Canada’s Winnipeg Artwork Gallery (WAG) introduced final month that it’s dropping the identify of its former director Ferdinand Eckhardt from its bodily and digital areas because of not too long ago surfaced proof of his help of the Nazi Social gathering in Thirties Germany.
The museum revealed in a 19 December press launch that it had “began the method of eradicating Eckhardt’s identify from the primary entrance corridor, the web site and all different gallery supplies”. The press launch additionally famous that the museum would “proceed to analysis the provenance of Eckhardt and the Eckhardt-Gramatté Basis donations” with an eye fixed in direction of figuring out any Nazi-confiscated artwork in his assortment and “return it to the rightful house owners or their heirs”.
Information of Eckhardt’s ties to the Third Reich turned public in November, dropped at gentle by Conrad Sweatman’s investigation for the Canadian journal The Walrus.
“Eckhardt’s public endorsements of Nazism embrace signing an oath of allegiance to Hitler and producing a number of polemics in far-right and Nazified journals within the early Thirties, urging, amongst different issues, that Germany’s cultural area align itself with the targets of the Nazi state,” Sweatman writes. “Eckhardt went to work for probably the most infamous gamers in Hitler’s conflict machine, IG Farben, the identical firm that constructed the Auschwitz focus camp and manufactured Zyklon-B, used within the gasoline chambers to kill over 2.5 million folks.”
Sweatman cites the German artwork historian Andreas Zeising’s 2018 e-book, Radiokunstgeschichte, in addition to Eckhardt’s personal unpublished memoirs—each of which element Eckhardt’s Nazi sympathies. (Approached for an announcement on the time, the museum mentioned that it was “extremely unlikely the [WAG’s hiring] committee would have chosen somebody with any connection to the Nazis”.)
Eckhardt, who was born in Vienna in 1902, was conscripted into the German military in 1942. On the finish of the Second World Battle, he turned an artwork historian and labored for the Austrian authorities earlier than migrating to Canada in 1953. Eckhardt turned the director of the WAG that very same yr, a task he held till 1974. In his article, Sweatman calls Eckhardt and his spouse (the lauded musician and composer Sophie-Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté) “amongst Canada’s most legendary creative {couples}. They’re additionally parental figures in modernism’s beginning within the Canadian prairies.”
As director of the WAG, Eckhardt was lauded for rising the establishment from a small, native museum right into a famend cultural centre with a group of European and Canadian modernist works, in addition to with beginning what would grow to be the world’s largest assortment of Inuit artwork. Eckhardt was inducted into the Order of Canada—the nation’s second-highest honour—in 1976, and was given a Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Medal in 1977. (Eckhardt’s 1982 Order of the Buffalo Hunt, one among Manitoba’s highest honours, was revoked on 10 January because of the brand new revelations.) Eckhardt died in 1995.
“The gallery approached latest stories linking Eckhardt to the Nazi occasion with the utmost seriousness, and instantly launched an inner investigation that included reviewing the Gallery’s archives, researching the not too long ago launched information on the Manitoba Archives and taking actions to look at associated German-language supplies,” present WAG director Stephen Borys mentioned in an announcement in December, answering Sweatman’s name for a assessment of the provenance data of the museum’s trove of works, a whole lot of which got here from Eckhardt’s private assortment. (Borys had beforehand doubted the veracity of Sweatman’s analysis, telling the Winnipeg Free Press: “There aren’t any gaps within the provenance of the works that he acquired… and that ultimately made their method to the WAG.”)
The College of Manitoba and College of Winnipeg, which have services named after Eckhardt and his spouse, instructed the CBC’s Darren Bernhardt that they’re within the technique of conducting inner investigations and critiques. The College of Manitoba, which gave Eckhardt an honorary diploma in 1971, has lined the museum director’s identify on indicators on campus within the interim.
