The Lost Art of the Unfortunate
Art can be a vague subject. There are many different art movements, art forms, and art styles. What one finds pleasing, another may not. One may deem a piece as “degenerate,” or vile, while others want the piece hanging in the living room where everyone can see. How people interpret art and their views on art can lead to terrible things being done. In the hellish moments of war, pieces may be looted from the homes of the ones being forced out. During the midst of the Holocaust, entire collections were looted from the Jewish as they were forcefully removed from their homes and into concentration camps.
Now, years after the Holocaust, the survivors and their families are fighting and struggling to at the very least get a piece they had owned in their collections before the terror of the Holocaust had begun. The pieces have ended up in galleries and private collections all throughout the United States and Europe. The pieces are one of the last remnants of their lives before all the chaos and the sorrow caused by the Holocaust.
The pieces were taken from the families by the Nazi regime. From there they were sold to museums in the United States and Europe. Some people belief that the museums should keep the pieces because they bought the pieces fairly, while others belief that the pieces should be given back to the rightful owners as restitution for the horrific crimes done to them. Who should be entitled to the valuable pieces of art? The pieces were taken from the Jewish families during the midst of the Holocaust. The survivors, as well as their families, should be given back the pieces of art that were taken from them.
The why, the how, the recovery
The why
Some may know that Hitler was intrigued...
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Imagine that one piece of history that is taken from a town. This piece of history tells l people how this town was built and all the important people that were apart of the community. “Returning Antiquities to Their Countries of Origin” by Joyce Mortimer can many people about how objects are getting taken from Museums. They should be returned immediately. There are so many artifacts out there that could be so important to people, and if someone can just imagine what it would feel to have one of the most important object taken from a museum and to be never returned again. Many people enjoy seeing these objects so why are they being taken?
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Through out the duration of the war the looting and destroying of artworks continued. One might even say it was an obsession. Hitler at the time wanted to create a museum of the best art.
In the years between 1933 and 1945, Germany was engulfed by the rise of a powerful new regime and the eventual spoils of war. During this period, Hitler's quest for racial purification turned Germany not only at odds with itself, but with the rest of the world. Photography as an art and as a business became a regulated and potent force in the fight for Aryan domination, Nazi influence, and anti-Semitism. Whether such images were used to promote Nazi ideology, document the Holocaust, or scare Germany's citizens into accepting their own changing country, the effect of this photography provides enormous insight into the true stories and lives of the people most affected by Hitler's racism. In fact, this photography has become so widespread in our understanding and teaching of the Holocaust that often other factors involved in the Nazi's racial policy have been undervalued in our history textbooks-especially the attempt by Nazi Germany to establish the Nordic Aryans as a master race through the Lebensborn experiment, a breeding and adoption program designed to eliminate racial imperfections.
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“Memorialization of the Holocaust has taken many forms in the sixty years that have followed it. The memory of this event seems more present now than directly after the war, but an increasing awareness of the limits of representing this memory has also cast a shadow (Sicher 355). Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale recontextualizes this history by addressing such limits of representation, functioning as a unique form of Holocaust memorialization, which elicits what I term "performative memorialization." Performative memorialization is a layered memorial activity that performs in every Holocaust genre to create a temporally fluid, Bakhtinian dialogic between the author and the subject (memory) and the event and the audience (history)-combating
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The Holocaust was a very impressionable period of time. It not only got media attention during that time, but movies, books, websites, and other forms of media still remember the Holocaust. In Richard Brietman’s article, “Lasting Effects of the Holocaust,” he reviews two books and one movie that were created to reflect the Holocaust (BREITMAN 11). He notes that the two books are very realistic and give historical facts and references to display the evils that were happening in concentration camps during the Holocaust. This shows that the atrocities that were committed during the Holocaust have not been forgotten. Through historical writings and records, the harshness and evil that created the Holocaust will live through centuries, so that it may not be repeated again (BREITMAN 14).
“Duncan’s (1991) article provides an examination of western museums as a vehicle for the “modern state” to project imperialistic values over art objects of the Third World. The American/European art museum is a type of “temple” that is used to ritualize western art objects as a projection of modernity over the “primitive” art of Third World cultures.”
The Ghetto’s Fighter House Institution is located outside of Akko, Israel. This institution includes Jewish artworks, photographs, and writin...
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Recently the major countries that were part of WWII are starting to try and push for museums to send back the stolen art to their rightful owners. With the millions of pieces that were stolen during WWII the number of pieces that have not been returned to its heirs is well over 100,000 pieces of art and most of them are currently missing.("Nazi Plunder," n.d.) To help return stolen art, museums search through all of their art to check if any of it was stolen during WWII. Currently though the progress has stopped for returning stolen artwork back to its rightful heirs, because the museums are refusing to give back some of the more major pieces of art. Also the lack of knowing who the art truly belongs to is also slowing down the
The subject of art conservation and restoration has long been debated in the art world. Experts and historians have never agreed that all art must be salvaged at any cost. This paper will examine what art conservation and restoration is, what is involved in these endeavors, and what has been done over the centuries to many of history’s cherished art pieces.