Art in Battle

Line Daatland is an art historian and Director of Art and Design at KODE - Art Museums of Bergen. She is part of the curatorial team for the exhibition "Art in Battle." James A. van Dyke is Associate Professor of Modern European Art History at the University of Missouri. He has published widely on the political history of modern art, with a particular focus on the relationship between art and anti-democratic ideology. Terje Emberland is a senior researcher at the Norwegian Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities in Oslo. He is the author of several books on fascism and the history of occupation in Norway. Matthew Feldman is Professor of Contemporary History and Co-Director of the Centre for Fascist, Anti-Fascist and Post-Fascist Studies at Teesside University. He has published widely on historical fascism and contemporary Far Right movements. Christian Fuhrmeister has been managing research projects at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich since 2003. His research and publications focus on art, power, and politics, notably during the Weimar Republic, National Socialism, and the post-war period. Anita Kongssund is a curator at the Documentation Archive of the National Museum for Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo. Formerly, she was Director of the Documentation Archive at the National Gallery in Oslo, Director of the Norwegian Labour Movement Archive of Northern Norway, and an archivist at the Norwegian National Archive. Gregory Maertz is Professor of English and Visual Culture at St John's University in New York City. He has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, most recently on American interventions in the post-World War Two German art scene. He is co-curator of the exhibition "Art in Battle." Dag Solhjell is an art sociologist. He was formerly a Senior Lecturer in Art Communication at Telemark University College. He is the author of several studies on the history of art politics in Norway. Erik Tonning is Professor of English literature and Culture, and Research Director of the "Modernism and Christianity" project at the Department of Foreign Languages in the University of Bergen. He is co-curator of the exhibition "Art in Battle." Eirik Vassenden is Professor of Scandinavian Literature at the Department of Literary, Linguistic and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Bergen. He has published widely on both historical and contemporary Scandinavian literature, and literary criticism.

The exhibition ART IN BATTLE deals with battles over art initiated by Nazi policies and European conquests on several arenas. Expounding the problems of the overfamiliar dichotomy of "Degenerate" versus "Great German" art, it examines propaganda exhibitions in occupied Norway as well as hitherto unseen art by soldiers stationed in Norway.

This exceptional catalog both documents this ground-breaking show and assembles leading experts on the history and ideology of Nazi cultural campaigns in both Germany and Norway to initiate a fresh discussion of the relationships between center and periphery within the artworlds of the Third Reich. Beyond historical re-assessment, this project also asks more pressingly: How do we encounter these battles over art today?