War and Art

 Blog post: 2
     Many people who study art can make a common link to war. Some paintings like the red poppies piece we observed in class has a hidden link to war and some of these common war paintings are more obviously about the topic like the Third of May 1808, by Francisco Goya. What I really wonder is why artists are so inspired by war, but i guess you can get five thousand different reasons by all different artists . After, I started thinking about how Nazi Germany was stealing famous art pieces from all across the world during World War II. What did Hitler want with all this art? If he really planned on destroying it why bother?  What many people don't realize is that hitler was an artist. Some of his pieces were quite beautiful but he was denied admission to  The Academy Art Studies in Vienna.

     After some research I found out hitler was rumored on opening up a massive museum in Germany and displaying all these famous stolen art pieces.  It is also said he might have taken them due to his love of art,  just to show he could have "world domination", or simply because he wanted pay back for not getting into his dream school. All of these reasons together could have spiked his interest in stealing all the famous pieces across Europe. 

    The Monuments men, a group of roughly 300 art curators, historians and architects joined the military to try to recover lost pieces, they recovered many pieces but the hunt is still going on today, many pieces still have not been found and many were destroyed in fires. Last year, 1,400 paintings were found in a Munich apartment roughly seventy years after the war.  Two of Van Gogh's famous pieces were sadly destroyed and can never be replaced. These paintings were called " Self Portrait on the Road to Tarascon" and " Portrait of Dr. Gachet". Also, the famous sculpture of Madonna of Bruges by Michelangelo was stolen but this piece was thankfully recovered by the Monuments men in the 1940s. It was surprisingly the only Michelangelo piece stolen by the Nazis.

Madonna of Bruges

Portrait of Dr. Gachet