Austria faces its history by exhibiting its Nazi art reserves

Austria plays transparency.

Until next April, the municipal museum Wien Museum MUSA is uncompromisingly exhibiting its reserves of Nazi art, including neoclassical sculptures and official paintings often stamped with a swastika.

Presented in two small rooms, these collections bear witness to this cumbersome heritage and a past long denied by Austria.

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The exhibition, which is soberly called

a standstill, sheds new light on artistic policy in Adolf Hitler's homeland, annexed in 1938 by Nazi Germany. There are paintings, pottery or posters prohibited from being placed on the market. The museum decided to show them numbered without completely unpacking them, as if they were just getting fresh air before quickly returning to the warehouse. But there is no question of putting them in beauty: they are historical witnesses and can no longer claim the title of work. "

", explains Ingrid. Holzschuh, one of the curators who conceived the project after four years of research. "

”she explains.

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"There are still many gaps to be filled"

Ingrid Holzschuh, project curator

While any apology for the Third Reich is severely sanctioned in Austria, she considers that it is time to assume and "

" because "

". After Austria joined the Reich on March 12, 1938, the regime took control of cultural policy to bring it “

”. Artists had to register with a supervisory authority, the Reich's Chamber of Fine Arts, which ensured that production conformed to the canons dictated by Berlin. Few of the Austrians know who are the 3000 members of this association who have agreed to replace the Jewish and avant-garde creators,considered as "

», To serve a murderous ideology.

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The

exhibition

presents paintings, pottery and posters that are normally prohibited from being placed on the market.

JOE KLAMAR / AFP

Art in the service of propaganda

The little peasant woman portrayed with flat realism by Herta Karasek-Strzygowski or the oil on canvas of a certain Igo Pötsch, immortalizing Hitler's entry into Vienna, have not changed the history of art.

It was then only a question of responding to the needs of propaganda with zeal and fidelity.

Those who refused to comply with the new rules had to flee or were sent to a concentration camp, details the 300-page catalog.

After 1945, the relics of this current, often the result of orders, were archived in the cellar.

And Austria presented itself as a victim of Nazism.

It was not until the end of the 1980s that a work of memory was undertaken.

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Just recently, Vienna launched a competition to

finally

"

" a statue of Karl Lueger, a former anti-Semitic mayor of the capital, who inspired Hitler.

The city also reviews its street names, some of which honor compromised personalities.

"

" said AFP city councilor Veronica Kaup-Hasler, stressing "

" and a "

".