A charged biography of a notorious Nazi art plunderer and his career in the postwar art world
"[Petropoulos] brings Lohse into sharper focus, as a personality and
axis point from which to explore a network of art dealers, collectors
and museum curators connected to Nazi looting. . . . What emerges from
Petropoulos’s research is a portrait of a charismatic and nefarious
figure who tainted everyone he touched."—Nina Siegal, New York Times
“Readers
of art history and WWII biographies will appreciate this engrossing
deep dive into one of the world’s most prolific art looters.”—Publishers Weekly
Bruno Lohse (1911–2007) was one of the most notorious art plunderers in
history. Appointed by Hermann Göring to Hitler’s art looting agency in
Paris, he went on to help supervise the systematic theft and
distribution of more than thirty thousand artworks, taken largely from
French Jews, and to assist Göring in amassing an enormous private art
collection. By the 1950s Lohse was officially denazified but was back in
the art dealing world, offering masterpieces of dubious origin to
American museums. After his death, dozens of paintings by Renoir, Monet,
and Pissarro, among others, were found in his Zurich bank vault and
adorning the walls of his Munich home. Jonathan Petropoulos spent nearly
a decade interviewing Lohse and continues to serve as an expert witness
for Holocaust restitution cases. Here he tells the story of Lohse’s
life, offering a critical examination of the postwar art world.
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