Saint Louis Art Museum

The governments of both leaders made modern art a political goal. (The Nazis referred to trendy art as Kunstbolschewismus—Bolshevik art—even although it was equally anathema in the Soviet Union.) Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union didn’t just censor modern artists and writers. After 1933, the year Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany, the United States all of a sudden turned attractive as a place the place trendy art might safely be proven. Hitler and Stalin supplied the tailwind for Quinn and Barr’s mission to modernize American style. As Eakin puts it, he wished “to deliver American …