36 posts tagged with wwii and art.
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Goodwill find? Try WWII-looted museum treasure.
Thrifter locates first-century Roman bust looted from a German museum/villa. Absolutely wild story that includes Pompeii, one Drusus "Dennis" Germanicus, King Ludwig I, lawyers, and ultimately a new home.
"In such vast ocean of matter and tumult strange"
Christine Riding, "Shipwreck, Self-preservation and the Sublime": Being "a subject that encourages the spectator to imagine 'pain and danger' and 'self-preservation,' 'without being actually in such circumstances' may well be why shipwreck ... was suited to the sublime." Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator [PDF; chapter summaries: 1 + 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]: "Humans live their lives and build their institutions on dry land. Nevertheless, they seek to grasp the movement of their existence above all through a metaphorics of the perilous sea voyage." Supplementing many previouslies, a number of shipwreck narratives offer further occasions for reflection. [more inside]
21-Year Old WWII Soldier’s Sketchbooks Are Visual Diary of War
The house that Edek built - and the secret suitcase kept inside
When Edward "Edek" Herzbaum and his wife Teresa designed and built their family home near Woking, they created a daringly modern building full of light. It was the 1950s. Young architects were in the vanguard of imagining a new, post-War Britain. Edward died in 1967, Teresa in 2002. It was not until then that their daughter Krystyna found a small suitcase full of papers that revealed her father, his story and his art. [more inside]
A dream of fully automated luxury space communism, 300 years too early.
Spomenik Database: An exploration of Yugoslavia's historic and enigmatic endeavor into abstract anti-fascist WWII monument building from 1960 to 1980. During the zenith of communist Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito, over a thousand monuments, or spomeniks, were commissioned to not only honor the many who died in the fight against fascism in World War II, but to help forge a new national identity that transcended ethnic and religious divisions, while also rejecting Soviet-inspired socialist realism in favor of abstract postmodernism. The endeavor did not survive long past Tito's death in 1980, and many spomeniks were abandoned or destroyed after the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, though others have been either maintained or repurposed. [more inside]
A Photographer in Shanghai
The battle of Shanghai in 1937 was unique in many ways. For example, it was recorded more exhaustively in the western media than any other battle in China’s long war with Japan. This was because of the presence, in the city’s international districts, of foreign journalists and photographers. The latter left a treasure trove of photos, some of which are unknown to the wider public to this day, nearly 80 years after the battle. Bonus: Asians in WWII Poster Art
Putting artists to work in World War II
The crazy idea was this: The United States Army would design a “deception unit”: a unit that would appear to the enemy as a large armored division with tanks, trucks, artillery, and thousands of soldiers. But this unit would actually be equipped only with fake tanks, fake trucks, fake artillery and manned by just a handful of soldiers.
Oh, yeah, about that Monet in the other house...
Works by Monet, Picasso, and Renoir are among the 60 additional works found in the Salzburg home of Cornelius Gurlitt, who made headlines last year when it was revealed that he had more than 1400 works stashed in his Munich apartment that had been lost or stolen during WWII. This comes just weeks after Gurlitt indicated for the first time that he is now willing to consider returning works that are determined to have been looted by the Nazis. Determining rightful ownership of the works is an ongoing and complicated process. (Previously)
"Degenerate Art" found in man's house.
About 1,500 modernist masterpieces – thought to have been looted by the Nazis – have been confiscated from the flat of an 80-year-old man from Munich, in what is being described as the biggest artistic find of the postwar era.
Snow White in Auschwitz
"Knowing of Dina's artistic ability, Freddy asked her to paint a mural on the wall of the barracks to cheer up the children. She agreed, although she expected she would be executed if the Germans caught her. This was some time if February 1944. Using paints that were smuggled from various sources, Dina set to work painting a scene of Snow White looking out over the Swiss countryside. Dina knew that some of the children had seen the movie and would recognize the character. She had seen the movie 'seven times in a row' back in Czechoslovakia."
The amazing, sad, triumphant story of Dina Babbitt (née Gottliebová)—artist, animator, concentration camp survivor. [more inside]
The amazing, sad, triumphant story of Dina Babbitt (née Gottliebová)—artist, animator, concentration camp survivor. [more inside]
United States of America
Warning! The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased, entry for the United States of America
Claude Lanzmann
Those Americans who are familiar with the name Claude Lanzmann most likely know him as the director of “Shoah,” his monumental 1985 documentary about the extermination of the European Jews in the Nazi gas chambers. As it turns out, though, the story of Lanzmann’s eventful life would have been well worth telling even if he had never come to direct “Shoah.” In addition to film director, Lanzmann’s roles have included those of journalist, editor, public intellectual, member of the French Resistance, long-term lover of Simone de Beauvoir and close friend of Jean-Paul Sartre, world traveler, political activist, ghostwriter for Jacques Cousteau — I could go on, but it’s a good deal more entertaining to hear Lanzmann himself go on, and thanks to the publication in English of his memoir, “The Patagonian Hare,” we now have the opportunity to do so. (previously)
Timeless Message
The story behind the iconic poster Keep Calm and Carry On rediscovered in 1991 at Barter Books, has been covered here before, but not in this lovely short video. And not with the new iPhone app.
Bomber Jackets
A gallery of personalized bomber jackets from WWII with descriptions.
House of Sharing
The House of Sharing is a place for the Halmoni to to live together and heal the wounds of the past while educating the future generations of the suffering they survived.The View From Over Here details her visit to the House of Sharing, a therapeutic group home and museum for surviving "comfort women", who were systematically raped by the Japanese military during World War II. The museum displays art for and by the survivors. Via Ask a Korean. [more inside]
Have you eaten your pound of potatoes today?
Beans are bullets. Potatoes are powder. An exhibition of food posters from the National Agricultural Library.
WWII Infographics
Max Gadney works at the BBC in London, but he also creates graphics and infographics for WWII Magazine in the US. (Flickr Photostream).
Marwencol is a fantasy world created by Mark Hogancamp.
After being beaten into a brain-damaging coma by five men outside a bar, Mark Hogancamp built a 1/6th scale World War II-era town in his backyard. Mark populated the town he dubbed "Marwencol" with dolls representing his friends and family and created life-like photographs detailing the town's many relationships and dramas. Playing in the town and photographing the action helped Mark to recover his hand-eye coordination and deal with the psychic wounds from the attack. [more inside]
Storytelling in sand.
The Amber Room found?
The Amber Room found? German treasure hunters using electromagnetic pulse measurements are "90% sure" the Russian "Eighth Wonder of the World" was buried by the Nazi's in a man-made cavern 20 meters underground near the village of Deutschneudorf (map), but it will take "..until Easter to get into the chamber because it may contain booby traps and has to be secured by explosives experts.. The chamber is likely to be part of a labyrinth of storage rooms that the Nazis built." Russia is eyeing its return, "If, hypothetically speaking, the room still exists."
A Monumental Achievement
"The “Monuments Men” [wiki] were a group of ... men and women from thirteen nations who comprised the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section during World War II....Together they worked to protect monuments and other cultural treasures from the destruction of World War II. ...They tracked, located, and ultimately returned more than 5 million artistic and cultural items stolen by Hitler and the Nazis. Their role in preserving cultural treasures was without precedent. "
Concentration Camp Tarot Cards
Hand drawn Tarot Cards created by a Boris Kobe, a prisoner at Allach Concentration Camp, a sub-camp of Dachau. Each card depcits an aspect of life in the camp - click each image for high-res versions.
Save the Girls
Save the Girls! A gallery of WWII era fighter & bomber nosecone art is the highlight of this site dedicated to the history and preservation of such works.
Buy War Bonds!
World War II Posters from the large collection at the Northwestern University Library.
He has cavorted naked with Charlotte Rampling [this is VERY NSFW] and covered himself in caviar for Marc Jacobs, but Jürgen Teller thinks "fashion is a wank".
Teller's first solo show in Paris is entitled "Nurnberg", it consists of a sequence of images (annoying Flash site, sorry) taken at the infamous Zeppelintribune parade ground, site of Nazi propaganda rallies, which was designed by Hitler's favourite builder, Albert Speer. Over several months, Teller (.pdf) has photographed the monument, the podium and the steep, ruthless steps, all of which have been left to decay. Or not. "It wasn't really maintained, but if there was a broken step, or a smashed wall, it would be mysteriously replaced with a new one." Teller's photographs show the delicate weeds, flowers and lichen [NSFW] that have grown up around the stone blocks. "In Germany, there is a saying about letting the grass grow over things, meaning that events will eventually be forgotten".
"Myrna Loy, Luminous Activist"
“Wouldn’t you know, the kid they pick to play tramps is the only good girl in Hollywood.”
Before Myrna Loy rose to stardom with Manhattan Melodrama and The Thin Man (both 1934), she was often relegated to playing vamps, mistresses, and other assorted flavors of wicked women. Then, after 80 movies playing mostly bad girls, Montana native Loy became “the perfect wife.” “Men Must Marry Myrna Loy” clubs were formed around the country. She and Clark Gable, in a poll conducted by Ed Sullivan, were voted by 20 million of the nation’s moviegoers as The King and Queen of Hollywood. She was FDR's favorite actress, and John Dillinger died just to see her new movie. A staunch anti-Nazi since the mid-Thirties (to MGM's dismay, Hitler promptly banned her films from the lucrative German market), wondered aloud in the press why blacks were always given servants' roles, and was the first major star to buck the studios in a contract dispute (the issue: equal pay for equal work. She was making half what William Powell was, didn't like it and quit work for nearly a year until MGM capitulated). When WWII broke out she quit Hollywood and worked full time for the Red Cross, and helped run a Naval Auxilary Canteen. More inside.
Andrzej Munk: Wry Smiles, Suspicious Glances
Eroica. Film director Andrzej Munk’s tragic death at age thirty-nine might have formed the plot for one of his own darkly sardonic works: a Polish Jew and an active resistance worker during the war, he was returning home from shooting his film Passenger at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1961 when an oncoming truck struck his car. He left behind only four feature films, but his influence was prodigious. As one of the key figures of the postwar “Polish School” of filmmaking, along with Wajda and Kawalerowicz, he helped to shape a vision that broke with the official social realist optimism of Eastern-bloc dogma and cast a skeptical eye on official notions of heroism, nationalism, and life in the Stalinist-occupied state. Mentor to Roman Polanski and Jerzy Skolimowski, his influence can be felt even in the films of a later generation of Polish filmmakers — directors like Zanussi and Kieslowski. More inside.
Aleksandr Sokurov's "The Sun"
The Emperor's Bunker. "The Japanese, with sadness and irony, stressed that Hirohito couldn't even speak properly. This was partly to do with the fact that he didn't have to speak - people spoke in his name and he was isolated from real life".
"The Sun", the third part in Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov's 'Men of Power' tetralogy after the gloom of Moloch (1999), about Hitler and Eva Braun, and the despairing tones of "Taurus" (2001), focused on the wheelchair-bound Lenin in his death throes, "The Sun" seems almost upbeat. This, after all, is a film about reconciliation. More inside.
Singing, Painting and the Holocaust: Interview with Leon Greenman
you'll then have a grave in the clouds where you won't lie too cramped "No, no, I never met Paul Celan. This poem is too CLASSIC, too cold, and too difficult to follow. It does nothing to me".
Singing, Painting and the Holocaust: Interview with Leon Greenman, Auschwitz Survivor 98288
The Amber Room
The Amber Room : [flash] Stolen by the Nazis in WWII from the Catherine Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Amber Room remains one of the greatest missing treasures of Europe. The room has now been reconstructed, and the search for the original may have come to an unhappy end.
Liberty takes a bow
Over 3,400 Annoying Gimmicks
Consolidated B-24 Liberator nose art archive. Signs of the zodiac, dirty jokes, self-fulfilling prophecies, and stumpers. (Some questionable content [NSFW-ish] and site design)
Lee Miller: The Real Surrealist
From muse to master Lee Miller started out as a Vogue model, but by 1930 she had moved behind the lens to take piercing photographs -- culminating in her rage-fuelled portraits of Nazi kitsch. The "Lee Miller: Portraits" exhibit is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from February 3 until May 30. More inside.
The mystery of Stefan Mart
The mystery of Stefan Mart and the 'Tales of the Nations'. "The Tales of Nations" was not an ordinary book that you could buy in a book store, and it's mysterious narrator/illustrator disappeared into the darkness of Hitler's Germany, seemingly without a trace. Learn the background, read the stories, and view all 150 fabulous colour illustrations — "small in size, but strong in expression, each a microcosm packed with action, each a feast for the eyes like a beautifully set jewel".
1957 atomic revolution comic book!
1957 atomic revolution comic book. Quite a find for 1950s atomic memorabilia enthusiasts. Creepy and educational. Has anyone here ever heard of M.Philip Copp?
The Last Expression project
The Last Expression project is a forum to explore the roles, functions, meanings and making of art in the Nazi concentration camps of World War II, focusing on the notorious site of Auschwitz-Birkenau. ... It is neither widely recognized in the realm of Holocaust history, nor in the discipline of art history, that concentration camp prisoners -- victims of the Nazis -- produced works of art during their incarceration. [from the Introduction.]
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