If there can be anything worse than a burning of books and art like the one proposed by Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451, it is probably the extermination even of its authors. Just thinking that someone is able to eradicate all artistic expression is frightening, which is no small consideration if we consider that not only is ending with a person or an object, but is erasing forever a more or less faithful portrait of sensitivity Of an entire community.
Probably, something like that might sound almost impossible because of the amount of information stored on the network, however, 20 years before Bradbury published his novel, the Nazis had already shown that humanity is capable of destroying its own history with Such as to ensure a "better" future, intended only for a few individuals. In 1933 began the persecution of artists and works considered as non German because its content did not tie with the Hitlerian vision of an Aryan future for the whole world.
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In 1941 the pressure of the German army had reached the artistic community of Paris, which made them fear not only for their lives, but for their work, which many of them considered as the only legacy they could leave the world after dying ; However, artists such as Dalí, Magritte, Klee, Miró and Moore did not have enough support from institutions like the Louvre to protect their work, since it was considered "degenerate art".
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The label bothered more than one, especially Peggy Guggenheim, who among her friends and lovers had many of these degenerate artists - she herself confessed to having reached the 400 lovers - whom she decided to help by buying many of her works. There are even those who come forward to ensure that, if we have not acquired all these works, the understanding of contemporary art as we know it would not even be possible.
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Guggenheim became involved with so many artists who grew in it a self-destructive feeling of inferiority, which he tried to fill by forming a collection with the work of his lovers, which being rejected by the Louvre administration decided to shelter in a train station in Annecy , Where they were exposed to leaks that possibly would have undone had it not been for the director of the museum of Grenoble offered to store them in his basement.
All these movements would not have been necessary had it not been because Guggenheim was Jewish, and although she herself said that her economic condition was long before that of Jewry, she knew very well that any unscrupulous soldier and with excessive loyalty to the Führer would have To imprison her without caring how much money she could give.
With an ace always up her sleeve, the woman-museum finally got a passport to escape to the United States away from the Nazi threat, of course, with her traveled more than 150 pieces that, among paintings and sculptures, are important works To understand modern art. Even 75 years after the glorious rescue, the wife of Laurence Vail, one of Peggy's ex-husband, said that the works had been lost in a shipwreck, which distressed many even though the works were safe in a gallery; Yet who would not have been afraid to know that these works, which had survived a veritable burning of art, were lost in the middle of the ocean unrecognizable, full of salt and sand?
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