Vue d'exposition, Museum Folkwang, 2024-2025
With the seizure of power by the National Socialists on January 30, 1933, the implementation of the Nazi regime's deeply antisemitic and racist ideology began. Jewish citizens, the Roma population, homosexuals, as well as political dissidents were systematically deprived of their rights, persecuted, expropriated, banned from practicing their professions, forced into exile, and murdered in concentration camps. The dictatorial regime of the National Socialists came to an end with their military defeat in World War II. Remembering the victims of persecution and terror is a collective duty. For the Museum Folkwang – as for many other cultural institutions – the National Socialist era was a turning point. The Folkwang championed a modern concept of art, which stood in direct opposition to National Socialist ideology. As early as 1933, Ernst Gosebruch was forced to resign from his position as director due to his progressive collecting and exhibition policies. He was replaced by Klaus Graf von Baudissin, a staunch antisemitic and member of the National Socialist Party. The Museum Folkwang did not oppose its co-optation by the National Socialists with sufficient determination, nor did it resist the exclusion of Jewish members from the museum's patrons' association. Klaus Graf von Baudissin contributed significantly to the confiscation of more than 1,400 works deemed "degenerate" from the museum's collection in 1937. Many of the confiscated works flooded the art market and are now in private or public collections; others have still not reappeared. 27 works have been repurchased since 1945. The artwork La Loi normale des erreurs : D'un musée l'autre (Essen) [The Normal Law of Errors: From One Museum to Another (Essen)], created between 2021 and 2025 by French artist Raphaël Denis, addresses the forced transfer of the 9 works from the Museum Folkwang collection that were sold during the 1939 auction of art confiscated from German public collections at the Galerie Fischer in Lucerne, Switzerland. This sale was intended to generate foreign currency for the Nazi state to support the war economy. The varying sizes of the empty wooden crates reference these works and their respective formats. Packaging, crates, stacks, and lists bring the scale of the theft to light in a concrete and oppressive manner.
In 2025, the Museum Folkwang and other cultural institutions in the city of Essen commemorate the end of World War II in Europe, 80 years ago.
Mathilde Heitmann-Taillefer,
Curator and Provenance Researcher
Museum Folkwang, Essen (DE)
