The Picasso Museum currently is showing 'L'Art Dégéneré', an exhibition about art seized from German museums by the Nazi government which sought to ban so-called "degenerate" art and persecute artists it didn't like.
As so often with "degenerate art" the focus is on paintings lost by German museums to the predations of their own government.
However, many of the dealers and collectors of the artists in question were German Jews, and for this reason they were targeted for persecution and plunder very early in the Nazi regime, when life was still pretty normal outside of Germany. Their assets were plundered and they were eventually murdered if they did not manage to escape. Later, after Nazi Germany attacked Poland in 1939 and France, Belgium and the Netherlands in 1940, the ERR and other Nazilooting organisations seized artworks from Jews in these countries, before murdering them.
This post looks at some of the Jewish collectors of artworks by Marc Chagall who were plundered by the Nazis. The transfer of artworks by so-called "degenerate" artist Marc Chagall to museums and collectors around the world (and notably in the USA) cannot be told without the stories of these looted Jewish collectors.
