold.” It tells the tale of how Adele Bloch-Bauer’s niece, Maria Altmann (1916-2011), played by Helen Mirren, succeeded in gaining ownership of her aunt’s portrait from the Austrian government decades after it was looted by the Nazis and displayed by the Belvedere in Vienna.

"Degenerate Art" is the term Adolf Hitler and his henchmen used to describe works they simply did not like. The Nazis are long gone. Much of the art they denounced has survived, and is now on view. Here's Erin Moriarty of "48 Hours":

In the cultural capital that was Berlin in the early 1930s, art and politics often clashed, with modern artists like George Grosz leading the charge.

"Grosz was fearless, and whether it was his art or politics, he spoke his mind," said Jonathan Petropoulos, a history professor at Claremont McKenna College in California. "He was probably the most famous Communist artist in Germany at the time, and he used his art as a weapon."