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Feb. 27th, 2012 09:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cblj_backupI think I have hit my World War II saturation point.
Not that there isn't more I could learn, because lord knows that war was fucking endless, but I've hit a point somewhere between "Okay, I knew that" and "Oh god, I'm falling asleep".
At Myopic Books down in Wicker Park I happened to pick up a copy of Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy To Steal The World's Greatest Works of Art by Hector Feliciano. And it's a good book! But I keep dozing off while reading it.
It's very much in the line of The Rape Of Europa, but it's focused more tightly on anecdotes -- not unsupported stories, but small individual stories, specific people and works of art, whereas Rape of Europa was generally more about systems.
From that perspective it's interesting to me, because I'm also more about individuals than systems, but being able to see the systemic framework of art looting during the war (and by extension back to the Napoleonic wars) it's not something I am as vested in.
There are some really interesting moments -- there's one that brings home how sudden and urban this war was, compared to others in history:
The letter [to art dealer Paul Rosenberg, who had fled to New York] from Roisneau, who was a witness to the Nazis' and Vichy officials' looting from the galleries on Rue de La Boetie, provided testimony to what was happening in Paris. She had been unable to prevent the German soldiers from taking the paintings and documents from Rosenberg's gallery. [...] A friend did manage to burn the gallery's inventory book before it could fall into German hands. The Wildenstein Gallery was also pillaged. [...] The Bernheim-Jeune Gallery was also requisitioned and placed under provisional administration, which meant Aryanization. Josse Bernheim, one of the brothers who had founded the company, was dead.
-- p. 73
For some reason that really hit me in a way little else about the wartime looting has -- it'd be like leaving Chicago ahead of an invading army and receiving a letter from a friend that Belmont Avenue had been torched and the guy who owns the neat second-hand bookstore near the train had been murdered for his books.
So, I didn't finish it, but I don't regret buying it; it's a nice addition to my little shelf of art-crime history books. I might never be a master forger or a cunning thief, but it's fun to play a bit of pretend sometimes. Certainly if I ever end up on the trail of looted war art, I'll have a solid foundation upon which to build.
Not that there isn't more I could learn, because lord knows that war was fucking endless, but I've hit a point somewhere between "Okay, I knew that" and "Oh god, I'm falling asleep".
At Myopic Books down in Wicker Park I happened to pick up a copy of Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy To Steal The World's Greatest Works of Art by Hector Feliciano. And it's a good book! But I keep dozing off while reading it.
It's very much in the line of The Rape Of Europa, but it's focused more tightly on anecdotes -- not unsupported stories, but small individual stories, specific people and works of art, whereas Rape of Europa was generally more about systems.
From that perspective it's interesting to me, because I'm also more about individuals than systems, but being able to see the systemic framework of art looting during the war (and by extension back to the Napoleonic wars) it's not something I am as vested in.
There are some really interesting moments -- there's one that brings home how sudden and urban this war was, compared to others in history:
The letter [to art dealer Paul Rosenberg, who had fled to New York] from Roisneau, who was a witness to the Nazis' and Vichy officials' looting from the galleries on Rue de La Boetie, provided testimony to what was happening in Paris. She had been unable to prevent the German soldiers from taking the paintings and documents from Rosenberg's gallery. [...] A friend did manage to burn the gallery's inventory book before it could fall into German hands. The Wildenstein Gallery was also pillaged. [...] The Bernheim-Jeune Gallery was also requisitioned and placed under provisional administration, which meant Aryanization. Josse Bernheim, one of the brothers who had founded the company, was dead.
-- p. 73
For some reason that really hit me in a way little else about the wartime looting has -- it'd be like leaving Chicago ahead of an invading army and receiving a letter from a friend that Belmont Avenue had been torched and the guy who owns the neat second-hand bookstore near the train had been murdered for his books.
So, I didn't finish it, but I don't regret buying it; it's a nice addition to my little shelf of art-crime history books. I might never be a master forger or a cunning thief, but it's fun to play a bit of pretend sometimes. Certainly if I ever end up on the trail of looted war art, I'll have a solid foundation upon which to build.
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Date: 2012-02-28 03:10 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2012-03-03 09:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-04 03:57 pm (UTC)