Center for Persecuted Art to Open in Germany
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After years of negotiations and planning, Rolf Jessewitsch, Director of the Kunstmuseum Solingen, announced on Monday that the Center for Persecuted Art in Germany will finally open on January 1, 2015, according to Art Magazin.
The center will be based within the Kunstmuseum Solingen. It will commemorate and exhibit artists who were prohibited and/or persecuted by the Nazi and GDR regimes. The center’s permanent collection brings together renowned collector Gerhard Schneider’s assemblage of degenerate art and the literary collection of journalist Jürgen Serke.
Jessewitsch also revealed that the center plans to hold an inaugural exhibition in Berlin. The show will be realized in cooperation with Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial center, Yad Vashem, and the memorial centers of the former concentration camps Auschwitz-Birkenau and Theresienstadt.
The exhibition will coincide with the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II and the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. Opening on February 27, 2015, it will take place in the German parliament at the Bundestag and will feature artworks, literature, and archival materials. Following the opening in Berlin, the exhibition will travel to Osnabrück, Krakow, and Jerusalem.
The center’s opening year will also feature an exhibition of paintings by the Nazi-persecuted artist Eric Isenburger. It will mark the first time these specific artworks will be shown since 1933 when they were exhibited at Galerie Gurlitt in Berlin.