There is a triumphalist tone in some reports of the recovery of something like 1500 works of art in the Munich apartment of the aged, reclusive son of a Nazi era art dealer. Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times finds it an occasion to cheer that art will "trump even humanity’s most demonic ambitions." I can understand the excitement; the thrill of finding works like these horses by Blue Rider artists Franz Marc, since my teens one of my favorite painters; works which were thought to have been lost forever. In some accounts it seems that Hildebrand Gurlitt or his widow told authorities that his collection (plus or minus the art he amassed for Goebbels with Hitler's museum at Linz as shall we call it a final destination) were destroyed in the 1945 fire bombing of Dresden. It is exciting to discover that they were not. I long to see them. It can't be anything but good that they survive. But let's get a grip; Hitler was defeated by his decision to take on the Soviet Union; by his human enemies, their weapons and grit. He was stopped but by the time he was stopped the holocaust had happened. The murder of millions and the destruction of entire civilizations was not trumped, not by 1500 works of art or anything else. It is moving even thrilling when objects believed destroyed by war turn out to have survived. Open the champagne but please let's drop the conceit that this is some kind of fairy tale happy ending; that art has the power to make up for, TO TRUMP no less, the vile behavior of men towards their fellows in the past and today.
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