Archive Newsletter No. 16

November 2025

The historical reappraisal of one's own history and continuous critical self-examination are important tasks for institutions. In this Archive Newsletter, art historian Christian Fuhrmeister summarizes key findings and recommendations on how to research the history of Kunstverein München before, during, and after the Nazi regime. For several decades, Fuhrmeister’s research has focused on the relationship between art, art theft, and art history during the Nazi era. He sees artistic engagement as having particular potential for contemporary reflection on the Nazi era and its impact on the present.

A longer version of the article first appeared in 2023 as part of the anniversary publication FOR NOW - 200 Years Kunstverein München.

THE KUNSTVEREIN MÜNCHEN DURING THE NAZI ERA.
WHAT TO ASK, HOW TO RESEARCH?

by Christian Fuhrmeister

Nothing is self-evident, and a critical historiography of institutions and organizations is no exception. For that reason, it seems to be a good idea to take a stepback and ask: who wants to know what, and why? This contribution aims to demonstrate how the history of the Kunstverein München during the Nazi era might be researched and documented: let us begin by sketching out the fundamental challenges of this endeavor.

I. THREE CHALLENGES

Institutions and organizations follow specific, at times idiosyncratic founding logics, which however interact with society and politics at large. A typical chronology that accentuates development and progression, stressing the temporal dimension above others, is therefore hardly an adequate framework to address the diversity and complexity of institutional structures and activities—of parameters and contexts. A sequence of dates demands a quasi-extraterritorial standpoint, which privileges continuities and smooths over ruptures. Finally, drawing connections between events or protagonists and dates (as is often the case) [1] may unintentionally neutralize the many levels and indeed the violence of these ruptures, fissures, and systemic changes. For these chronologically organized retrospective accounts of historical processes often fail to include defining social factors and politi-cal contexts. Importantly we must, therefore, firstly reflect upon this fundamental historiographical problem: what is it that we look back upon when we (wish to,have to, are able to, may, must) review the history of a single entity?
            Secondly, it is important to precisely articulate the intended epistemological outcome. What do we believe we will find through an investigation of the Kunstverein München in the Nazi period? What are our expectations, our presuppositions? What should be ultimately uncovered and exposed? Which assessments should be confirmed, and which should be “disillusioned”[2)] or refuted? Which narrative should be debunked, and which strengthened? Put briefly: who wants to know what and why? This setting of the course—an anticipatory discussion of the direction(s) that our questioning will take—in fact plays a decisive role, because it defines both focus and objectives.
            Insofar as the setting is multi-layered and complex from the outset, the treatment must necessarily follow from multiple perspectives.It is important to analyze the specific (spatial and historical) organizational configurations (that is, Munich, 1933–45, Kunstverein) with particular attention given to the relations between progressive and conservative or impeding elements, culminating, as we know, in the question of the specific relationship between “modernism” and “Nazism”. Recent scholarship has diagnosed that the well-established, but highly schematic narrative of a progressive artistic modernity radically “interrupted” by “the” Nazi cultural politics of 1933, but quickly reanimated after the war, is lacking in complexity. [3]
            The third challenge is the modest cache of source material, combined with the relatively poor provision of literature and, in consequence, the suboptimal state of research. Although this diagnosis applies generally, to a certain extent, to all German Kunstvereine, [4] I would argue that it is especially problematic in the case of Munich, since the constitution of visual arts here may be seen as paradigmatic for an understanding of the history of art in Germany throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The reason for this can be found in the interdependence of factors that led from the establishment of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1808, via the monarchical-aristocratic-bourgeois ideals of education and representation in the so-called ‘Athens on the Isar,’ as well as the international exhibitions at the Glaspalast, to the coining of Munich as “Kunststadt” (“City of the Arts”). The especially dynamic cultures of the art trade and art reproduction in the nineteenth century were later followed by a tendency toward seclusion in Bavaria in the nineteen-twenties, and eventually the proclamation of the “Capital of German Art” in October 1933, on the occasion of the foundation stone laying for the “Haus der Deutschen Kunst.” Nowhere else—or rather, only here—did the first “Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung” (“Great German Art Exhibition”) and “Entartete Kunst” (“Degenerate Art”) coincide almost directly: in the summer of 1937, the two exhibitions were staged, at short notice, perhaps 350 meters apart; the latter in the rooms of the Hofgarten arcades, into which the Kunstverein moved in 1953.
            Bearing in mind these three very different conceptual challenges, the following cursory discussion [5] highlights what are essentially only initial hints toward questions that should be examined later. My mode is thus that of a cartographer, marking out the terrain, probing conditions, sketching out points of approach and perspectives, and finally, formulating concrete pistes de recherche: which research perspectives appear adequate, that is, fit for purpose and ambitious in the sense of a critical reflection geared toward the present and the future?

II. FORWARDS, BACKWARDS, OR SIDEWAYS? OR KEEP STILL AND HOLD OUT? DIRECTIONS OF MOVEMENT DURING THE LONG NINETEEN-TWENTIES (FROM 1918 TO 1933)

The characterization of the Kunstverein in the interwar period as “reactionary” [6] appears entirely appropriate—if one were to understand reactionary as geared firmly in reverse and self-avowedly hostile to progress. It seems significant that the exhibitions planned for 1928 with works by Vincent van Gogh, James Ensor, and Max Slevogt indeed went unrealized [7]; instead, a short while later, the Kunstverein put out an invitation using an antiquated, almost authoritarian language, to an exhibition named Bildwerke und Werkkunst des 12.–18. Jahrhunderts (Sculptures and Decorative Arts from the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Centuries): the Kunstverein “would consider it an honor, if Your Excellency were most inclined to view” the show. [8]Under this title, the private collection of the artist, art historian, and collector Hubert Wilm (1887–1953) was presented.      
            “Reactionary” is harsher—though more accurate—than just “conservative.”[9] It describes an attitude that does not only seek to cultivate and conserve the by gone, but which, regardless of all previous developments (such as democracy replacing monarchy, the republic replacing the kingdom, or a contemporary avant-garde replacing the nineteenth-century “Munich School of Painting”) strives with a certain fervor against any form of renewal and, in doing so, can border on a dogged withdrawal from the world.
            The fact that the Kunstverein’s exhibition and publication program of the long twenties was predominantly dedicated to a past century correlates with a notable skepticism of contemporary art. The fact that many of those active at the time were ageing, and some were indeed very old. Similarly, by the early nineteen-thirties, the long-standing secretary or director of the Kunstverein, Erwin Pixis (1872–1946),[10] had lived the majority of his life in an empire in which his father, the painter Theodor Pixis (1831–1907) had received numerous commissions from Maximilian II and Ludwig II. Sociologically, the persistent presence of a feudal upper class of nobility, civil servants, and officers, one hundred years after the institution’s founding, is clearly recognizable, albeit with an increasing number of upper-middle-class citizens (bankers and merchants) and members of the educated classes.[11]  In terms of the age of the members—and their attitudes toward and conceptions of art—the pro-monarchy Kunstverein starkly resembled the aged collegium of the Academy of Fine Arts Munich.[12] In essence, its members and its program were fairly hermetically sealed within a tradition anchored in enlightened absolutism, which adorned itself with artists in line with its liberalizing tendencies.
            Against this backdrop of contradictory value horizons in the long nineteen-twenties, the Kunstverein seems to have tended toward stagnation and resignation, and perhaps even a decisive refusal to accept the impositions of the present. The change of the political system with the end of the war in 1918 was understood as a loss of meaning and structure, and went along with concrete financial losses. At the Kunstverein, in any case, there was no evident spirit of optimism, no emphatic embrace of the “new,” let alone the avant-gardist.
            From the end of World War I (and with it, the defeat of the Bavarian Council Republic), the state of the Kunstverein was in decline—in terms of its program, concept, and personnel: at the general meeting of the Association of German Kunstvereine in Speyer in 1930, Erwin Pixis described the situation as ‘vegetative,’ referring to the loss of financial and political power.[13] Still evidently enthused by the presentation of his own collection at the Kunstverein in 1931, Hubert Wilm stressed the exact opposite in an article for the Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten on January 28, 1932: “Let us introduce: Kunstverein München. One hundred and eight years old, but extraordinary lively.”[14] This anticyclical invocation seems all the more untenable in light of the commemorative exhibition in 1932 of the ‘German Impressionist’ Maria Slavona, born in 1865, who had died a year earlier. Against this background, it is significant that the traveling exhibition Junge Künstler in München (Young Artists in Munich), conceived by Hans Eckstein (1898–1985) and organized with adequate commitment from Pixis in 1931—which presented the two thirty-year-old artists Ernst Andreas Rauch and Hermann Mayrhofer-Passau along with two artists well under thirty, Richard Hallgarten and Erwin von Kreibig—was not on show at the Kunstverein München, of all places, but instead at the Kunstvereine in Mannheim, Bochum, and Leipzig, among others.[15]
            In summary, it can be said that the ties between potent patrons and significant contemporary artists, which had shaped the Kunstverein for much of the nineteenth century, gradually began to dissolve over the course of the first third of the twentieth century, if not earlier. As far as we can tell, Pixis tried in vain to carry on with the earlier recipe for success as well as old ingredients, but it was precisely this attachment that may have reinforced the institution’s isolation.

III. CONTEMPORANEITY DURING NATIONAL SOCIALISM—RESEARCH PERSPECTIVES

Seemingly paradoxically, contemporary art—the art of that moment—which had played little to no significant role at the Kunstverein München of the Weimar Republic, became increasingly present throughout the nineteen-thirties. It would be going too far to portray this striking tendency in detail here. Suffice it to mention a handful of exhibitions: the retrospective for Edmund Steppes in the spring of 1933 (Steppes had been a member of the NSDAP, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, since the beginning of 1932)[16]; the exhibitions organized by the NS-Kulturgemeinde (National Socialist Culture Community) in 1934/35 and 1936 (“Geformte Kraft” or “Formed Power”), as well as the traveling exhibition “Blut und Boden” (“Blood and Soil”) of 1935; [17] and the show of works by Ernst Vollbehr, “Am Westwall. Feldzug gegen Frankreich” (“At the Siegfried Line. Campaign Against France”) in 1940. Another exemplary exhibition to be mentioned here is “Münchner Künstler erleben den Krieg” (“Artists from Munich Experience the War”) in spring 1941. Even if not all presentations are documented in catalogues and the exhibition titles may, in principle, express both a programmatic affirmation and a reserved attitude to the Nazi regime—which is to say, there might be a certain tension between “packaging and content” [18]—a turn toward current phenomena is nevertheless undeniable.
                       At the same time—according to the incomplete but continuously updated chronicle of the Kunstverein to which I refer here—the annual frequency of exhibitions was markedly intensified after the beginning of World War II. While only one or two exhibitions were shown annually in the years after 1924 (at present, we know of none in the years 1919, 1920–23, 1926, or 1928), this number increased continuously in the nineteen-thirties (three exhibitions per year in both 1933 and 1934, and five in 1935, 1935, 1939, and 1940 respectively)[19] to reach a highpoint in 1941 and 1942, each hosting nine exhibitions. It seems as though the Kunstverein, with Pixis as its motor, had been able to shift into turbo and firmly establish itself—now of all times—within the extremely competitive environment of the “Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung,” the “Große Münchner Kunstausstellung” (“Great Munich Art Exhibition”), and the “Kameradschaft Münchner Künstler” (the “Fellowship of Munich Artists”), that is, between or among the regime-compliant “Haus der Deutschen Kunst,” the Maximilianeum, and the Künstlerhaus at Lenbachplatz.[20]
            The networker Pixis had, in other words, proactively formed and made effective use of the replacement, or indeed the adaptation and transformation of the political elite. The Nazis’ understanding of art was doubtlessly heterogeneous and variable in relation to specific contexts. A prerequisite of the smooth convergence of the Kunstverein with these conceptions from around 1935 was unquestionably ist conformity in relation to decisive ideological and cultural parameters such as formal aesthetic premises as well as preferences of motifs. The accountability report from June 30, 1936, presents this congruence emphatically:

For many years—one could say since the beginning of the twentieth century. [sic] our exhibitions have often been accused of backwardness in journalistic reviews, academic papers, and other assessments, because the board of directors and the exhibition committee were never prepared to go with the fashion and to let those deemed great in their day have their say; those who were put on pedestals by the art trade and the circles interested in it. […]

"The fact that the association has steered free of all that which today is rightly called ‘degenerate art’ is reason for justified pride, and has brought with it ist own reward, as the association did not have to change allegiances as so many others did after our leader Adolf Hitler seized power.

That is why we have no difficulty in joyfully pledging allegiance to the principles established by the Third Reich for the cultivation of German art and to employ our best efforts on Munich’s future mission, for the benefit of Munich’s art and Munich’s artists."[21]

Self-praise—the claim that a reconfiguration had not been necessary, because one had been compliant even before 1933 out of one’s own convictions—also served as self-assurance in the context of what was, until summer 1937, a confusing landscape; confusing because, while the opponents of the National Socialists’ racial and cultural ideology and party politics had been repeatedly defamed, a positive definition of a genuinely Nazi form of art remained very vague.[22] Without Pixis’s alertness to cronyism and changing power relations, and without his compliant adaptation to the diverse challenges of the National Socialists’ operating system with regard to art, the Kunstverein München would not have been able to grow and prosper. It can come as no surprise that the Kunstverein München emphasized its distance from the regime immediately after 1945 [23] —it thus sought to align with the justifying mainstream rhetoric that left no part of society untouched.[24] The numerous actors of the former “Nazi art operating system” who—with little to no adjustment or modification—simply continued their work constitute a visible indication of the significant continuities after the change of system.[25]

 IV. CONSIDERING RESEARCH DESIGN

Based on the sources already identified (and those still to be investigated), several research perspectives are conceivable, desirable, and necessary, in order to further profile the specific realities of the Kunstverein München under the Nazi regime. It should be noted in advance, however, that only guiding principles can be indicated here, following which future research efforts can presumably generate new insights.    

   Firstly, it appears fruitful to identify artworks and artists who were on view at the Kunstverein more than once. Considering the generally more limited significance of, for example, landscapes and floral still lifes as regards content and programming, the allocation of meaning made in opening speeches, catalogue texts, and exhibition reviews takes on a special role.
            The second possible research path would be a closer look into the configuration of non-artistic staff, in particular Erwin Pixis’s specific working premises and the further illumination of his relationship to Nazi art policies (the degree of alignment, the reasons for continuities and ruptures), while bearing in mind the honor bestowed upon him on the occasion of his seventieth birthday in the form of a portrait bust by Arthur von Hüls, which was shown in room thirty-five at the “Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung” (GDK) in 1942.
            Thirdly, a systematic examination of the respective “spaces of experience and horizons of expectation”[26] is necessary: who had which visions for the future, and when, based on their biographical influences? How will art’s development—and the development of one’s own institutional entity—be assessed after 100 and 150 years? How can the descriptions of these positions be contextualized with a critical stance in regard to the source material? As an example of an (attempted) functionalization, reference can be made to the welcoming address by the first chairman of the Kunstverein, Ministerial Manager Eberhard Kuchtner (1906–1983) from 1953: the promotion of art was “society’s insurance premium against nothingness [because the artist was] the bearer and creator of absolute values in our time of relativization and the dissolution of all values.”[27] He goes on to thank those “who stood faithfully by the side of the Kunstverein München in the past years and are now once again helping to bridge the difficulties of a new beginning.” What image—of the Kunstverein and of art—is thus projected retroactively onto art during the Nazi era?
            Fourthly—and since the research on art during the Nazi period is still in ist infancy—the fundamental analysis of the structures and framework conditions of activities in the operating system art under National Socialism can best be dovetailed using the textbook case of the Kunstverein München; if necessary by modifying, correcting, and updating the diagram recently put forward elsewhere.[28] Here, at the latest, it is crucial to take a position on the questions raised at the beginning: what is the purpose of this autopsy? Which epistemological interest justifies the elaborate labor of reconstruction? Why should the existing interpretations be consistently questioned?

V. ART IN THE NAZI PERIOD AND US

Why do we still seek a debate about National Socialism today? This question was recently justified with the statement that it is “especially important in a democracy to understand how dictatorships function.”[29] Nevertheless, the integration of perspectives of those alive today is an important step, since such subjective viewpoints, familial influences, and communal attempts to generate meaning are brought into relation through the examination of historical phenomena. The reflection on processes of transformation in which we inevitably take part, by way of re-evaluating and re-contextualizing the historiography of institutions and organizations, is indispensable. The exact mode of this repeated negotiation and re-negotiation—whether this happens via artistic research or processes of conceptual intervention, as practiced by artists such as Hans Haacke, Maria Eichhorn, and Bea Schlingelhoff, or else by current historical or art historical examination, or other specialist and methodical approaches—seems to me to be of lesser importance.
            In this context, Bea Schlingelhoff’s project for her exhibition No River to Cross from September 11 to November 21, 2021 at Kunstverein München, is particularly illuminating. In the framework of her research into the Kunstverein’s history, she came across an amendment to its statutes, which had been passed in the general meeting on June 30, 1936. The amendment in section 8, paragraph d, declared: “Non-Aryans cannot be members of the association.”[30] In an extraordinary general meeting before the opening of the exhibition in September 2021, Schlingelhoff put it to the Kunstverein to apologize explicitly for this exclusion, and suggested a preamble to today’s statutes:

"The Kunstverein München asks for forgiveness for its collaboration with the Nazi regime and the Reich Chamber of Culture and acknowledges its substantial share of responsibility for the injustices committed by the Reich Chamber of Culture and the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts. In particular, the Kunstverein München asks for forgiveness for the inclusion of section 8, paragraph d in the association’s statutes on June 30, 1936. The Kunstverein München declares that it is permanently committed to the principles of non-discrimination and equal treatment towards members and non-members."[31]

Juliane Bischoff situated this remarkable, conceptual address precisely:

"The realization of non-discrimination may seem like an impossible task, but Schlingelhoff’s proposition shifts at least a part of the normative framing of the work of the institution, within which questions around interpretation and participation must be renegotiated again and again. [...] Increasingly revisionist, anti-Semitic, and racist tendencies alongside a dwindling social willingness to deal with Nazi history make the confrontation with the past and its continuities within public institutions seem ever more urgent. Historical knowledge shapes aesthetic as well as communal judgment.”[32]

With the exhibition No River to Cross, Kunstverein München catalyzed a process. For artifacts, sources, structures, spaces, and biographies constitute the dissonant legacy of Nazism to which we must develop a position. Not least because the material and structural inheritances of the Nazi period reach into our present, there is no alternative to continuing the research efforts that are already underway. Who, if not we, should pay attention to this segment of our cultural heritage? It is those living today who are called upon to take an explicitly critical approach to the effects and consequences of Nazi cultural politics and their structural, toxic narratives. In doing so, it is necessary to continue to precisely reconstruct networks and cliques, as well as to investigate determining factors and asymmetrical power relations. This active addressing of National Socialism—by the Kunstverein, but also by us—is ultimately an expression of contemporaneity.

Christian Fuhrmeister is an art historian and works at the Central Institute of Art History in Munich. He also holds a professorship at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. He studied English, Art, and Art History at the Universities of Oldenburg, Hamburg, and Towson/Baltimore. From 1994 to 1997 he was a member of the Graduate Program Politische Ikonographie at the Universtity of Hamburg, where he received his PhD in 1998 with a thesis on Beton, Klinker, Granit: die politische Bedeutung des Materials von Denkmälern in der Weimarer Republik und im Nationalsozialismus. His research focuses on art, art theft, and art history during National Socialism, art protection during World War II, ruptures and continuities in the twentieth century, and provenance research. He regularly presents project results and archival findings in conferences, lectures, and discussions.