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Blackvegetable » 9 minutes ago » wrote: ↑

9 minutes ago

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertai ... i-culture/

The Nazis loathed modern art. They launched a war against it.

In 1943, Pablo Picasso received a desperate letter from an artist called Jeanne Kosnick-Kloss. “It’s all too late,” she wrote. “I have just been told that Otto has been sent to the north. Please do something for him. I beg you. Tell me what to do before I die of sorrow.” 

Kosnick-Kloss was the life partner of Picasso’s friend Otto Freundlich. The two men had lived as neighbors in Montmartre, in the warren of ramshackle artists’ digs nicknamed the Bateau Lavoir. This was during the heroic period, before World War I, when Picasso and Georges Braque were inventing cubism. They stayed in touch, and in 1938, Picasso even signed a petition urging the French state to acquire one of Freundlich’s paintings.

But now, in 1943, Paris was under Nazi occupation, and Picasso, for all his fame, was helpless. Freundlich was already in an internment camp at Drancy, on the outskirts of Paris. Two days later after Kosnick-Kloss’s letter, he was on his way to Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in Poland, where he was murdered.