Castaway Modernism

Torn Modernism illuminates an important moment in the history of the Kunstmuseum Basel's collection. In 1937 the Nazi cultural policy denounced thousands of works as degenerate and forcibly removed from German museums. The Third Reich s Ministry of Propaganda correctly assumed that a portion of such works would find buyers abroad, in this way certain artworks deemed internationally exploitable reached the art market via various channels. In  1939 Georg Schmidt (1896 1966), the museum s director at the time, managed to acquire the painting Fate of the Animals by Franz Marc and 20 more avant-garde masterpieces.In the catalog, renowned experts trace the events based on the seizures in German museums and explain the historical contexts presenting the protagonists of the institutions as well as the art market, and revealing Nazi regime's act of cultural violence that resulted in an artificial fragmentation of Modernism into art that was "exploitable" on the one hand, and art that has been destroyed or forgotten on the other. Contributions on the auction of the Galerie Fischer in Lucerne, on Georg Schmidt's approach, and on the classification of the acquisitions in the context of Basel's collection history bring specific Swiss aspects into focus.The KUNSTMUSEUM BASEL houses the oldest public art collection in the world.