sandr020

In Sept 1942, a lone plane dropped three bombs on Petworth in Sussex , one of them falling on a boys’ school. The bomber killed 29 school boys, a headmaster and schoolmistress in this daylight raid. The town was de­vastated so immediate protests were organised to the Lord Lieut of Sussex, the House of Commons and church author­ities. Why am I discussing Petworth? Kingdom House was a fine C17th grey stone mansion situated in a hamlet named River, consisting of 18 cottages and a public bouse. Near Petworth, one of the most picturesque parts of Sussex, this property was owned by barrister and fascist sympathiser WG Barlow . A church at Kingdom House was set up by a group styl­ing itself the Legion of Christian Reformers/LCR and dedicated to the worship of Adolf Hitler. During the war Barlow was detained under Regulation 18B of the Defence General Regulations 1939 , which enabled the internment of enemy aliens and political dissenters. Most members of the LCR were former 18B de...

By the time we were selecting our own clothes in the 1960s, the times were too hippy for my generation to tolerate Christian Dior  (1905–1957)’s post-war fashions. But now it is time for us to re-examine our old views. Born in Normandy and moved to Paris when he was a child, the Dior family name was known for his father’s successful fertiliser comp­any. As an adult, Dior immersed himself in the capital’s creative scene, under the care of Robert Piguet, fashion designer who trained Hubert de Givenchy. Following France's surrender to Germany in 1940, Dior returned to Paris, where he was soon hired by couturier Lucien Lelong . Through­out the remaining years of the war, including when Dior was serving in the French army, Lelong's design house dressed the women of the Nazis and of French collab­orat­ors. During this same time, Dior's younger sister, Catherine, was working for the French Resistance. Dior, bar suit, 1947 silk jacket and wool crêpe skirt How did Christian Dior ...

The film Woman in Gold , directed by Simon Curtis, was about the recovery of Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I 1907. Gustav Klimt 1862-1918 (Moritz Bleibtreu)’s finished portrait painting, made of gorgeous oil, silver and gold, took three years to complete. His 1907 painting, commission by the husband, had originally been titled Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. It was the first of 2 port­raits that Klimt painted of Adele; then Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II in 1912. When Adele died in 1925, her 6 paintings by Klimt were not left to Austria. She spec­if­ied in her will that the paintings were to be left to her husband and asked that he donate them to the Austrian State Gallery upon his death, to be put on display in the prest­ig­ious Belvedere Palace . However Adele's husband, wealthy sugar magnate Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer 's own will stated that his estate, including the Klimt paintings, was to go to his heirs. But Ferdinand did not die until WW2, and by that tim...

Albert Coates (1895-1977) was born in Ballarat in Central Victoria, oldest of seven children of strong Methodists Arthur and Clara Coates. Alth­ough money was short, Arthur and Clara raised their family valuing educ­at­ion. Albert had a thirst for literature and know­ledge, but his formal educ­ation ended at 11. At first he worked in a butcher's shop on Saturdays only, then he worked 6 days a week. At 14 was indentured to a Ballarat bookbinder, which gave the lad the chance to read widely and study at night. Encouraged by night-school at Ballarat, Coates passed the junior public examination with distinct­ions in French and German in 1913. But Coates wanted a career in medicine. He qual­ified for Melbourne University but as he could not afford to take his place on financial grounds, he moved to Wang­aratta. There he worked in the Postal Department and studied in his spare time. World War One and after By 1914 Coates was able start a university medical course, however WW1 interven...

Notable German art dealer Hild­ebrand Gurlitt (1895–1956) was the ­son of a famous art hist­or­ian, Cornelius Gurlitt I (1850–1938), and grandson of Louis Gurlitt (1812–1897), an important C19th landscape artist. Early in his car­eer in the 1920s, Hilde­brand worked as a museum dir­ector in Zwickau, where he tried to convince people of the merits of modern art. But he faced a right wing backlash and was dropped. In 1933 he moved to Hamburg where young Hildebrand tried to rebuilt his career as a modern art dealer, just as the Nazis rose to power. Hildebrand started to actively link himself with the Nazi goals, writing to the Propa­ganda Ministry to volunteer his skills as a leading expert in modern i.e degenerate art. He was sent with other dealers to act for the Nazis, with the task of acquiring works for the Führermuseum project. Hit­ler’s Special Art Comm­ission of Linz planned to create a super museum in his boyhood town, Linz, that would contain every important art work in the w...

Pablo Picasso was born in 1881, in Málaga Spain. Landmarks of the artist’s childhood are still vibrant today in this sunlit Medit­er­r­anean city. The Church of Santiago was where Picasso was bapt­is­ed. Touristy Plaza de la Merced was where the art­ist etched his first drawings outside his home. Picasso was messy, both boisterous and silent, amor­ous and domineering. His love of bullfighting stemmed from child­hood visits to Málaga’s Plaza de Toros de la Malagueta, making picadors and bulls a recurring motif in his work.   Guernica, 1937 3.5 × 7.8m Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid Photo credit: publicdelivery Early on Pablo shed his father’s name, Ruiz, and adopted his mother’s more memorable Picasso. Within a few years, Picasso was painting skilled portraits of family and friends. By 16, his work got him into the prestigious Royal Acad­emy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid . And studied the Spanish masters he admired at the Prado Museum . Picasso was young when Paul Cézanne, Geo...

Here is a blog post of mine, reposted from 23/12/2008 and now modified. Prof Peter Singer , born safely in Australia straight after the 1939-1945 war, wanted to get to know his late grandfather, David Oppenheim . This was a man who died in the war in 1943, before he could reach a safe place. Luckily for Singer, heaps of documents survived. His aunt, Doris Liffman, had studied some of the letter-based material years earlier for her university degree. These days I ask my students to read Pushing Time Away ( Ecco, 2003), but not because they are necessarily interested in Peter Singer’s task in discovering his own family history. Rather I want them to un­derstand Viennese Jewish intellectual life from the late C19th until 1933. Peter Singer's book with his grandparents' portraits A new golden age of building came to Vienna, based on the grac­­ious Ring­strasse which was created 1860-90: all the city’s great institutions were lo­cated there. Diff­er­ent from the churches and imperi...

The Chase School of Art opened to students in 1896 and two years later it became the New Yorker School of Art . New Yorker Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) enrolled in art classes at this school in 1908. Two years later, in 1910, he left high school to study art at The National Academy of Design and then The Art Stud­ents League . Thomas Fogarty and George Bridg­man were excellent teachers, preparing Rockwell for professional commissions. No Swimming, 1921 Saturday Evening Post While still very young, Rockwell was hired as art director of Boys’ Life , the publication of the American Boy Scouts, and illustrated a range of young people’s publications. In New Rochelle, Rockwell set up a studio with a cartoonist and produced work for such magazines as Life , Literary Digest and Coun­t­ry Gentleman . In 1916, 22-year-old Rockwell painted his first cov­er for The Saturday Evening Post , and for five decades, 321 Rockwell more covers appeared on the front of the Post. The 1930s and 1940s were s...

During the Third Reich, of the five complexes planned for the bene­fit of the German working classes under the auspices of the Streng­th Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude or KdF ) leisure movement, only one was ever started. Stretching for 4.8 ks along the north coast of Rügen, an East Ger­man is­land along the Baltic Sea, Prora was built between 1936-9 as part of Adolf Hitler’s KdF. Robert Ley, the lead­­er of the German Labour Front, was responsible for this huge resort project, creating Hit­ler’s dream for a seaside dest­in­ation for working families. Some historians have reported that the building work was done by military con­scripts, prisoners of war, forced labourers and refugees. The com­p­arison with Butlins was apt; the resort was designed to be af­fordable for the average worker, with each of the rooms present­ing a sea view. Prora’s eight identical, stark buildings had identical rooms. Each had attractive waterfront views, two beds, wardrobe and a sink, with com­munal bathro...

Britain’s Channel Islands (pop 160,000) are self-governing crown depend­en­cies, off the French coast of Normandy. They comp­rise two separate self-governing bailiwicks: Guernsey and Jersey. In 1940 a German in­vas­ion of Britain was possible, but an invasion of the Channel Islands was inevitable. The Germans had to protect their expansion into France from its western flank. And since de­fending the Channel Islands was was "impossible", the Brit­ish Government made evac­uat­ion plans, sending ships to the islands  in June 1940. German soldiers who invaded the Channel Islands in June 1940 and took them over until May 1945. The Germans invested a fortune into these four small, sparsely pop­ul­ated islands because they were half way bet­ween Britain and Fran­ce. In June 1940, German bombers over the Islands bombed the harbours, killing dozens of islanders. Two days later Ger­man planes landed in Guernsey and met no resis­t­ance. Thus began the only wartime occup­at­ion of the B...