Book launch: Art Restoration Under the Nazi Regime

Join Dr Morwenna Blewett, former Worcester Research Fellow, for the launch of her new book, Art Restoration Under the Nazi Regime: Revelation and Concealment.

Culture today is being used to misrepresent. Political and military regimes have manipulated visual culture in their attempts to re-shape reality – from looting and destroying objects and archives, to making new visual representations, and appropriating visual symbols. As authoritarian populisms and ethno-nationalisms remerge, scholars are now turning from writing the history of representation to that of misrepresentation.

Through meticulous research, Morwenna Blewett offers a courageous and detailed study of the abuse of a field of art and culture that has largely been overlooked in histories of the manipulation of culture: the conservation of art. This is the first in-depth study of art conservation and restoration under the Nazis.

The author not only exposes patterns of complicity behind the participation of the conservation and restoration profession in this complex and opaque network of profit, crime, persecution and ideological broadcast but asks us to reflect on the enduring danger that knowledge and skill are vulnerable to being co-opted by power and its misrepresentation of reality.

Art Restoration under the Nazi Regime makes a ground-breaking contribution to tackling the uncomfortable truths of ‘culture wars’ – past, present and future.