Spring Opening Lecture: Raphael and Stalin in Dresden: Art, Display, and Ideology

This museum within the museum remained secret and the spoliations denied. After signing the Hague Convention in 1954 and during Khrushchev’s De-Stalinisation, the USSR started returning the estimated 2.5 million booty objects. The repatriation of the Dresden Picture Gallery in 1956, rewarding the GDR’s political loyalty, was accompanied by massive propaganda which created the legend of the rescue of the Dresden collections by the Trophy Brigades and Soviet art restorers from Nazi and Allied barbarism. The paper investigates how the Stalinist aesthetic legacy still defines Dresden’s cultural identity. The analysis of propagandistic publications of the 1950ies, to which Cocteau’s and Aragon’s Conversations must be added, shows that the Gallery’s present iconic focussing onto the Sistine Madonna results from Soviet classicism. In 2006, the Pushkin Museum celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Soviet restitutions and planned to exhibit the Sistine Madonna, which failed albeit Putin’s efforts. This proves that, in the face of Russian neo-imperialism, a critical observation of the political uses and abuses of art is an urgent need. The Research Seminar wishes to foster the discussion about politics and art history in the face of Russia's war on Ukraine.

Tristan Weddigen is director at the BHMPI: Curriculum Vitae.

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Scientific organization: Tristan Weddigen