Nazi Art Quotes

LADY LAZARUS I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it-- A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot A paperweight, My face a featureless, fine Jew linen. Peel off the napkin O my enemy. Do I terrify?-- The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth? The sour breath Will vanish in a day. Soon, soon the flesh The grave cave ate will be At home on me And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die. This is Number Three. What a trash To annihilate each decade. What a million filaments. The peanut-crunching crowd Shoves in to see Them unwrap me hand and foot-- The big strip tease. Gentlemen, ladies These are my hands My knees. I may be skin and bone, Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman. The first time it happened I was ten. It was an accident. The second time I meant To last it out and not come back at all. I rocked shut As a seashell. They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call. It's easy enough to do it in a cell. It's easy enough to do it and stay put. It's the theatrical Comeback in broad day To the same place, the same face, the same brute Amused shout: 'A miracle!' That knocks me out. There is a charge For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart-- It really goes. And there is a charge, a very large charge For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood Or a piece of my hair or my clothes. So, so, Herr Doktor. So, Herr Enemy. I am your opus, I am your valuable, The pure gold baby That melts to a shriek. I turn and burn. Do not think I underestimate your great concern. Ash, ash-- You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there-- A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling. Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air. -- written 23-29 October 1962

The art of reading, as of learning, is this:… to retain the essential, to forget the nonessential.

If, in time of peace, our museums and art galleries are important to the community, in time of war they are doubly valuable. For then, when the petty and the trivial fall way and we are face to face with final and lasting values, we… must summon to our defense all our intellectual and spiritual resources. We must guard jealously all we have inherited from a long past, all we are capable of creating in a trying present, and all we are determined to preserve in a foreseeable future. Art is the imperishable and dynamic expression of these aims. It is, and always has been, the visible evidence of the activity of free minds.…

That's outrageous! How can you, of all people, be such a racist! You talk about Blacks the way the Nazis talked about the Jews!

There is no rationality in the Nazi hatred: it is hate that is not in us, it is outside of man.. We cannot understand it, but we must understand from where it springs, and we must be on our guard. If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again. Consciences can be seduced and obscured again - even our consciences. For this reason, it is everyone duty to reflect on what happened. Everybody must know, or remember, that when Hitler and Mussolini spoke in public, they were believed, applauded, admired, adored like gods. They were "charismatic leaders" ; they possessed a secret power of seduction that did not proceed from the soundness of things they said but from the suggestive way in which they said them, from their eloquence, from their histrionic art, perhaps instinctive, perhaps patiently learned and practised. The ideas they proclaimed were not always the same and were, in general, aberrant or silly or cruel. And yet they were acclaimed with hosannas and followed to the death by millions of the faithful.

You don’t rewrite it, censor it, or edit it, to suit some warped view you have of the past and your own present.

You have to be a Nazi to think that art is a decorative lie. You have to be a Communist to see art as recreation. You have to be a bourgeois liberal to think it amuses.

We must guard jealously all we have inherited from a long past, all we are capable of creating in a trying present, and all we are determined to preserve in a foreseeable future. Art

As part of his life-saving therapy with suicidal patients and his own experience in a Nazi concentration camp, Frankl learned there are three things that give meaning to life: first, a project; second, a significant relationship; and third, a redemptive view of suffering.

In another part of the city in a ramshackle gallery that had to be reached through a narrow stairway was an exhibition of “degenerate art” which Dr. Goebbels had organized to show the people what Hitler was rescuing them from. It contained a splendid selection of modern paintings—Kokoschka, Chagall and expressionist and impressionist works. The day I visited it, after panting through the sprawling House of German Art, it was crammed, with a long line forming down the creaking stairs and out into the street. In fact, the crowds besieging it became so great that Dr. Goebbels, incensed and embarrassed, soon closed it.

While photographs certainly attest to Nazi crimes, the magnitude of Nazi genocide demands that every trace of the regime be forever remembered. The various symbols devised by the Nazi image-makers for the most sophisticated visual identity of any nation are a vivid reminder of the systematic torture and murder engaged in by this totalitarian state. These pictures, signs, and emblems are not merely clip art for contemporary designers to toy with as they please, but evidence of crimes against humanity.

It dawned on me that at least some of the art my family had lovingly collected might also serve as memorial candles.

humans with their brief lives, these beautiful objects could reach across the generations, each with a story to tell if only one could unlock its secrets.

When bigots get loud, we gotta make our existence even louder.

Austrian Republic established after the war gave an amnesty to 90 per cent of members of the Nazi Party in 1948, and to the SS and Gestapo by 1957.

Hitler is all the war-lords and witch-doctors in history rolled into one. Therefore, argues Wells, he is an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to disappear almost immediately. But unfortunately the equation of science with common sense does not really hold good. The aeroplane, which was looked forward to as a civilising influence but in practice has hardly been used except for dropping bombs, is the symbol of that fact. Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous. Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age.

Exhibit A: I’m guessing you’re no fan of socialism, which was a founding principle of the Nazi movement. The name “Nazi” is an acronym for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which most of today’s Democrat socialists conveniently forget. Actually, that’s an understatement. These people don’t just overlook this truth, they’ve totally rewritten history on the matter. These days, Nazism gets associated with conservatism at the drop of a hat, but historically it stems from the left. Adolf Hitler? An art-loving vegetarian who seized power by wooing voters away from Germany’s Social Democrat and communist parties. Italy’s Benito Mussolini? Raised on Karl Marx’s Das Kapital before starting his career as a left-wing journalist and, later, implementing a deadly fascist regime.

He came to three conclusions which explained to him the success of the Social Democrats: They knew how to create a mass movement, without which any political party was useless; they had learned the art of propaganda among the masses; and, finally, they knew the value of using what he calls “spiritual and physical terror.

Once a nation fell to Germany, great care was taken to refashion that country’s concepts of culture, history, literature, art, media, and entertainment in an effort to solidify and reinforce Hitler’s power. Often, the first cultural pillar to be toppled was the library. Hitler created the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) to confiscate desirable books and other artifacts in occupied territories. They were intended for a Nazi university to be built after the war. Undesirable books, by contrast, were destroyed.

When the Nazis took Paris, the director of the Toledo Museum of Art wrote to David Finley, director of the not yet opened National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to encourage the creation of a national plan, saying, “I know [the possibility of invasion] is remote at the moment, but it was once remote in France.

On my mental instant replay, I realized that obliquely comparing his family to the Nazis was maybe not my finest moment. He was quiet a second, and then he said, 'Did you know that Hitler anted to be an artist, but since he couldn't get into art school, he turned into a Nazi?' 'Yes, I remember that.' 'Just imagine if he got into art school, the whole world would be different.' I said, 'It just shows that people should be allowed to be who they are. If they can't, then they turn into nasty, sad people.' He started to laugh. 'What if you went to the art gallery, and the guy was like, "Here you see a beautiful Monet, and here on your left is an early Hitler." Wouldn't that be weird?' I couldn't think of any subtle way to turn it back around again. He said, 'You would go to the gift shop and buy Hitler postcards, and you'd go, "Oh, look at this beautiful Hitler. I'm going to hang it in my room!" And people would wear Hitler t-shirts.' 'Yes,' I said. 'That would have been better.

A wonderful ferment was working in Germany. Life seemed more free, more modern, more exciting than in any place I had ever seen. Nowhere else did the arts or the intellectual life seem so lively. In contemporary writing, painting, architecture, in music and drama, there were new currents and fine talents. And everywhere there was an accent on youth.

Poet: should you receive the applause of the people, ask yourself: what have I done wrong? ! And if your second book is so received as well, then cast away your pen: you can never be great. […] Art for the people? ! : leave that slogan to the Nazis and Communists: it’s just the opposite: the people (everyman!) are obligated to struggle their way to art!

Art is the imperishable and dynamic expression of these aims. It is, and always has been, the visible evidence of the activity of free minds.…

The mills of justice grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.

History is the art of giving meaning to the meaningless,” said a brilliant German professor (who was later killed by the Nazis).

The first global goal is to fire the fascists.

The storyline also changed with the times, and went from Marla Drake held captive by Nazis in the war years, to mad scientists, gangsters and kidnapping after the war. Miss Fury's adventures were part pulp, part film noir.

World War II had exposed millions of young American men and women to the art and architecture of Europe and Asia and almost overnight created an interest in and appreciation for the arts that would normally require generations to nurture.

To explain the nineteenth century, that is, the contemporary world, one had to consider first what it had been bequeathed from ancient times. Three things, said Chamberlain: Greek philosophy and art, Roman law and the personality of Christ.

When, late in the war, with the Wehrmacht breaking up on all fronts, our planes were sent to destroy this last major city, I doubt if the question was asked, “How will this tragedy benefit us, and how will that benefit compare with the ill-effects in the long run?” Dresden, a beautiful city, built in the art spirit, symbol of an admirable heritage, so anti-Nazi that Hitler visited it but twice during his whole reign, food and hospital center so bitterly needed now—plowed under and salt strewn in the furrows.

Joseph Goebbels had artfully accomplished what all good propagandists must, convincing the world that their version of reality was reasonable and their opponents’ version biased. In doing that, Goebbels had not only created a compelling vision of the new Germany but also undercut the Nazis’ opponents in the West—whether they were American Jews in New York City or members of Parliament in London or anxious Parisians—making all of them seem shrill, hysterical, and misinformed. As thousands of Americans returned home from the games that fall, many of them felt as one quoted in a German propaganda publication did: “As for this man Hitler. . . . Well I believe we should all like to take him back to America with us and have him organize there just as he has done in Germany.

Dozens of paintings could fit those general descriptions. Instead, claimants had to describe their stolen painting in detail, including if possible the canvas measurements—an important identifying point in paintings—and provide documentation of prior ownership.

After Kristallnacht, tight U.S. immigration laws were relaxed somewhat, allowing a trickle of people who wanted to leave Europe to enter the United States. Many of those given priority in a first wave of immigration were artists, writers, composers, and scientists, but even that very circumscribed immigration caused alarm. As late as 1939, 95 percent of Americans did not want any part of a European war.15 And, with the country’s economy still fragile, many people resented those fleeing it as needy hordes who would compete for scarce jobs and dwindling government support. Anti-immigration forces in Congress used fear as an excuse to deny foreigners entry. The House Committee on Un-American Activities was established in 1938 to investigate newcomers suspected of being communists or spies.16 Alarm and insecurity in some soon hardened into paranoia and hatred. In February 1939, twenty-two thousand people marched through Manhattan, giving fascist salutes and carrying U.S. flags as well as banners with swastikas, toward a pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden.

In this sense, Hitler´s painting supports [Hannah] Arendt´s theory of National Socialism--that it was defined by its banality and lack of empathy. The Nazis relied on the ability of people not to imagine themselves in someone else´s shoes. The lack of a connection was very much the point.

A wonderful ferment was working in Germany. Life seemed more free, more modern, more exciting than in any place I had ever seen. Nowhere else did the arts or the intellectual life seem so lively. In contemporary writing, painting, architecture, in music and drama, there were new currents and fine talents. And everywhere there was an accent on youth. One sat up with the young people all night in the sidewalk cafés, the plush bars, the summer camps, on a Rhineland steamer or in a smoke-filled artist’s studio and talked endlessly about life. They were a healthy, carefree, sun-worshiping lot, and they were filled with an enormous zest for living to the full and in complete freedom. The old oppressive Prussian spirit seemed to be dead and buried. Most Germans one met—politicians, writers, editors, artists, professors, students, businessmen, labor leaders—struck you as being democratic, liberal, even pacifist.

Works of art were trophies that glorified leaders and the nation. Art would also reflect and legitimize the National Socialist ideals and the new human being. But the actual ideology would be underpinned by books and archives. The future would be built by a control of memory and history, on the basis of the written word. The

But was art worth a life, Taper wanted to know. Like all Monuments Men, it was a question that haunted him. “I had that choice,” Leonard said. “I chose to remove the bombs. It was worth the reward.” “What reward?” “When I finished, I got to sit in Chartres Cathedral, the cathedral I had helped save, for almost an hour. Alone.

The theory that languages are tools used for particular purposes, sometimes for many different purposes, means that extinct languages belong neither in a museum of art nor in a museum of natural history. Tools are meant to be surpassed by better tools. Once they are, they should be preserved in a museum of technology, of human ingenuity, of the cultural past.

Religious intolerance is an idea that found its earliest expression in the Old Testament, where the Hebrew tribe depicts itself waging a campaign of genocide on the Palestinian peoples to steal their land. They justified this heinous behavior on the grounds that people not chosen by their god were wicked and therefore did not deserve to live or keep their land. In effect, the wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian peoples, eradicating their race with the Jew's own Final Solution, was the direct result of a policy of religious superiority and divine right. Joshua 6-11 tells the sad tale, and one needs only read it and consider the point of view of the Palestinians who were simply defending their wives and children and the homes they had built and the fields they had labored for. The actions of the Hebrews can easily be compared with the American genocide of its native peoples - or even, ironically, the Nazi Holocaust. With the radical advent of Christianity, this self-righteous intolerance was borrowed from the Jews, and a new twist was added. The conversion of infidels by any means possible became the newfound calling card of religious fervor, and this new experiment in human culture spread like wildfire. By its very nature, how could it not have? Islam followed suit, conquering half the world in brutal warfare and, much like its Christian counterpart, it developed a new and convenient survival characteristic: the destruction of all images and practices attributed to other religions. Muslims destroyed millions of statues and paintings in India and Africa, and forced conversion under pain of death (or by more subtle tricks: like taxing only non-Muslims), while the Catholic Church busily burned books along with pagans, shattering statues and defacing or destroying pagan art - or converting it to Christian use. Laws against pagan practices and heretics were in full force throughrout Europe by the sixth century, and as long as those laws were in place it was impossible for anyone to refuse the tenets of Christianity and expect to keep their property or their life. Similar persecution and harassment continues in Islamic countries even to this day, officially and unofficially.

a man who possesses the art of correct reading will… instinctively and immediately perceive everything which in his opinion is worth permanently remembering, either because it is suited to his purpose or generally worth knowing… The art of reading, as of learning, is this:… to retain the essential, to forget the nonessential.*… Only this kind of reading has meaning and purpose…

The Weimar Republic gave nectar to the artists, social reformers and progressive people of all classes. They drank it, unaware that they were sitting close to a dungheap. The Nazi time had already begun in the first years of the Republic. Many, perhaps most, of those favoured by the new regime did not notice or did not want to see what was blatantly obvious. Pleasure had never been so sweet, the arts and architecture so advanced, the theatre so rich in new ideas and techniques. And the cabaret held up a mirror to the new times. Freedom from stereotyped convention produced original talents. In the “intimate theatres” and cabarets, elegant diseuses sang risque songs in a spirit of “anything goes”, titillating the senses of “normal” and homosexual people.

I am quite gifted at waiting,” von Rumpel says in French. “It is my one great skill. I was never much good at athletics or mathematics, but even as a boy, I possessed unnatural patience. I would wait with my mother while she got her hair styled. I would sit in the chair and wait for hours, no magazine, no toys, not even swinging my legs back and forth. All the mothers were very impressed.

forty-seven years old, tired, but none the worse for wear. In a little more than thirteen months, he had discovered, analyzed, and packed tens of thousands of pieces of artwork, including eighty truckloads from Altaussee alone. He had organized the MFAA field officers at Normandy, pushed SHAEF to expand and support the monuments effort, mentored the other Monuments Men across France and Germany, interrogated many of the important Nazi art officials, and inspected most of the Nazi repositories south of Berlin and east of the Rhine. It would be no exaggeration to guess he put 50,000 miles on his old captured VW and visited nearly every area of action in U.S. Twelfth Army Group territory. And during his entire tour of duty on the continent, he had taken exactly one and a half days off.

But the commandments were absolute. The stone tablets Moses brought down from the mountain had not said Thou shalt not kill except when fighting Nazis, or in self-defense, or in some other situations, listed below. Thou shalt not steal unless thou art near death with hunger fighting in a just cause, or hath a family to support, or if perhaps an irresistible opportunity to get rich presenteth itself.

Papa, explique-moi donc à quoi sert l'histoire?' These are the opening words of Marc Bloch's moving Apologie pour l'histoire, which was cut short when its author was killed by the Nazis. [...]Apparently it has not yet struck anyone that where the myth originated it might also be rendered innocuous through more accurate work in the quarry of books. [...] It would be easy to show that one element of the nazi myth sprang up in the harmless field of comparative philology. The great Max Müller once ventured the guess that all peoples speaking the so-called Indo-Germanic languages might derive from the tribe of Aryans. He soon changed his mind, but the mischief was done, and the ghastly tragedy of those who were idiotically labelled non-Aryans should now suffice to answer the question of Marc Bloch's son.

Museum Work and Museum Problems” course, the first academic program specifically designed to cultivate and train men and women to become museum directors and curators. In addition to the connoisseurship of art, the “Museum Course” taught the financial and administrative aspects of running a museum, with a focus on eliciting donations. The students met regularly with major art collectors, bankers, and America’s social elite, often at elegant dinners where they were required to wear formal dress and observe the social protocol of high culture. By 1941, Sachs’s students had begun to fill the leadership positions of American museums, a field they would come to dominate in the postwar years.

Except for Christianity, the Nazis reject as Jewish everything which stems from Jewish authors. This condemnation includes the writings of those Jews who, like Stahl, Lassalle, Gumplowicz, and Rathenau, have contributed many essential ideas to the system of Nazism. But the Jewish mind is, as the Nazis say, not limited to the Jews and their offspring only. Many “Aryans” have been imbued with Jewish mentality—for instance the poet, writer, and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the socialist Frederick Engels, the composer Johannes Brahms, the writer Thomas Mann, and the theologian Karl Barth. They too are damned. Then there are whole schools of thought, art, and literature rejected as Jewish. Internationalism and pacifism are Jewish, but so is warmongering. So are liberalism and capitalism, as well as the “spurious” socialism of the Marxians and of the Bolsheviks. The epithets Jewish and Western are applied to the philosophies of Descartes and Hume, to positivism, materialism and empiro-criticism, to the economic theories both of the classics and of modern subjectivism. Atonal music, the Italian opera style, the operetta and the paintings of impressionism are also Jewish. In short, Jewish is what any Nazi dislikes. If one put together everything that various Nazis have stigmatized as Jewish, one would get the impression that our whole civilization has been the achievement only of Jews.

And yet some Germans at least, especially in the art center of Germany which Munich was, preferred to be artistically polluted. In another part of the city in a ramshackle gallery that had to be reached through a narrow stairway was an exhibition of “degenerate art” which Dr. Goebbels had organized to show the people what Hitler was rescuing them from. It contained a splendid selection of modern paintings—Kokoschka, Chagall and expressionist and impressionist works. The day I visited it, after panting through the sprawling House of German Art, it was crammed, with a long line forming down the creaking stairs and out into the street. In fact, the crowds besieging it became so great that Dr. Goebbels, incensed and embarrassed, soon closed it.

We could also see birches in the woods beyond the thirteen-foot-high fences. And we could see women prisoners in the adjacent field; if the girls saw their mothers among them, they could throw their bread to them, hoping that they would not loft it back, as our rations were greater than anyone else's in the camp. We could see the labs we were taken to on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays, the two-story buildings of brick, but the rest of our view was limited. If someone had cause to pluck us up and take us somewhere, then there was more we might learn of Auschwitz, but otherwise, we did not see the section of camp called Canada, which featured a series of warehouses so overwhelmed with pillaged splendor that the prisoners named it after a country that represented wealth and luxury to them. Inside Canada's structures, our former possessions loomed in stacks: our spectacles, our coats, our instruments, our suitcases, all of it, even down to our teeth, our hair, anything that could be considered necessary to the business of being human. We did not see the sauna where inmates were stripped, or the little white farmhouse whose rooms were passed off as showers. We did not see the luxuriant headquarters of the SS, where parties took place, parties where the women of the Puff were brought in to dance and sit upon Nazi laps. We did not see, and so we believed we already knew the worst. We couldn't image the greatness of suffering, how artful and calculating it could be, how it could pluck off the members of a family, one after the other, or show an entire village the face of death in one fell swoop.

My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I'd wandered in late to the punk party in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history. I'd kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad, which I'd written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who'd cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list. But as we all know, it's zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels were punk. Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class, Dennis Potter, and The Prisoner were punk too. A Clockwork Orange was punk. Lindsay Anderson's If ... was punk. Monty Python was punk. Photographer Bob Carlos Clarke's fetish girls were punk. Comics were punk. Even Richmal Crompton's William books were punk. In fact, as it turned out, pretty much everything I liked was punk. The world started to make sense for the first time since Mosspark Primary. New and glorious constellations aligned in my inner firmament. I felt born again. The do-your-own-thing ethos had returned with a spit and a sneer in all those amateurish records I bought and treasured-even though I had no record player. Singles by bands who could often barely play or sing but still wrote beautiful, furious songs and poured all their young hearts, experiences, and inspirations onto records they paid for with their dole money. If these glorious fuckups could do it, so could a fuckup like me. When Jilted John, the alter ego of actor and comedian Graham Fellows, made an appearance on Top of the Pops singing about bus stops, failed romance, and sexual identity crisis, I was enthralled by his shameless amateurism, his reduction of pop music's great themes to playground name calling, his deconstruction of the macho rock voice into the effeminate whimper of a softie from Sheffield. This music reflected my experience of teenage life as a series of brutal setbacks and disappointments that could in the end be redeemed into art and music with humor, intelligence, and a modicum of talent. This, for me, was the real punk, the genuine anticool, and I felt empowered. The losers, the rejected, and the formerly voiceless were being offered an opportunity to show what they could do to enliven a stagnant culture. History was on our side, and I had nothing to lose. I was eighteen and still hadn't kissed a girl, but perhaps I had potential. I knew I had a lot to say, and punk threw me the lifeline of a creed and a vocabulary-a soundtrack to my mission as a comic artist, a rough validation. Ugly kids, shy kids, weird kids: It was okay to be different. In fact, it was mandatory.

I track pieces of Nazi-stolen art,” she said, after a moment. “And what I’ve noticed is just how far each object travels. Take Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet. It was painted in 1880 in Auvers-sur-Oise about a month before Van Gogh committed suicide. The work changed hands four times—from Van Gogh’s brother to his brother’s widow to two independent collectors—before it was acquired by the Städel in Frankfurt. When Nazis plundered the museum in 1937, it was seized by Hermann Göring, who auctioned it off to a German collector. But here’s where things get interesting: that collector sold it to Siegfried Kramarsky, a Jewish banker who fled the Holocaust for New York in 1938. It’s remarkable, isn’t it? That the painting wound up, after all that, in Jewish hands, and directly from a Göring associate?” Mira fingered her headphones. She seemed suddenly shy. “I suppose I think we need God for the same reason we need art.” “Because it’s nice to look at?” “No.” Mira smiled. “Because it shows us what’s possible.

Lo hice nuevamente. Uno de cada diez años puedo soportarlo… una especie de milagro ambulante, mi piel brilla como una pantalla nazi, mi pie derecho un pisapapeles, mi rostro sin forma, delgado lienzo judío. Retira la compresa, ¡ah, enemigo mío! ¿te doy miedo?… ¿La nariz, la fosa de los ojos, toda la dentadura? El aliento agrio un día se desvanecerá. Pronto, pronto la carne que alimentó la grave sepultura me será familiar y yo seré una mujer sonriente, sólo tengo treinta. Y como el gato tengo nueve vidas que morir. Ésta es la Número Tres. Qué basura para la aniquilación de cada década. Qué millón de filamentos. La multitud como maní prensado se atropella para ver desenvuelven mis manos y pies… el gran strip tease señoras y señores éstas son mis manos mis rodillas. Puede que esté piel y huesos, sin embargo, soy la misma e idéntica mujer. La primera vez que ocurrió, tenía diez. Fue un accidente. La segunda vez quise que fuera definitivo y no regresar jamás. Me mecí doblada sobre mí misma como una concha. Tuvieron que llamar y llamar y quitarme uno a uno los gusanos como perlas viscosas. Morir es un arte, como cualquier otro, yo lo hago de maravillas. Hago que se sienta como un infierno. Hago que se sienta real. Creo que podrían llamarlo un don. Es tan fácil que puedes hacerlo en una celda. Es tan fácil que puedes hacerlo y quedarte ahí, quietita. Es el teatral regreso a pleno día al mismo lugar, a la misma cara, al mismo grito brutal y divertido “¡Milagro!” que me deja fuera de combate. Hay un precio a pagar para mirar las escaras, hay un precio a pagar para auscultar mi corazón… late de veras. Y hay un precio a pagar, un precio mayor por una palabra o un contacto o un poquito de sangre o una muestra de mi cabello o de mi ropa. Bueno, bueno, Herr Doctor. Bueno, Herr Enemigo. Soy vuestra opus, soy vuestra valiosa niña de oro puro que se funde en un chillido. Giro y ardo. No crean que no estimo su enorme preocupación. Cenizas, cenizas… Ustedes atizan y remueven. Carne, hueso, no hay nada allí… Un pan de jabón, un anillo de bodas, un empaste de oro. Herr dios, Herr Lucifer tengan cuidado tengan cuidado. Sobre las cenizas me elevo con mi cabello rojo y devoro hombres como aire.

Rome was not the first state of organized gangsterdom, nor was it the last; but it was the only one that managed to bamboozle posterity into an almost universal admiration. Few rational men admire the Huns, the Nazis or the Soviets; but for centuries, schoolboys have been expected to read Julius Caesar's militaristic drivel ("We inflicted heavy losses upon the enemy, our own casualties being very light") and Cato's revolting incitements to war. They have been led to believe that the Romans had attained an advanced level in the sciences, the arts, law, architecture, engineering and everything else. It is my opinion that the alleged Roman achievements are largely a myth; and I feel it is time for this myth to be debunked a little. What the Romans excelled in was bullying, bludgeoning, butchering and blood baths. Like the Soviet Empire, the Roman Empire enslaved peoples whose cultural level was far above their own. They not only ruthlessly vandalized their countries, but they also looted them, stealing their art treasures, abducting their scientists and copying their technical know-how, which the Romans' barren society was rarely able to improve on. No wonder, then, that Rome was filled with great works of art. But the light of culture which Rome is supposed to have emanated was a borrowed light: borrowed from the Greeks and the other peoples that the Roman militarists had enslaved.

Adeline is Battered & Threatened Not knowing the title of this bureaucrat, I addressed him incorrectly as Meine Herrschaften. With this silly fabricated title, I simply tried to explain to him that the corporal was a brave Frontsoldat. My efforts were in vain since he was intent on finding out the corporal’s name, and my stalling only made matters worse. “What’s his name?” he shouted again and again, this time hitting my breasts and punching me in the stomach, which caused me to vomit all over the floor. It didn’t matter to him that my husband was a German soldier fighting for das Vaterland. He continued to beat me and threatened to put me into the terrible prison camp at Schirmeck. Having passed by there recently, the crying and moaning sounds from inside the gates of this prison were still very vivid in my mind. He reached for his telephone and said, “With one call you’ll be there if you don’t answer me!” “Please, I won’t be able to live with myself if I’m the cause of an innocent person’s death,” I sobbed. I remember him saying, “I remember you! You’re the woman from Bischoffsheim who helped with the kindergarten class and did the art work there. You have two little girls, don’t you?” How could this man know so much about me? He continued his threats by saying that he would beat my little girls at 3 o’clock every afternoon in the Village center, until I gave him the names he wanted. I formed a mental image of this cruel act, however in spite of this, I firmly told him that I would never talk and that the only Etappenhase was the man standing in front of me. The last thing I can remember was him using the telephone to hit me. His last blow struck me above my right eye…. With this I fell down into my own vomit and lost consciousness!

I mean, there’s got to be an art to expounding the virtues of logical positivism while garrotting Nazis with piano wire, and it looks as if Jarrod started missing their special flair.

se produjo un interesante deslizamiento semántico. Atento el lector, porque va a ver cómo por arte de birlibirloque la fea serpiente de la esvástica se transforma, dentro de la chistera del prestidigitador, en un blanco e inocente conejillo: los que habían aupado a Hitler al poder, lo habían secundado en sus criminales proyectos, habían saqueado Europa y habían perpetrado un sinfín de atrocidades antes y durante la guerra se denominaron «los nazis». Paralelamente surgió otro colectivo sin relación alguna con el anterior, un colectivo del todo inocente, más bien víctima, que agrupaba a todo el pueblo alemán, «los alemanes». O sea: las aberraciones las habían cometido los nazis, no los alemanes. Es más: los alemanes habían sido las primeras víctimas de los nazis. Eso es lo políticamente correcto

A key role in this process was played by antisemitic writers like the popular novelist Julius Langbehn, whose book Rembrandt as Educator (published in 1890) declared the Dutch artist Rembrandt to be a classic north German racial type, and pleaded for German art to return to its racial roots, a cultural imperative that would later be taken up with great enthusiasm by the Nazis.

The OSS had developed a uniquely American cadre of intelligence analysts, but Donovan and his star officer, Allen W. Dulles, were enthralled by espionage and sabotage, skills at which Americans were amateurs. Donovan depended on British intelligence to school his men in the dark arts. The bravest of the OSS, the ones who inspired legends, were the men who jumped behind enemy lines, running guns, blowing up bridges, plotting against the Nazis with the French and the Balkan resistance movements.

As Mark Lombardi would discover to his eternal disillusionment, Pope Paul VI not only worked the Nazi ratlines while managing the Vatican’s intelligence operations but directly assisted in installing highly placed Mafiosi in key political positions to extend US influence in Italy. He paved the way for Sindona to enter the Vatican Bank. Beatified in 2014 because of an alleged miracle attributed to his intercession, Montini was a highly compromised figure in more ways than one.

Doctors defiled the art of medicine to perpetrate ghastly experiments and even choose who was healthy enough to be worked to death

Titus Crow is an occult investigator, a psychic sleuth, an agent for Good in the detection and destruction of Evil. During WWII, as a young man, he worked for the War Department; his work in London was concerned with cracking Nazi codes and advising on Hitler’s predilection for the occult: those dark forces which Der Führer attempted to enlist in his campaign for world domination. Following the end of the war, and from then on right through a very active life which encompassed many “hobbies,” he fought Satan wherever he found him and with whichever tools of his trade were available to him at the time. Crow became, in fact, a world-acknowledged master in such subjects as magic, specifically the so-called “Black Books” of various necromancers and wizards, and their doubtful arts; in archaeology, paleontology, cryptography, antiques and antiquities in general; in obscure or avant-garde works of art—with particular reference to such as Aubrey Beardsley, Chandler Davies, Hieronymous Bosch, Richard Upton Pickman, etc.—in the dimly forgotten or neglected mythologies of Earth’s prime, and in anthropology in general, to mention but a handful.

Although it’s mostly just annoying, self-infantilisation’s pervasive existence in the culture could also be the harbinger of something more sinister. Last year, the comic book author Alan Moore suggested that the popularity of superhero films represents an “infantilisation that can very often be a precursor to fascism”. This might sound hyperbolic, but it’s true that a certain kind of kitsch infantilism was always a feature of Nazi art, which was hostile to moral ambiguity and formal complexity. Hitler himself was a Disney adult. If the desire to relinquish responsibility for your own life can be considered an infantile trait, it’s easy to see why this would make you more susceptible to authoritarianism. Today’s white nationalists – with their cartoon Pepes and their ‘frens’ – are as smooth-brain and babyish as any online community, while right-wing reactionaries have recently taken to eulogising 90s video games, Blockbuster and Toys R Us – a glorious past that has been robbed from us by wokeness.

What can I not doubt? The reality of suffering. It brooks no arguments. Nihilists cannot undermine it with skepticism. Totalitarians cannot banish it. Cynics cannot escape from its reality. Suffering is real, and the artful infliction of suffering on another, for its own sake, is wrong. That became the cornerstone of my belief. Searching through the lowest reaches of human thought and action, understanding my own capacity to act like a Nazi prison guard or a gulag archipelago trustee or a torturer of children in a dungeon, I grasped what it meant to “take the sins of the world onto oneself.” Each human being has an immense capacity for evil. Each human being understands, a priori, perhaps not what is good, but certainly what is not. And if there is something that is not good, then there is something that is good. If the worst sin is the torment of others, merely for the sake of the suffering produced—then the good is whatever is diametrically opposed to that. The good is whatever stops such things from happening.

Objects foraged out of Nazis' quarantine, fenced for colossal sums in the black markets of the world outside. Manifs stolen while the partisans fight for liberation, while Thibaut and his comrades face down devils and fascists and errant art, and die.

I myself would like to see more explicit attention paid to the losses experienced due to the Japanese occupation in the Pacific during World War II, and for this history to be as much in dialog with Western culture as the war in Europe and the Holocaust has been, both in film and art, as well as in classrooms and in literature. Not only do I think it's important for the Western survivors of the internment camps like my father to be acknowledged and their trauma addressed, but the vast majority of Japanese forces' victims in World War II were millions of Asians, and with the singular focus on the Nazi occupation, I think there's a great deal of Eurocentrism in our Western understanding of the Second World War. It's important that we address this, because an attitude in the West of regions we deem as less important can lead to events such as the Rwandan genocide in 1994, during which the Western world turned a blind eye and the United Nations refused to send aid as an estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered. As long as we continue to divide the world according to our "us and them" mentality, I believe these tragedies will continue. This is not just about politics, because when we talk about politics we are talking about people.

Further Reading Atwood, Kathryn. Women Heroes of World War II (Chicago Review Press, 2011). Copeland, Jack. Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park’s Code-Breaking Computers (Oxford University Press, 2010). Cragon, Harvey. From Fish to Colossus: How the German Lorenz Cipher was Broken at Bletchley Park (Cragon Books, 2003). Edsel, Robert. The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History (Hachette Book Group, 2009). Eisner, Peter. The Freedom Line (William Morrow, 2004). Helm, Sarah. A Life in Secrets: The Story of Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE (Hachette UK Book Group, 2005). Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma (Random House UK, 2014). Mazzeo, Tilar. The Hotel on Place Vendôme: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris (HarperCollins, 2015). Mulley, Clare. The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (St. Martin’s Press, 2012). O’Keefe, David. One Day in August: The Untold Story Behind Canada’s Tragedy at Dieppe (Knopf Canada, 2013). Pearson, Judith. The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America’s Greatest Female Spy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). Ronald, Susan. Hitler’s Art Thief (St. Martin’s Press, 2015). Rosbottom, Ronald. When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation 1940–1944 (Hachette Book Group, 2014). Sebba, Anne. Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved, and Died Under Nazi Occupation (St. Martin’s Press, 2016). Stevenson, William. Spymistress: The Life of Vera Atkins, the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II (Arcade Publishing, 2007). Vaughan, Hal. Sleeping With the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War (Random House, Inc., 2011). Witherington Cornioley, Pearl; edited by Atwood, Kathryn. Code Name Pauline: Memoirs of a World War II Special Agent (Chicago Review Press, 2015). From the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee/Target Intelligence Committee (TICOM) Archives. NW32823—Demonstration of Kesselring’s “Fish Train” (TICOM/M-5, July 8, 1945).

Art for the people ?! : leave that slogan to the Nazis and Communists : it's just the opposite : the people (everyman !) are obligated to struggle their way to art !

or trepidation, like they wanted to run away as fast as they could once the photo was taken. But Manfred Lange appeared happy to be photographed. His occupation was listed as art historian, and his date of birth as 29 June 1871. All consistent with what Anna knew about him. She flipped the little cardboard folder of his work permit over. Underneath was a membership card to the NSDAP, the Nazi Party. Again, his unapologetic face stared out at her. Member number 149578. So he had been a party member. Anna twinged a little. Had he told her he had been a party member? People with important jobs usually had to be, and it didn’t necessarily mean they were true believers, or even sympathizers. Still, it bothered her. She scanned the room trying not to appear furtive but failing. She quickly flipped pages to see if she could find his Fragebogen, the questionnaire the Americans would have made him complete. But it wasn’t there, of course, because these were the Germans’ files, not the Americans’. Deeply uncomfortable, she flipped back to the party membership card. The date of issue was 20 April 1933. Hitler’s birthday. Manfred Lange had been what the Germans called a March Violet—a late bloomer. March Violets were those who joined the party right after Hitler had seized full authority in March of 1933. Many with elite jobs and who considered themselves to have standing in society, rushed to join the party in order to be on the right side of the power grab. Probably that’s what Manfred Lange had done, too, like millions of others. She closed the folder indicating she was ready to go. She wanted to be out of the building and far away. “Find anything we should know about?” Bender asked, as he held the door for her. “No,” she lied. “Okay. I’ll take your word for it,” he said, climbing into the driver’s seat. The air had turned colder and the sky was socked in with dense clouds. “Looks like we’re in the clear for now. At least with the folks working for us.” He shot her a look. “Should you have let me see Herr Lange’s information?” Anna retaliated to deflect any further line of questioning. He smiled as he started the engine. “Probably not,” he said, “but I can’t help it. I’m so nosy.” Six “Where were you? I couldn’t find you at all yesterday.” Cooper was flustered and irritated but a smile appeared when Anna looked up at him from her desk. Things had piled up while she was out with Bender, so she had come in early to catch up. Anna honestly couldn’t remember if Manfred Lange had mentioned being a party member; she could only recall that he was very against the Nazis’ attitude toward art and free speech to the point where the memories had upset him. She hated that these misgivings lived on and probably would forever. One day, Amalia would ask her what she had done in the war. “I went with Bender to Darmstadt. I thought you knew about that,” she said. “He told me he had checked with you.” “That’s right. Of course. Was it a successful trip?” He sat down in the chair next to her table, intent on something. “I think so. He asked me to help him translate some paperwork. He was checking on some personnel? I didn’t find anything.” “Sounds like good news. For us, anyway. We already had to fire some people when their past caught up with them.” “Because they were party members?” “Or worse. Makes sense, but we had to let some very qualified people go. And with all these government types breathing down our necks, we can’t afford a single screw up. Washington is just waiting for something to go wrong so they can scrap this whole operation.” His face sank back into the shadows it had carried for the past weeks. He leaned forward and dropped his face into his hands. Anna felt sorry for him. “That won’t happen,” she said. “You will make sure of it.” She placed a hand on his shoulder. Without looking at her, Cooper took her hand in his and held it in place, his

The man who kept the Axis partners smoothly aligned, with his impressive language and social skills, was a highly educated, arts-loving homosexual who enjoyed trading in the most salacious gossip about the personalities who ruled Germany and Italy. Dollmann was, in short, precisely the type of person the Nazis sent to the gas chambers.

Van Meegeren’s hubris might have done him in, except for the marvelous fact that when it came to swagger and self-delusion he was no match for the experts he needed to outwit. The connoisseurs’ exaggerated regard for their own views was more than a quirk. It is a striking feature of the art world that experts have little choice but to put enormous faith in their own opinions. Inevitably, that opens the way to error, sometimes to spectacular error.

Second-rate experts may swoon in the presence of second-rate paintings.*

To ensure that the hiding places stayed secret, Goering sent the soldiers who had done the digging to the deadly fighting on the Russian front.

Most forgers are finally caught, one scholar has written, because they fool one person too few. Van Meegeren’s misfortune was that he fooled one person too many.

Piller’s focus had been on where the paintings had come from, not on whether they were genuine.

For years, Van Meegeren had lied to the world, and it had fallen for every lie. Now he had told the truth, and no one believed a word of it.

The easiest answer was that, after Emmaus’s stunning success, Van Meegeren had coasted on his reputation. Piller didn’t quite buy it. But the most conspicuous hole in Van Meegeren’s story, in Piller’s view, was that no one had ever seen him at work. That seemed awfully convenient. How did anyone know Van Meegeren was a forger? Because he said so.

Van Meegeren had nothing in common with “one of these important-looking bragging artists… who make everybody who isn’t an insider feel like a blundering yokel.

rumors that an American millionaire had offered to buy all the forgeries for eight million dollars (about $ 80 million today).

In more recent news stories Van Meegeren came across as a rogue, not a villain, an ordinary man who had punctured the pomposity of the big shots. If he had sold a forgery to Goering, it was hardly a crime to have outwitted the biggest stuffed shirt of them all.

Many of the first news stories had spilled over with rage. Van Meegeren’s painting career hadn’t won him much attention, but during the occupation he’d made friends in all the wrong places, and the Dutch had noticed that.

(Van Meegeren had managed to create enough confusion about the Hitler dedication to dampen down that controversy. His story was that he had signed many copies of his book; someone else, perhaps a “German officer,” must have added a dedication and given Hitler the book.) In more recent news stories Van Meegeren came across as a rogue, not a villain, an ordinary man who had punctured the pomposity of the big shots. If he had sold a forgery to Goering, it was hardly a crime to have outwitted the biggest stuffed shirt of them all.

Jesus Teaching in the Temple certainly looked like a Van Meegeren. The resemblance to Goering’s Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery was especially strong. In the topsy-turvy world in which Van Meegeren found himself—where the only way he could convince the authorities he was telling the truth was to demonstrate that he was a liar and a cheat—this was all to the good.

Van Meegeren delighted at the trouble he had stirred up. Here were the scientists with their microscopes and magnifying glasses, their X-ray and ultraviolet and infrared photographs, their talk of spectographic analysis and partial solubility, the whole circus set in motion by his own mischievous enterprise.

Why hadn’t Van Meegeren thrown away so incriminating a piece of evidence? He had kept it, he said, precisely so that he could prove beyond question that Emmaus was his work. And perhaps that had once been his intent. But if Van Meegeren had truly wanted to tell the world that he had painted Emmaus, he had missed chance after chance.

By March 1947, the Coremans commission had proved beyond any doubt that Van Meegeren’s tale was true. He had indeed forged the “Vermeer” he sold Goering, and all the others. He could not be accused of selling off Holland’s heritage since he had not enriched Goering but had cheated him out of millions. The collaboration charge was dropped. Van Meegeren would go to trial, but only for fraud.

He not only admitted the charges but wallowed in them. For Van Meegeren and the two hundred spectators squeezed into courtroom 4, no prospect could be more inviting than a close-up look at just which experts had showered praise on which forgeries and which millionaires had dipped deep into their pockets.

Van Meegeren’s many victims—museum directors, art dealers, critics, scholars, and collectors—cringed at the thought of rehashing their gullibility in public. The Dutch state, though it was prosecuting the case, was one of those mortified buyers. An examination of that purchase promised to be humiliating.

The court had a question. Why had Captain Piller kept Van Meegeren as a kind of private prisoner when he could immediately have turned him over to the Department of Justice? “Because it took me quite a while to find out who at Justice had been correct or incorrect in the years past,” Piller said, in a deliberately unsubtle allusion to Holland’s many collaborators and German sympathizers. “Your Honor, I can assure you, that was not an easy task.” No further questions.

Finally, after all the seduced experts and suckered millionaires, Van Meegeren himself took the stand. “You admit that you painted these fakes?” the judge asked. “Yes, your honor.” “And that you sold them, at high prices?” “I had no choice. If I had sold them at a low price, no one would have believed they were authentic.” Snickering in the court. “Why did you continue with your forgeries after your success with Emmaus?” “I could not stop, your honor. It became an addiction. I wanted to prove myself over and over again.” “That’s all well and good, but you did quite nicely for yourself.” More laughter. “It’s true, your honor, but I didn’t do it for the money. I already had more money than I could ever spend. I didn’t know what to do with it.

Finally, after all the seduced experts and suckered millionaires, Van Meegeren himself took the stand. “You admit that you painted these fakes?” the judge asked. “Yes, your honor.” “And that you sold them, at high prices?” “I had no choice. If I had sold them at a low price, no one would have believed they were authentic.” Snickering in the court. “Why did you continue with your forgeries after your success with Emmaus?” “I could not stop, your honor. It became an addiction. I wanted to prove myself over and over again.” “That’s all well and good, but you did quite nicely for yourself.” More laughter. “It’s true, your honor, but I didn’t do it for the money. I already had more money than I could ever spend. I didn’t know what to do with it.” “So your motive was not financial gain?” “I wanted to strike at the art world for always belittling me. That was all.” “It seems you succeeded.” Applause in the courtroom, gaveled down by the judge.

In the summer before the trial he had been diagnosed with heart disease and hospitalized for a month. On November 26, just before his prison term was to begin, he was admitted to the hospital once again. On December 29 he suffered a heart attack. On December 30, never having served a day of his sentence, he died. He died a hero. Over the course of the year that passed between his confession and his trial, public opinion in Holland had swung completely in Van Meegeren’s favor. Once damned as a traitor, he became, in the words of the American journalist Irving Wallace, “the man who swindled Goering.

Van Meegeren posed it in its starkest form: “Yesterday this picture was worth millions of guilders, and experts and art lovers would come from all over the world and pay money to see it,” he declared at his trial. “Today, it is worth nothing, and nobody would cross the street to see it for free. But the picture has not changed. What has?” Van Meegeren presumably had an unflattering answer in mind. The picture had not changed, but it had lost its glamour. Why? Because the “experts and art lovers” were as fake as it was. The world was full of people who thought of themselves as art lovers but were in fact merely snobs.

Scientists can demote a painting, but only connoisseurs can promote one.

most forgers in real life work backward—they start with materials, not with an artist, and then choose the artist to fit. Their motto is, “Let the paper choose the master.

he painted A View of Delft, The Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Milkmaid, and some thirty more. The work met a respectful welcome, but no one was bowled over. Certainly no one spoke of Vermeer as a genius. But his work commanded high fees, and it continued to do so in the years shortly after his death, in 1675. At an Amsterdam auction in 1696, for example, twenty-one Vermeers sold at an average price of 72 guilders apiece. The Lacemaker, now at the Louvre, brought only 28 guilders, but the Milkmaid brought 175 guilders, and A View of Delft the highest price of all, 200 guilders.

One Dutch scholar has made a careful estimate of how productive painters were in Holland’s Golden Age—to earn a living, he calculated, most artists needed to produce one or two paintings a week. Rembrandt did not achieve quite that pace, but he completed about twenty-five paintings a year, year in and year out. The exact tally is in dispute, as scholars debate which paintings are by Rembrandt himself and which by his followers, but the current estimate is on the order of 350. Vermeer painted only one tenth as many, a total of thirty-five or thirty-six paintings over the course of his entire, twenty-year career.* To boost his income, he worked as an art dealer, and that second job may have brought in more money than did his own paintings.

HIS NAME WOULD be lost almost until the age of the Impressionists. “The greatest mystery of all,” in the words of the historian Paul Johnson, “is how his works fell into a black hole of taste for nearly two hundred years. He is now more generally, and unreservedly, admired than any other painter.

THE VERMEER REVIVAL began in 1866, with the publication of three articles by a French art historian named Theophile Thoré-Bürger.

And yet, consider the dramatic conclusion to Valentiner’s essay. In his final sentence he highlighted two qualities above all others that made The Lacemaker a masterpiece. First, “The face of the girl is unusually pretty, as the features are smaller than in some of the artist’s other types.” Vermeer had painted a girl, in other words, who suited modern taste. In a second way, too, Valentiner noted approvingly, Vermeer had transcended the bounds of his own era. He had managed “a subtlety in the distribution of light and diffusion of color rarely to be found in the genre paintings of Holland in the seventeenth century.” It was as if Vermeer lived in the same world as twentieth-century art connoisseurs.