The Gallery of Miracles and Madness: Insanity, Modernism, and Hitler's War on Art
by English, Charlie
- Used
- Very Good
- Hardcover
- first
- Condition
- Very Good/Fine
- ISBN 10
- 0525512055
- ISBN 13
- 9780525512059
- Seller
-
Santa Barbara, California, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
New York: Random House, 2021. Cloth, 304 pages, [16] pages of plates, illustrations (some colour); 24 cm. Near fine. Tight, clean copy. Small remainder mark (ink dot)/tail edge. Stated First U.S. Edition. Dust jacket protected in a mylar cover. Another copy available. "This is a tragedy that begins in the halls of psychiatry and modern art and ends in the Nazis' first gas chambers. In the early 1920s, Hans Prinzhorn, a psychiatrist and aesthete, sought insight from the art of mental patients such as Franz Buhler. Buhler was a brilliant, well-known ironworker until his schizophrenia diagnosis, and his work was compared to that of Munch and Duhrer. Prinzhorn collected and published their work, inspiring the Modernist movement that was coming into fashion just as a young Adolf Hitler arrived in Vienna to begin his brief, failed career as a painter. Hitler was alienated by the Modernists and what he called their 'degenerate' art that expressed the most primal human emotions. He saw it as a disease in the body politic and set out to crush it with the infamous "Degenerate Art" exhibition Goebbels and Hitler engineered in 1938, that mocked the work of mental patients and Modernists. The cultural cleansing was a precursor to the racial cleansing and Prinzhorns's patient artists would be caught up in both. Hitler developed the first gas chambers as a way to dispose of 70,273 patients, including Franz Buhler. In The Gallery of Miracles and Madness, the Nazis' cultural destruction, which would rightly be considered among the lesser sins of the Reich, puts the horror of the Holocaust into relief. The cultural decimation--the burning of books and artwork--was a stepping stone to the more overt horrors of the Holocaust. By equating artistic expression with sickness, Hitler made the case to the German people that they could not be made whole until those spreading this sickness were destroyed. Showing us the way Hitler's most profound personal insecurities fan the flames of nationalism and unfolding the transition from Weimar life to Nazi life from less familiar points of view--the ward of a psychiatric hospital, the contents of a museum--English poses profound questions about what is really at stake in cultural objects and offers us a fresh look at the brutality of the Nazi regime" - Publisher.. 1st. Hardcover. Very Good/Fine. 8vo.
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Details
- Bookseller
- LEFT COAST BOOKS (US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 200068
- Title
- The Gallery of Miracles and Madness: Insanity, Modernism, and Hitler's War on Art
- Author
- English, Charlie
- Format/Binding
- Hardcover
- Book Condition
- Used - Very Good
- Jacket Condition
- Fine
- Edition
- 1st
- ISBN 10
- 0525512055
- ISBN 13
- 9780525512059
- Publisher
- Random House
- Place of Publication
- New York
- Date Published
- 2021
- Size
- 8vo
- Bookseller catalogs
- European / 8. Modern, 1900-1945; European / German, Austrian & Swiss; Movements / Art Brut;
Terms of Sale
LEFT COAST BOOKS
30 day return guarantee, with full refund including original shipping costs for up to 30 days after delivery if an item arrives misdescribed or damaged.
About the Seller
LEFT COAST BOOKS
Biblio member since 2016
Santa Barbara, California
About LEFT COAST BOOKS
Established in Santa Barbara, California, in 2004, Left Coast Books specializes in ART BOOKS, offering thousands of titles on painting, sculpture, graphic arts, architecture, design, photography, film, video, and performance art. We also sell classics, literature, history, and a broad variety of useful academic books.
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- Remainder Mark
- Usually an ink marking of some sort which indicates that the book was designated a remainder. In most cases, it can be found on...
- Fine
- A book in fine condition exhibits no flaws. A fine condition book closely approaches As New condition, but may lack the...
- Cloth
- "Cloth-bound" generally refers to a hardcover book with cloth covering the outside of the book covers. The cloth is stretched...
- Tight
- Used to mean that the binding of a book has not been overly loosened by frequent use.
- Jacket
- Sometimes used as another term for dust jacket, a protective and often decorative wrapper, usually made of paper which wraps...