?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
(DEGENERATE ART SHOW) Suite of 5 rare, real photo Third Reich postcards of modernist artworks in a later iteration of the Nazi exhibition "Entartete Kunst," which was displayed in Berlin; with an original broadside promoting this "austfellung," plus 5 photographs of Julius Lippert, the State Commissioner of Berlin, at the show's opening on March 3, 1938. The images of the mayor are ferrotyped silver prints, 5 1/4x7 1/4 inches (13.3x18.4 cm.), and the reverse, mounted recto/verso, each with a handwritten caption (in German); the image area of the postcards measures 5 1/4x3 1/4 inches (13.3x8.3 cm.), and the reverse, printed on Agfa paper stock, 2 with captions in the negative; 4 are unused. 1938
The postcards were apparently shot and published by Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler's chief photographer, and include: 1. Artworks and signage "Nehmen sie Dada Ernst" 2. A modernist sculpture of Christ by Prof. Gies 3. A painting entitled "Mother and Daughter" by artist Jankel Adler 4. Signage on the front of the building at Galeriestrasse 4 5. An uncredited painting entitled "Kriegskruerrel."
The first show of Degenerate Art opened in Munich, in June 1937, and attracted more than 1,000,000 vistiors in the first 6 weeks. Later exhibitions were mounted in Berlin, Leipzig, Dusseldorf, Vienna, and Salzburg, attracting similar numbers of visitors. In these shows the price museums had paid for paintings or sculpture (interestingly, without adjusting for the overinflated currency of Weimar Germany) was also displayed.
"Degenerate art" was defined as works that were viewed by Nazis as anti-nationalistic and injurious of the National Socialist's firm anti-Semitic agenda.
