Belonging and Betrayal: How Jews Made the Art World Modern [Hardcover]

The story of dealers of Old Masters, champions of modern art, and victims of Nazi plunder.
 
Since the late 1990s, the fate of Nazi-stolen art has become a cause c?l?bre. InBelonging and Betrayal, Charles Dellheim turns this story on its head by revealing how certain Jewish outsiders came to acquire so many old and modern masterpieces in the first placeand what this reveals about Jews, art, and modernity. This book tells the epic story of the fortunes and misfortunes of a small number of eminent art dealers and collectors who, against the odds, played a pivotal role in the migration of works of art from Europe to the United States and in the triumph of modern art.

Beautifully written and compellingly told, this story spans both sides of the Atlantic from the late nineteenth century to the present. It is set against the backdrop of critical transformations, among them the gradual opening of European high culture, the ambiguities of Jewish acculturation, the massive sell-off of aristocratic family art collections, the emergence of different schools of modern art, the cultural impact of World War I, and the Nazi war against the Jews.
 

Charles Dellheimis professor of history at Boston University. He is the author ofThe Face of the Past: The Preservation of the Medieval Inheritance in Victorian EnglandandThe Disenchanted Isle: Mrs. Thatcher’s Capitalist Revolution.
           During and after the Nazi era, ignorant or unscrupulous individuals, institutions, and governments acquired despoiled works of art. it evidently was difficult for dealers, collectors, museums, and European states to resist the sudden availability of a bonanza of old and modern masterpieces. if some knew or suspected that gaps in wartime provenance signaled that they might be buying looted objects, others had little or no idea that there was anything wrong with their purchases.