Out of the Cellar

Adolf Hitler was a frustrated painter, but he and his Nazi crony Goering compensated by collecting art. At last the West German government has figured out what to do with the remainder of their vast personal collections, which for the past 20 years have festered unseen in the dark basement of a classicistic pile in Munich designed fittingly by Hitler himself.

Museums throughout Germany, announced Bonn's Treasury Ministry, will soon share in long-term loans of 857 first-rate paintings. While only the residue of vast hoards of some 80,000 art works repatriated after the war, the art bounty, now in gilt frames stacked like storm doors in the cellar, is resplendent with Botticelli, Cranach, Tiepolo and Titian. There are scads of Flemish masters, but not a scrap of canvas from 19th century France, whose artists Hitler scorned as the fathers of decadent modernism.

Railroaded Masters. Behind the two-decade delay is the problem of rightful ownership. The French alone claim that 138 boxcars of art were railroaded into Nazi hands during the war. Many of Hitler's purchases were indeed paid for, but forced sales and confiscations from German Jewish art collectors and dealers were common. Most of the works have lost their pedigrees on paper (or as art historians call it, their provenance), and possible claims for restitution make the Bonn treasury officials touchily reluctant to give details.

Hitler's art collection is often plainly preposterous. Sharing the racks with Rubens are sexy sphinxes and snake-draped nude dancers of Max Klinger and Franz von Stuck, whose fancy for the Wagnerian concept of total art led them to stud their frames with marble, onyx and semiprecious lapidary and to incise their names in five-inch letters. Among nearly 2,000 lesser art works are monumental glorifications of the autobahns, tiers of titillating, bulky Bruennhildes in the buff, and pleasant vistas of Berchtesgaden. One canvas, called Judgment of Paris, shows three hefty maidens placidly awaiting the award of the golden apple from Paris, who is a lad dressed in a Hitler Youth uniform.

Junk Show. While curators from Aachen to Zweibruecken eagerly await the disposition of the finest work, at least one government-endowed research foundation in Germany would like to get its hands on the junk. Munich's Institute for Contemporary History is attempting a scientific analysis of Nazism, and one of its pet ideas is a public exhibit of what Hitler liked. The last time art was displayed in Germany for such unartistic reasons was the infamous 1938 degenerate art show--composed of what Hitler did not like.

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