Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 244

Why Francis Bacon deserves to beat The Scream's record-breaking pricetag

Is Bacon's three-panel portrait of Lucian Freud about to fetch the highest price ever for a painting at auction, beating the $120m paid for Munch's masterpiece?

If any artist is worth a lot of money it is Francis Bacon. Looking at his paintings in Tate Britain, I am hit in the face by their brilliance. One gallery contains such famous works as David Hockney's painting Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy and Anthony Caro's Early One Morning. Yet every single thing here wilts in the baleful glare of Bacon's Triptych – August 1972, a painting with the darkness of Caravaggio, the curves of Bernini, and the brutal passion of a criminal Titian.

Bacon is a great artist, and Christie's is putting big money on that greatness. The auction house expects to make at least $85m (£53m) when another of his triptychs goes on sale this evening. The New York sale is aiming to outdo the record-making $120m price recently paid for Munch's Scream – but is Bacon that appealing to art collectors?

One thing is obvious if you take a glance at the art market and its mega-sales. Collectors are idiots, and auctioneers know it. They report that prices are seriously influenced by how much red or gold is in a picture. Think about it: you have tens of millions to spend on art and you allow yourself to be influenced by ... its colour. How dumb is that? What does it say about the vacuous tastes of art's new plutocrats?

The Bacon triptych is unusually bright for him, with big passages of yellow. Yet the big selling point is surely its content. With this work, you get two modern greats for the price of one. It is a portrait of Lucian Freud, who stands with Bacon as a modern master of the painter's art. Freud and Bacon had an intense friendship, fraught with rivalry yet also, it is said, sexually charged. One of the reticent Freud's most public gestures was to make a Wanted poster for his own portrait of Bacon after it was stolen in Berlin. This moving poster was suggestive of how much he felt for Bacon, as well as for that little painting.

Freud is today at least as revered as Bacon. Both of them deserve the fame. So maybe Christie's is right and Three Studies of Lucian Freud presses all the buttons to make obscene amounts of money. Bright colours and famous names – it's as profound as that.

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The 10 most shocking performance artworks ever

Russian artist Pyotr Pavlensky's nailing of his scrotum to Red Square isn't as unique as you might think: artists have shot, burned, disfigured, and eaten themselves

Artist Pyotr Pavlensky has made eyes water all over the world with his protest against Russia's descent into authoritarianism – nailing his testicles to the ground in Red Square on Sunday to denounce Vladimir Putin's "police state". Yet connoisseurs of performance art are probably already saying: "Meh, seen it all before." For Pavlensky's protest is the latest in a long line of performance art pieces that have endangered life and limb. Here are our top 10 ...

The vanishing Dutchman

No one will ever know if Bas Jan Ader expected to die in his performance In Search of the Miraculous. In 1975, the Dutchman set out from Cape Cod in a small sailing boat to cross the Atlantic. This was part of an artwork that also included a series of pictures of bland Los Angeles scenes. It was as if he sailed out to find something deeper than freeways and fast food. His broken boat was found 150 miles off the coast of Ireland. It was empty.

Marina and the star of fire

Today she hangs out with Lady Gaga but in 1974 the Belgrade-born, New York-based artist Marina Abramovic nearly joined Bas Jan Ader as a martyr to the imagination. In Rhythm 5, she placed on the ground a large, five-pointed wooden star, an echo of the communist red star, soaked it in petrol and lit it. As it blazed, she threw in bits of toenail, fingernail and hair, which she cut off in front of a watching audience. Then she jumped through the flames into the centre. She did not know the fire had sucked up all the oxygen and, since the audience couldn't see her clearly for smoke, it took several moments for them to realise she was unconscious. Abramovic was rescued just in time and rushed to hospital.

Shot by a rifle, nailed to a car

In 1971, young American artist Chris Burden stood still while a friend aimed a rifle and shot him in the arm. The performance was caught on video. It was a violent time, with war in Vietnam and riots in US cities. Burden wore a T-shirt and jeans and, after being shot, clutched his arm, looking stunned even though he planned it all. He recovered and went on to have himself nailed to a Volkswagen.

The hidden masturbator

In his 1972 performance Seedbed, American artist Vito Acconci constructed a false floor in a New York art gallery and hid beneath it. Speakers relayed his voice into the gallery. As visitors walked over the wooden floor, they heard him murmuring sexual fantasies about them while masturbating, thereby evoking the paranoia of the Nixon era.

The castration myth

In attacking his own genitals, Pyotr Pavlensky may have been inspired by inaccurate stories about Austrian artist Rudolf Schwarzkogler. When he died in 1969, it was widely believed he had killed himself by cutting off his own penis. The works of this Vienna actionist do include images of castration, but they were mocked up. So Schwarzkogler's reputation as the ultimate performance artist is somewhat exaggerated. He actually died after falling from a window.

Surgeon, remake me

In The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, a project that started in 1990, the French artist Orlan has altered herself with a series of operations. Through plastic surgery, she aims to have a completely new appearance based on bits of western paintings that define the ideal of beauty, including Botticelli's Venus and the Mona Lisa. She calls the project "a struggle against the innate".

Equal rights for cyborgs

In retrospect, Orlan's operations look less like feminist body art than the beginning of a cultural obsession with cyborgs and post-human transformations. Enter the Catalan-based Neil Harbisson, who, having been born unable to see colours, has been implanted with a device to "hear" them. In 2004, this "eyeborg" extension was allowed to feature on his passport photo, a milestone in cyborg rights. He is the founder of the Cyborg Foundation.

Yoko stripped with scissors

In Cut Piece, an early piece of feminist art first staged in 1964, Yoko Ono knelt on the ground and laid down a pair of scissors. The audience were invited to come forward and cut off any piece of her clothing. It started politely but became more and more threatening as her clothes were reduced to rags and she kneeled in her underwear.

A bath in blood

Hermann Nitsch was part of the Vienna actionist movement that set out to shock Austria with gory images of violence, blood and apparent self-torture. His grotesque Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk is, however, the Orgiastic Mysteries Theatre, in which crowds of young people bathe in blood and conduct animal sacrifice at rituals in his castle. The last such rite happened in 1998.

Testicles for tea

In 2012, Japanese artist Mao Sugiyama had his genitals surgically removed, to raise awareness of asexual rights. After keeping them in the fridge for a while, he cooked them and served his friends a meal of steaming hot bollocks. But was it art? Hard to say without actually tasting them.

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Should we be so shocked that Lucian Freud's work is on show in Vienna?

Yes, Freud refused to lend his works to Austria for most of his life, but maybe this new exhibition should be seen as a tribute to the power of art in the face of adversity

Is it hypocritical for Austria to lionise the late Lucian Freud with an exhibition of his paintings at Vienna's magnificent Kunsthistorisches museum? The artist gave permission for this show in his very last years – but for all his life until then, he had refused to lend his paintings to Austria.

Now, he is the toast of Vienna with his pictures hanging next to those of his hero Titian. Is this, for all the agreement extracted from a frail old man, a shifty bit of mythmaking that buries Europe's crimes under Europe's glory? It's one thing to see Freud and Titian side by side: what continuity! Yet in reality, that continuity was savagely broken.

Vienna is the city of Freud's grandfather, Sigmund. Shamefully, it was also the city Sigmund had to flee. Having invented psychoanalysis in Vienna, he had to leave it in old age to escape the Nazis, and died in London. There, he joined Lucian and his family who had already moved to Britain from Berlin.

It's easy to see why Lucian Freud refused to exhibit in Vienna for decades, and tempting to see his posthumous exhibition there as a whitewash of history. And yet ...

Sigmund Freud was just one of the great cultural figures who left Vienna because they were Jewish or partly Jewish. The art historian EH Gombrich was born there in 1909, and learned his craft among Vienna's art collections until he moved to London in the 1930s. The historian Eric Hobsbawm also spent part of his childhood in Vienna. The Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein took British citizenship in 1939.

Austria contributed so much to modern culture – and that contribution was overwhelmingly Jewish. But one of the most distinctive contributions of Vienna's intellectuals was to see the vitality of the past, the power of heritage. Sigmund Freud was immersed in art history. He wrote a book about Leonardo da Vinci. His collection that survives in his London home bears witness to the depth of his interests from ancient Egypt to Renaissance Italy.

Gombrich, meanwhile, wrote classic books including The Story of Art and Art and Illusion that argue for the distinctive energy and intelligence of European art since ancient Greece. For Gombrich and Sigmund Freud, the European heritage was a marvel.

The place they could see this marvel most clearly as young men was Vienna's Kunsthistorisches museum – the very place where Freud is now being exhibited.

In a subtle way, his exhibition in Vienna is a homage to Sigmund Freud, to Gombrich, to the great minds that saw so deep into the power of art. Lucian Freud, too, is a thinker. His intellect as a painter is one that converses naturally with the masters of the past. Freud's peculiar genius proves the endurance of cultural values in spite of the hells the 20th century made.

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Pope Francis kisses a disfigured man – and shows politicians the lost virtue of humility | Jonathan Jones

Is this a publicity stunt? No, because it expresses more than an empty gesture ever could

We live in a world of image-conscious leaders, hair primped, faces artfully powdered, photo opportunities carefully devised. The art of image is generally assumed to be both modern and false: the term spin doctor was unknown in Britain before Tony Blair's team made it part of the language. Yet for all the sophistication of modern political style, Pope Francis is showing by his superior example how tired, unconvincing and alienating such methods have become.

Francis has renovated a damaged brand not in years, but months. He has turned the image of the papacy and by extension the Catholic church upside down in less than a year. His papacy already seems destined to be remembered as special – and yet this communicational triumph has not been achieved through carefully constructed PR techniques. It is not spin. Its methods are medieval and its magic is simple.

This week's images of the pope kissing and praying with a man severely disfigured by illness are truly gothic. I do not say that intending to belittle or caricature the condition, apparently neurofibromatosis, from which this man who attended the pope's general audience in the Vatican is suffering. What is gothic is the return to 13th-century values in this picture of a Christian leader showing humility and charity by physically interacting with someone visibly sick and visually different from those around him. St Francis of Assisi, whose name Pope Francis has adopted, was a master of simple, powerful popular gestures: he invented the Christmas crib and reputedly preached a sermon to the birds.

Disease, in the world of St Francis, was mysterious and awe-inspiring. There was virtually no effective medicine. The sufferings of Job were a reality for all those infected by illnesses no one understood. Few illnesses today can inspire the deep sense of awe that once attended leprosy and plague: so it is harder to inspire saintliness, kissing the boils of the sick. Francis has found a face so unusual and estranged from the normal that as he touches and prays with its possessor he seems to reenact the spirit of St Francis himself.

Is this a publicity stunt? No, because it expresses more than an empty gesture ever could. Charity and humility and love really are Christian ideals, and for someone in the pope's position of power to so graphically express them is full of concrete meaning. Be like Christ: identify with the outcast. This pope's idealism is so clearly readable in his actions that it is missing the point to call him a clever communicator. He knows that he is a living symbol and that by identifying with this man he is making the church itself grow more human.

Can politicians emulate this pope's bold symbolic language? They'd be laughed at and called cynics. So why can he get away with it? The word we are looking for is authenticity. Pope Francis appears utterly authentic and honest. He does not seem cynical in this image because we accept his sincerity and seriousness. This is what politicians have lost in modern democracies. It is why people turn to Russell Brand. There is a deep crisis of belief in democratically elected leaders but Pope Francis has the answer: you who seek to lead, look at this picture, it has a message for you.

A simple message. Do and say what you believe.

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The Nazi hoard worth a billion – the week in art

A game-changing art stash is uncovered in a Munich flat, as the plans for the Battersea Power Station revamp are released in full – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Painting Now
Is painting still a viable art form in the 21st century? What kind of painting captures the spirit of now? And can the five artists highlighted here – Tomma Abts, Gillian Carnegie, Simon Ling, Lucy McKenzie and Catherine Story – hold a candle to the great tradition of painting?
Tate Britain, London SW1 from 12 November until 9 February

Other exhibitions this week

Foreign Bodies, Common Ground
Contemporary art explores modern medicine in this group show by B-Floor Theatre, Lena Bui, Elson Kambalu, Miriam Syowia Kyambi/James Muriuki, Zwelethu Mthethwa and Katie Paterson. All have created work out of residencies at medical research centres.
Wellcome Collection, London NW1 from 14 November until 9 February

West Country to Worlds End
Images of Elizabethan exploration portray great westcountrymen such as Sir Francis Drake.
Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter EX4 until 2 March

Marking Language
This exhibition explores how artists use drawing to depict language, bringing together craft and conceptual art.
The Drawing Room, London SE1 until 14 December

Claes Oldenburg
A show celebrating the 20th anniversary of Oldenburg's public sculpture in Middlesbrough, Bottle of Notes.
Mima, Middlesbrough TS1 until 23 January

Masterpiece of the week

The Mildenhall Dish
Roman Britain, 4th century AD
This is an astonishing masterpiece of mythological art – as well as a luxury item. It's a big silver dish decorated with scenes of satyrs and other worshippers of Bacchus, a good theme for a boozy Roman banquet.
British Museum, London WC1B

Image of the weekWhat we learned this week

That the €1bn art stash of Nazi art found in a Munich flat changes everything we thought about Hitler's views on art

Whether the Battersea Power Station overhaul will ruin the building's soul

That one photographer's love letter to Paris is full of beautiful rooftop scenes and pinball machines

What your favourite bad graffiti looks like

A list of art's greatest guerrillas

That the RA just got £12.7m lottery funding

And finally...

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From Nazis to Napoleon: the art of war – quiz

Jonathan Jones:: How well do you know your history? After this week's Hitler hoard was uncovered in Munich, test your knowledge of looters, lost masterpieces and other crimes against art

Jonathan Jones

The revolution will not be aestheticised: the top rightwing artists

From Goya to Glibert and George, artists have long embraced – and expressed – rightwing views

You don't have to be leftwing to carry a paintbrush or fill a taxi with snails. Since the French revolution – when art turned left, according to Tate Liverpool – there have been plenty of artists who turned right.

Elisabeth Louise
Vigée-Lebrun

This portrait painter was a friend of the much-demonised French queen Marie Antoinette. When the revolution happened, she fled France and continued her aristocratic art in exile. But can the French Revolution even be celebrated as a victory of the left anyway? At least Royalist Vigee LeBrun had no blood on her hands – unlike the "radical" artist Jacques-Louis David, who voted to execute the king.

James Gillray

The powerful satirist got money from Britain's Tory government for his prints poking fun at the French revolution. His caricatures of starving maniacs bathing in the blood of the guillotine equate revolution with mayhem.

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes

This visionary artist started out as a liberal, and his portraits of reformers reveal his desire for a modern Spain. But in the Napoleonic wars, his view of Spain got darker. His "rightwing" contempt for the common people is obvious in such paintings as The Burial of the Sardine, where peasants dance like idiots.

Caspar David Friedrich

This German Romantic painter was not very political, but his images of soaring mountaintops, seas of mist and forests have often been adopted as symbols of a right-wing nationalism. The modern artist Anselm Kiefer alluded to this when he had himself photographed posing as a figure from a Friedrich painting, giving a Nazi salute.

Edgar Degas

The French impressionists were deeply influenced by Wagner, whose melting preludes are echoed in their liquid light. Renoir painted his portrait, listening politely to his antisemitic talk. Degas was himself an antisemite: note his painting of dealers, At the Bourse, with its Jewish caricatures.

Futurism

Italy's futurist movement was aggressively nationalist and elitist. Before the first world war, the futurists, led by FT Marinetti, praised militarism and violence. Later, Marinetti influenced his fellow demagogue Mussolini and tried to make futurism the official art of fascist Italy.

Vorticism

The vorticist periodical Blast praised war and criticised the suffragettes. When war broke out in 1914, however, vorticists painted the reality of the trenches, though vorticist poet Ezra Pound ended up supporting Mussolini.

Emil Nolde

The German expressionist painter Nolde joined the Danish Nazi party. His dark and intense landscapes, with their echoes of Romantic art, can be interpreted as morbid celebrations of native northern blood and soil.

Jean Cocteau

This artist, writer and film-maker – co-creator with Satie and Picasso of the ballet Parade – collaborated with the Germans during the second world war, complying with Nazi propaganda rules.

Salvador Dalí

The surrealists expelled Dalí, above, after he painted a dream image of Hitler. And they were shocked by Dalí's refusal to support the Republicans in the Spanish civil war. After 1945 Dalí lived in Spain and made no objection to the Franco regime.

Gilbert and George

Britain's most consistently provocative modern artists have made art that celebrates skinheads, and often put the St George cross and the Union Jack centre stage. "We'd rather side with the bankers," they said last year, "than some vegan protester twit on benefits."

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Otto Dix works in Munich hoard speak truth to Hitler

First glimpses of pictures by 'degenerate' modernist artist reflect grotesque carnival of lies and hypocrisies of German New Order

The first glimpses of pictures by Otto Dix recovered in the €1bn Munich art hoard discovery show why he upset Adolf Hitler so much.

It is no surprise that Dix was pilloried by the Nazis as a "degenerate" artist or that his works have turned up in a hoard apparently connected with the Exhibition of Degenerate Art staged in Munich in 1937 to demonise modernism.

In some ways, Dix is the very definition of degenerate art – perhaps his paintings even helped to inspire the term. For with his relentless portrayal of characters who seem to inhabit a Germany consisting entirely of brothels, cafes and cabaret clubs, he delights in the seamy side of the nation. Hitler's Germany found no reflection of its banal self-image in his spicy pluralism, nothing heimlich (secret) in the visceral carnival that is his art.

In his newly discovered self-portrait that was hidden from the world for so long, Dix sees himself as one of the sleazy sophisticates who inhabit his art. He looks like the slick city killer Mackie Messer in the song by his contemporaries Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill from their cynical masterpiece The Threepenny Opera.

Dix kills the lies people live by. He is one of the most subversive and satirical of modern artists, a visionary who recorded the chaos of German life on the eve of Nazism. He sees the world through a grotesque lens. His eye for people is precise yet extravagant. This wonderful painter took modernism as his licence to show his time and place the monstrous reflection of its crimes.

Dix fought in the first world war, winning the Iron Cross, but saw things he never forgot. Hideous visions of the killed, the disfigured, the dismembered fill his landscapes of barbed wire and muddy trenches. The same ruined bodies haunt his scenes of civilian life.

In Berlin in 1919, the Dada movement responded to the broken spirit of Germany, fought over by extremists, by cutting up photos to reflect society's crisis in splintered totems of confusion. Dix did this too but he did not need to use found objects or photos to evoke the modern world's violence. His brush cut, knife-like, through society's foibles.

It is superficial to see Dix through 21st-century eyes simply as someone victimised by Hitler because he was "modern". Indeed the story of modernism in Germany is very distinctive. French cubism looks perfectionist beside the more street-level disorder of Dix. While modern styles set him free, he uses this freedom to tell the truth of economic crisis. Money becoming worthless, the rise of the right – his extreme eye sees history with utter lucidity.

He is not modernist in his technique but in his grisly contempt for bourgeois society. His flesh puppets fill scenes of high life infused with the seedy. Cubism gives him the power to monster Germans.

In other words, he truly is degenerate – gloriously so. Together with his fellow Weimar Republic artist Georg Grosz, he shows sins, hypocrisies, lies, illusions, crimes peeping out in the poor skin, jutting noses, monocles and cigars of his victims.

The works by him found in the Munich hoard typify his free, furious style. If this discovery brings Dix into the limelight, Cornelius Gurlitt will do something worthwhile for world culture in spite of himself. For it is evident, just from these pictures, why Dix upset Hitler. He told the truth. He showed the eccentric, messy, unkempt stuff of life. His pictures live in their gross energy. They give delight even when they condemn their subjects.The fury of Dix is perversely joyous. Too joyous, too true, to be tolerated by Hitler's New Order.

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Missing in action: artworks presumed to have been destroyed in the war

Modernist works by Klimt and Van Gogh and masterpieces by Caravaggio are among the pieces that have long been assumed lost. But could the Munich hoard give hope for their survival?

Klimt University Murals and Schubert at the Piano

Klimt's decorations for Vienna University were his most controversial and radical paintings. These cosmic dream pictures were attacked for their eroticism and atheism in his lifetime – today they might secure his reputation as a great modernist. But together with other paintings, including Schubert at the Piano (above), they are said to have been burned by the SS in 1945.

Caravaggio Portrait of a Courtesan

Caravaggio's great painting of Saint Matthew and this portrait of a courtesan friend were both stored in Berlin art shelters that were hit by incendiary bombs. But were these masterpieces really burned in allied air raids? The survival of "degenerate" art in a flat in Munich raises questions about every disappearance of art from the Nazi era.

Van Gogh

Painter on the Road to Tarascon, also known as Painter on His Way to Work, 1888.

This renowned painting by Van Gogh has never been forgotten even though it is believed to have been burned in an air raid on Germany in the second world war. Francis Bacon even painted his own version that can be seen at Tate Modern. But does the fate of the original need to be re-examined in the light of the Munich art find?

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Does the Munich hoard turn the story of art and the Nazis on its head?

The discovery in a Munich flat of 1,500 'lost' works raises fresh questions about the Nazi's attitude to the modern art they loved to hate

It is one of the most shuddered-at chapters in the story of art. In July 1937, Nazi officials turned up in full uniform alongside evening-suited cultural eminences of the Third Reich at an art gallery in Munich for the opening of the Exhibition of Degenerate Art. They came not to praise modern art, but to laugh at it.

Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Otto Dix, Georg Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner – the masters of modernism, including giants of Germany's own avant garde, were shown in this exhibition as deviant, decadent practitioners of so-called Degenerate Art – "Entartete Kunst". Sections of the show had titles such as "Total Madness", "The Prostitute Raised to a Moral Ideal", "The Negroisation of Art". Modern art was interpreted in the catalogue as a conspiracy by Russian Bolsheviks and Jewish dealers to destroy European culture. The admiration for African carvings that had so fired Picasso and other artists was taken as proof of modern art's racial degeneracy.

Vile stuff – but the Nazi attitude to modern art may have been radically misunderstood. An amazing discovery in 21st-century Munich turns the story of art and the Nazis on its head.

Cornelius Gurlitt's flat looks meagre in photographs. It is located in an apartment block in Munich that, from the outside, appears to have seen better days. Yet in that flat lay secrets of the Third Reich only now accidentally uncovered. Intrigued by Gurlitt's lack of German identity documents and odd behaviour while crossing the border on a trip to Switzerland, police raided his home and found a hoard of more than 1,500 works of art including pieces by Picasso, Matisse, Renoir, Paul Klee, Emil Nolde, Franz Marc, Otto Dix and Oskar Kokoschka. The understandably reclusive Gurlitt turned out to be the son of Hildebrand Gurlitt, an art dealer who played a key role in the Nazi roundup of "degenerate art". Although half-Jewish, and the cousin of the "degenerate" composer Manfred Gurlitt, the Nazis considered him a useful expert. This is not just any haul of stolen goods: it may turn out to be one the most important recoveries of lost art ever. For it takes us to the heart of the cultural policies and crimes of the Third Reich.

It raises massive questions about the fate of art in and after the second world war. As the allies entered Germany in the last phase of the war they took with them experts, nicknamed the "monuments men", whose job was to find out where the Nazis had stashed looted works of art. For it was not just modern art the Nazis abused. All over Europe, they seized the best masterpieces from the finest museums. Many of these, including such treasures as Titian's Danae and Van Eyck's Ghent altarpiece, were found stashed in mountain tunnels and mines. Others, including many of the works of art shown in the Degenerate Art exhibit, are believed lost for ever. Paintings such as Van Gogh's The Painter on his Way to Work and 14 masterpieces by Gustav Klimt are written off as destroyed. But is it possible a Nazi network preserved a secret world of stolen art after 1945? Is it even possible such art was used to fund neo-Nazi activities or maintain war criminals in quiet comfort?

To put it another way: were Hildebrand Gurlitt and his son unique, or is the find in Munich a clue to some larger network of Nazi art hoarders sitting on secret treasures all this time in postwar Europe, living off occasional covert sales of the Picassos that they keep among the canned foods in their anonymous flats?

One thing is certain: this story comes from the dark heart of Nazi Europe. Munich was Hitler's art capital. As a young man, famously, he wanted to be an artist. He wasted an inheritance trying to get an art education in Vienna. While Klimt was creating modern art there, Hitler was going to the opera to hear Wagner (conducted by the modernist Gustav Mahler), and soon eking a living painting drab topographic scenes. Eventually he left for Munich, where he survived as a hack painter of typical German scenery until the first world war gave him a new life as a soldier. Hitler loved Munich, and when he came to power lavished money on its art scene. The city's expressionist painters were in trouble. But while Degenerate Art pilloried them, in 1938 Hitler opened a huge exhibition of "proper" German art at the newly built House of German Art, a grand neo-classical temple to the art of a new, fascist Europe. Where the year before thousands had flocked to see the art they were told to hate, far fewer went to see Nazi-favoured art.

This is where the cliches start. It is conventional to contrast the avant-garde art the Nazis maligned with the traditionalism and conservatism of the art they admired. But the National Socialist nightmare was not "conservative". It was, in its own way, horribly modern – it imagined a different, perverted vision of modernity. The House of German Art still survives in Munich. Today it is used as an alternative arts centre. Video and installation look subversively great in its grand icy halls. You wouldn't call these rooms old-fashioned. Rather they have a chilly neo-classical hauteur that speaks of sublime ambition. This is the neo-classical modern art of Nazism that can still be seen in Leni Riefenstahl's terrifying films – some of the most disturbingly beautiful ever made – and the designs of Hitler's architects Paul Troost and Albert Speer.

Hitler did not hate art – he loved it. Other leading Nazis just saw it as money. Goering, greedy and corrupt, amassed art because it symbolised wealth and power. Munich was at the centre of the regime's cultural pretensions. The Gurlitt hoard is a survival of the Nazis' strange and ambivalent attitude to art, from Hitler's aesthetic New Order to the simple philistine greed that probably motivated most of their art theft.

Gurlitt's cache reveals that many assumptions about the Nazis and art are simply untrue. The Degenerate Art exhibition was real enough – but did it really mean the Nazis hated modern art? It is because we take this for granted that no one has been searching for lost "degenerate" works such as those in the flat in Munich. Some works from the Entartete Kunst exhibition, many seized from once-progressive German museums, were sold abroad afterwards. Others have vanished. As the war began and Nazi racial policies became ever more explicit, more modern and pre-modern works were seized or bought for a pittance from Jewish owners. Much was destroyed. Or was it?

One of the most suspicious cases is that of Klimt's lost works. Fourteen paintings by this Austrian visionary of dreams and desire were stored in an Austrian castle during the war. In 1945, an SS battalion reportedly held an orgy there before setting the castle alight. The Klimts are presumed lost, but there were rumours that some might have been spirited away. Now, surely, such stories need to be re-examined. The 1,500 works hidden by the Gurlitts, father and son, were also presumed lost.

The allies tend to blame themselves for art lost in Germany in the 1940s. Almost every major German city was bombed by Britain and the US during the second world war. Firestorms ravaged museums and art stores as well as killing thousands of civilians. "Bomber" Harris, Britain's Bomber Command mastermind who insisted this was the way to win the war, was apparently responsible for burning paintings such as Van Gogh's Painter on the Way to Work and Caravaggio's first version of St Matthew, as well as his portrait of a courtesan.

Perhaps the single most significant fact that has so far come out about Hildebrand Gurlitt is that he claimed his collection of looted art was destroyed in the bombing of Dresden. So it was the allies who burned it. If he lied so easily about that, what about other Nazi-owned art that supposedly vanished in wartime air raids?

The massive destruction the Nazis brought down on Germany created chaos in 1945. As the "monuments men" were seeking out stolen art treasures in Alpine mines, it seems Gurlitt was carefully and quietly preserving his personal hoard.

The reason he got away with it is that he had grabbed so many modernist works. Ever since 1937, it has been assumed that "degenerate art" was either sold abroad or destroyed. The "monuments men" went searching for Titians, not Picassos. But the Munich hoard proves the naivety of this assumption. Even in the mind of Hitler, modern art was bizarrely fascinating. You do not put on an exhibition of something you do not want to look at. In some strange way the Nazis needed modern art, as a demonic image of their nightmares. The Degenerate Art exhibition is, after all, the biggest backhanded compliment ever paid to the avant garde. Many people think art has no influence on the world. Hitler knew it did. The old saw that he hated modernism is just too simple. He loved to hate it. What you love to hate, you want to keep, somewhere, if only as a freakshow curiosity.

Other Nazis simply went along with Hitler's taste in public but did not really know what the would-be artist in him was talking about. In Mussolini's Italy, the Futurist movement was cosy with fascism. There was no reason – Italy proved – that fascists needed to spurn modernism. Some German modern artists, notably Nolde, were themselves sympathetic to the far right.

Then there was greed. In the end, the National Socialists were thugs, criminals and murderers. The idea that most of them believed deeply in ideological discriminations about art is not that plausible. For men like Gurlitt, modern art made a good stash. He and his son sat on the hoard while his claim that it was lost in a firestorm was taken at face value.

Now the books on Nazi loot need to be reopened. It seems only too possible that other Gurlitts hid away other art treasures in the chaos of defeat.

In one of the last photographs ever taken of Adolf Hitler he is in the bunker in Berlin contemplating Albert Speer's design for a new art capital to be built at Linz. Much as he loved Munich, this city was closer to his childhood home. Its massive new museum was to have contained all the art treasures of conquered Europe.

While Hitler doted on his cultural fantasies, paintings were vanishing into fruit cellars and attics. It was so easy to write them off in the Führer's Götterdämmerung.

Read Jonathan Jones on the masterpieces that are missing in action

ArtGermanySecond world warPablo PicassoHenri MatissePierre-Auguste RenoirPaul KleeModernismAdolf HitlerEuropeJonathan Jones
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