In an essay on art and morality, Robert Hughes argued that Americans "seem to feel that the main justification for art is its therapeutic power," that it is a moralising influence in itself. Perhaps that attitude, embodied in the personnel of the American Office of Strategic Services in post-war Germany, encouraged their conviction that German art experts who had worked for the Nazis should be tried for war crimes. It is one thing to imagine murderous SS squads plundering treasures and destroying "degenerate" art, quite another to realise that the planning and the plundering were effected not by uniformed thugs but by respected scholars and administrators, art world professionals who should, presumably, have known better.
But for a variety of reasons, including lack of political will, these people were never seriously brought to book. Instead, their careers often resumed after the fall of the Reich, with a brief time-out for "denazification". That fact, more than any other, prompts the anger that occasionally surfaces in Jonathan Petropoulos's exemplary study of how the art world functioned in Nazi Germany.
For Hitler, art was essentially a form of propaganda, useful for inculcating and reinforcing ethnocentric ideas of national and cultural superiority. Essentially, he reshaped the German art world to his own ends, and it should come as no surprise that, as with other spheres of German society, when it came to the crunch the art world fell obediently into line. Those who didn't like it fled the country in droves, leaving the field to second-raters, or, as in the case of the painter Emil Nolde, whose support for the regime was not reciprocated, lived in a state of "inner exile".
Petropoulos deals with five occupations: gallery directors, dealers, critics, artists and art historians. His account of a key figure in each area is augmented by shorter studies of ancillary individuals. This series of comparative biographies reveals a recurrent pattern of deepening involvement with the regime, typically graduating from opportunistic party membership via more overt careerism to unambiguous participation in plundering throughout occupied Europe. In almost every case, a moral Rubicon is crossed through complicity in the systematic expropriation of Jewish property.
"The art dealing business has always attracted people of dubious ethics," as he says. But ethics quickly went by the board all round. Art criticism was policed to the extent that critics were nothing more than mediocre party functionaries peddling the official line. Not that some of them needed much encouragement, as Wolfgang Wollrich's strident denunciations of modern art and artists attest (even Heinrich Himmler found him a bit too extreme), not to mention his by no means untypical obsession with "racial purity".
The sculptor Arno Breker, "Hitler's Michelangelo", enjoyed wealth, power and prestige and never quite seems to have accepted the implications of his immensely profitable involvement with the Nazis or the way they used his work. Though he was never publicly rehabilitated, he remained a darling of the political right. A thoroughly nasty individual, the personable Salzburger Kajetan Muhlmann, "arguably the single most prodigious art plunderer in the history of human civilisation," managed to avoid "both post-war justice and the scrutiny of historians". This despite the eloquently understated verdict of an Allied interrogator that: "he does not care about art; he is a liar and a vile person".
All victorious armies plunder, as some apologists for the Nazis have argued in exculpation, but Petropoulos's case is that the institutionalisation of the process in Nazi Germany, its inextricable association with anti-Semitism and ethnic cleansing - which he demonstrates very convincingly through an overwhelming mass of detail - makes it part of "a continuum that ended in murder".
One of the most dispiriting things about his book is that, search as you might in case after case for some mitigating factor, some redeeming feature, none materialises. A more venal, self-serving, self-deceiving, duplicitous bunch it would be hard to find. Yet none of them was spectacularly evil. Rather they were weak in an average, all too recognisable way. The opportunities presented by circumstances simply magnified the flaws in their characters. While, Petropoulos writes, they must at some stage have known they were doing wrong, their subsequent efforts at self- justification were not straightforwardly dishonest. He cites Primo Levi's observation about people's ability "to fabricate for themselves a convenient reality". For after all: "Anyone who lies in good faith is better off."
Aidan Dunne is Art Critic of the Irish Times
