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Holiday 2014 / 2015 Tempus-Magazine.com 84 ments, obstructing German efforts. While many of his coconspirators were killed, Sandberg escaped into hiding. At the end of the war, Sandberg ascended to the museum directorship. He was hailed as a hero. Te reality, Schavemaker says, is not so neat and pristine. "Te Stedelijk has this myth around it of being this museum of resistance," says Schave- maker. As is often the case, the reality is more lay- ered, more complicated. "It was not only that they were in the resistance—or else they would not have been able to stay open." She stops short of denigrat- ing wartime Stedelijk staff as collaborators but calls them "smart" and "diplomatic" as they maneuvered to keep the museum open and evade arrest. Sand- berg and the wartime museum director, David Röell managed to avoid producing many overtly propa- gandistic exhibitions that were common in occupied regions, but they did show groups of German-sanc- tioned artists and gave Nazis tours of the museum's holdings. Te alternative, as Schavemaker says befell a more obstinate museum ofcial from Te Hague, would have been arrest. After the war, when Sandberg ascended to the Stedelijk's directorship, he banished the art groups that had cooperated with the Germans. Still, he was also intent on transforming the Stedelijk into a modern and contemporary art museum, and to that end, he whitewashed the histories of particular art- ists when it suited his larger goals. "He embraced the art of the moment, which was of course Mon- drian but also Cobra, which was our sort of Abstract Expressionist group," Schavemaker says. Te trou- ble was that some of the avant-garde movement's leaders, including, she says, Karel Appel, had sub- scribed to Nazi dogma—at least in the sense that they had signed a pledge that they were Aryan and accepted small allowances in exchange for making art acceptable to the Nazis. Tose who did not sign were barred from exhibiting their work or studying at art schools. Appel's actions "didn't ft" with the Stedelijk's stated ethics, Schavemaker says. "But that was ignored." Te gray area that Sandberg seems to have occu- pied was by no means limited to him or the Stedeli- jk. Many artists who registered with the Germans did so grudgingly, seeing it as their only way to show or attend school. "History is messy," says Jon- athan Petropoulos, a history professor at Claremont McKenna College who specializes in the Nazi looting and also served as research director of the Presiden- tial Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets. Te Nazi occupation even caught the respected artist Max Beckmann in its morass, according to scholars. Beckmann, the German Expressionist whose paint- ings were confscated from museums and displayed among other avant-garde works in the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich in 1937, left his native land for Amsterdam a day after Hitler railed against "degenerate" art in a radio address. During the occupation, Beckmann was able to paint largely unfettered, according to art historian Olaf Peters, who has written a book on the artist. "He was able to keep his studio and do his work," Peters says. "He had the materials. He had collectors from Germany. He was maybe like Picasso in occupied Paris. He was not able to exhibit, but he was tolerated." Tat tolerance, Peters says, was at least in part due to his association with Erhard Goepel, a German art historian tasked by the Nazis with identifying and stealing valuable art from Jewish collectors in oc- cupied countries. Goepel had been in Beckmann's circle before the war, and though the ofcial line scorned the artist's take on modernity, Goepel re- mained an admirer—and a supporter. While acquir- ing old masters on behalf of the Nazis, he transported Beckmann canvases back to Germany, where he sold them, providing the artist with much-needed in- come. After the war he even published monographs on the artist and cofounded the Max Beckmann So- ciety. Beckmann, who eventually settled in St. Louis and then New York, was fully aware that his German collectors supported Hitler politically, if not artisti- cally. But he apparently felt enormously grateful to—or dependent on—Goepel: Peters says Beckmann even risked upsetting his wife by letting Goepel buy a self-portrait that the artist had already given her. Interestingly, the art markets across occupied countries were booming, according to Petropoulos, who has found there was no shortage of local deal- ers willing to collaborate. Te frst priority of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), one of the main Nazi looting agencies was to supply Hitler's planned Führer Museum in Linz with masterpieces. But many Nazi agents, like Goepel, were doing deals on the side or simply pinching artworks for them- selves. Petropoulos is currently writing a book about Bruno Lohse, a notorious ERR dealer stationed in occupied Paris who supplied not only Hitler's mu- seum but also Hermann Göring the founder of the Gestapo who oversaw the Luftwaffe before turning most of his attention to mass art theft. Petropoulos interviewed Lohse roughly ffty times before the