Goring's Man in Paris: The Story of a Nazi Art Plunderer and His Word
By Jonathan Peteropoulos
8vo. pp. xiv, 408. 16 double-sided b/w plates. index. bds. dw. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2021.
New.
ISBN-10: 0300251920 / ISBN-13: 9780300251920
A charged biography of a notorious Nazi art plunderer and his career in the postwar art world
Bruno Lohse (1911-2007) was one of the most notorious art plunderers in history. Appointed by Hermann Goring to Hitler's art looting agency in Paris, he went on to help supervise the thirty thousand artworks, taken largely from French Jews, and to assist Goring in amassing an enormous private art collection. By the 1950s Lohse was officially denazified but was back in the art dealing world, offering masterpieces of dubious origin to American museums. Monet, and Pissarro, among others, were found in his Zurich bank vault and adorning the walls of his Munich home. Jonathan Petropoulos spent nearly a decade interviewing Lohse and continues to serve as an expert witness for Holocaust restitution cases. Here he tells the story of Lohse's life, offering a critical examination of the postwar art world.