ARTISTS UNDER HITLER is reviewed in the new issue of Commentary by Mark Falcoff:

After the war, those who had collaborated found ways of reinventing their personal histories or pretended they had been apolitical all along. With the coming of the Cold War and the division of Germany into U.S. and Soviet spheres of influence, the Federal Republic and its sponsors lost interest in inquiring too deeply into the political records of some outstanding personalities, both political and artistic. The CIA, Petropoulos writes, “even organi[zed] exhibitions, arranging purchases for American museums, and financing artists….Effort such as this, well intentioned and well informed or not, contributed to the myth that all modernists had fought the good fight.” Only in the late 1960s did young Germans begin to wonder about the careers of the people profiled in this book, and with them, the history of their parents’ generation. Petropoulos’s Artists Under Hitler is a carefully nuanced and fair-minded treatment of a controversial and difficult subject.

It is; I reviewed Jonathan Petropoulos’ book last year and highly recommend it, particularly for its details on the period from 1933 until 1938, when the Hitler-attended “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Berlin signified the end of modern art in Nazi Germany: ‘In the Land of Faust, They Eagerly Followed a Faustian Script.’