"At Schloss Neuschwanstein in southern Bavaria, Captain James Rorimer, who later would become the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, supervises the safeguarding of art stolen from French Jews and stored during the war at the castle (April-May, 19
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The relationship between art and the Third Reich has long been a pop culture punch line, from jokes about Hitler's failed painting ambitions in The Producers to the rapacious Nazi collectors in the Indiana Jones series. The actual history behind the fight over and fate of European art before, through, and long after World War II remains obscure, though, one that is explored in The Rape of Europa.
Based upon the a book of the same title -- published in 1995 and honored by the National Book Critics Circle -- The Rape of Europa documents the Nazi theft, pillaging, and attempted annihilation of hundreds of thousands of works of art through World War II and the Holocaust.
Just as significantly, the documentary also tells the story of the fight to save art, from the evacuation of the Louvre and Hermitage to the work of Allied "Monuments Men" to recover looted artifacts in the final months of the war.
The documentary begins and ends with the story behind the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I by the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt. Completed in 1907 for his model (and benefactor), it was claimed as state property in Austria following the Anschluss. Decades later the work became the subject (along with four other paintings by Klimt) of a protracted court battle between the nation of Austria and an heir of Bloch-Bauer. The latter was named the rightful owner in arbitration by an Austrian court in 2006. It was subsequently sold to a museum in New York for a reported $135 million, an amount that currently places it among the most expensive paintings ever sold.
Underwritten and produced for eventual public and educational broadcasts and screenings by Actual Films, The Rape of Europa will be seeing a theatrical release in the spring of 2007. A trailer for the documentary -- which is screening on the first day of the Wisconsin Film Festival -- follows below.
