Sunday Arts Lecture by Jonathan Petropoulos (in conjunction with the Tuesday Reading Club)

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Sunday, December 7 at 2:00 p.m. Free

RSVP for free tickets: http://bit.ly/1A5posB

The Nazis were not only the most systematiFeatured imagec mass murderers in history, but arguably the greatest thieves. Recovering stolen art and other property and returning it to rightful owners is a task that continues decades after the end of World War II. A film released in 2014, The Monuments Men, has drawn public attention to this issue. The movie, directed by and starring George Clooney, is loosely based on the non-fiction book, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, by Robert M. Edsel. The story follows an allied group – the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program – tasked with finding and saving pieces of art and other culturally important items before their destruction by Hitler at the end of World War II.

Recently the news has chronicled the discovery of the so-called Gurlitt cache which included some 1,300 pictures looted by the Nazis. These had been held by a private art dealer and his family since the end of the war and most had been considered lost until authorities raided the dealer’s Munich apartment. In this lecture, Dr. Jonathon Petropoulos will discuss what we can learn from these events as well as the present-day restitution efforts of governments, museums, and families of Holocaust victims.

Dr. Jonathon Petropoulos is a Professor of European History at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, whose areas of expertise include European History, Germany, Holocaust Art Theft and Looted Art, and World War II history. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1990, where he began working on the subject of Nazi art looting and restitution. Petropoulos is the author of four monographs, including Art as Politics in the Third Reich (1996), The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany (2000), and the forthcoming Artists Under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany (due out from Yale University Press in November). His book, The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany was named one of the 25 most memorable books of 2000 by the New York Public Library.

Petropoulos has also appeared in more than a dozen documentary films, including Rape of Europa (Actual Films, 2007), and has helped organize many art exhibitions, including Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, which opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1991. From 1998 to 2000, he served as Research Director for Art and Cultural Property on the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States, where he helped draft the report, Restitution and Plunder: The U.S. and Holocaust Victims’ Assets (2001). He has served as an expert witness in a number of cases in which Holocaust victims have tried to recover lost artworks, including Altmann v. Austria, which involved five paintings by Gustav Klimt that were claimed by Maria Altmann and other family members (including the “Golden Adele,” which is exhibited in New York’s Neue Galerie).

Signed copies of Petropoulos’ most recent book will be available for purchase at the lecture. Don’t miss a chance to meet and hear from an accomplished expert in this very delicate field of art history on December 7, 2014 at 2:00pm.

Remember this event is free; to reserve your spot click here: http://bit.ly/1A5posB