Did you know,
the museum of modern art in Mannheim is not far away from the BASF, which I try to recreate at the moment? No. Stop. Wrong Story.
Did you know,
the museum of modern art in Mannheim features one of my most adored sculptures, the big fish by Constantine Brancusi. Oops. Where is my mind? Sorry. Wrong story again.
But did you know ...
the museum of modern art in Mannheim was founded out of nothing with the donations of a jewish couple named Julius and Henriette Aberle in 1907. So the task for the first directors of the museum was clear - to build up a collection from scratch and so they bought actual art during the first decades of the last century. Which was a very lucky coincidence as we know today - those were the decades of the "classic modern" and many of the artists like Munch, Manet, Klee, Ernst, Lembruck became famous.
But things changed and Nazis took over and they couldn't stand modern art at all and they fired the old director, collecting modern art, immediatly and installed their own director in 1936, named Walter Passarge.
Passarges first job was to make a list of prints and drawings which were examples for what Nazis called "degenerate art". And at the end until august 1937 roundabout 600 artworks were removed from the museum in Mannheim and destroyed or sold to foreign countries to fill the war chest.
What can't be explained very well until today – why many modern artworks weren't touched and remained in the museum. Why did the Nazis taking only a great part from the collection of so called "degenerate art" but then forgot to take away some of the finest, the most prestigious works? Especially those?
Last year, in 2018, a list was found made by Walter Passarge with exactly those artworks on it. Now - why this second list? Was it a secret list? It seems Passarge himself, the museum's director installed by the Nazis, decided to hide some of the artworks form his Nazis-friends to help them survive the barbarous cleaning. As if he loved art more than ideology.
But this is only speculation.
