Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore: Surrealist Lovers Who Defied the German Occupation

Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore: Surrealist Lovers Who Defied the German Occupation

Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, two Surrealist artists and life partners, are the focus of a new exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis. The show, titled "And I Saw New Heavens and a New Earth," presents their collaborative work, including intimate portraits and photomontages, and highlights their daring resistance activities, such as creating anti-Nazi propaganda during the German occupation of Jersey.

calder sale art detective

An Alexander Calder mobile, *Big Horizontal Red* (1956), estimated at $5–7 million, is set for auction at Christie’s on May 12. The work’s provenance traces through Perls Galleries, the Texas Institute for Rehabilitation and Research, and a private New York collection, but a source reveals that its 1997 purchaser, Patricia Halterman, was the granddaughter of Magda Goebbels, wife of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Christie’s declined to comment on the consignors but stated it conducted careful evaluation and diligence.

Read a book, flip off a Nazi: when reading meant resistance – in pictures

A new exhibition at Poster House in New York, titled "Reading Under Fire: Arming Minds & Hearts During Wartime," showcases vintage posters from World War I and World War II that promoted reading and book donations to support troops. The posters, drawn from the collections of the American Library Association, the YMCA, and other organizations, encouraged the public to supply soldiers with reading material as a form of morale-boosting and education. The exhibition runs until 1 November and is curated by Molly Guptill Manning.

Degenerate! Hitler’s War on Modern Art

The National WWII Museum in New Orleans will host the traveling exhibition "Degenerate! Hitler's War on Modern Art" from November 6, 2025, through May 10, 2026. Originally created by the Jewish Museum Milwaukee, the show examines the Nazi campaign against modern art and music, featuring over 65 original works by artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Max Beckmann, Pablo Picasso, and Marc Chagall. It explores how modernist art was labeled "degenerate" by the Third Reich, used as propaganda, and systematically suppressed, with many works seized, destroyed, or sold. The exhibition also expands into music, highlighting the suppression of jazz and works by Jewish composers.

NRW will Verbot für Handel mit Holocaust-Dokumenten

The German state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) is introducing a legislative bill to ban the commercial trade of personal Holocaust documents and artifacts, such as letters from concentration camps, Gestapo cards, and yellow stars. The initiative follows international outrage over a planned auction in Neuss in November 2025, which was halted at the last moment; around 460 objects from that auction were transferred to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation. The bill, to be presented at the Bundesrat session on May 8, aims to prohibit the sale of items directly linked to Nazi victims, while exempting museums, archives, and research institutions.