Background
Adolf Ziegler was born in Bremen in 1892.
Adolf Ziegler was born in Bremen in 1892.
Trained at the Arts Academy in Weimar.
An officer during World War I. From 1925 in personal contact with Hitler, he joined the Nazi Party and later became the expert on the arts in the Reich Leadership of the NSDAP in Munich. A mediocre painter, if technically accomplished. Ziegler was known for his prim, pseudo-classical, waxwork nudes and his depiction of ideal Aryan types. His artistic ‘realism' left nothing to the imagination - not for nothing was he known as ‘Aleister des Deutschen Schamhaares' - but his work enthused Hitler who commissioned him to paint the portrait of his blonde niece, Geli Raubal, reputedly the only deep love of his life.
Professor at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts from 1933, Ziegler became the foremost official painter of the Third Reich. In 1936 he was appointed President of the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts, a position he held until his dismissal in 1943. In 1937 he was authorized by Hitler to strip all galleries and museums in the Reich of so-called ‘degenerate art’, including some 16,000 examples of expressionist, abstract, cubist and surrealist works of art. The paintings of such ‘degenerate’ artists as Max Ernst, Franz Marc, Max Beckmann, Emil Nolde, Oskar Kokoschka, George Grosz and Kandinsky were confiscated on Ziegler's orders as head of the purge tribunal.
In July 1937 Ziegler organized the Exhibition of Degenerate Art in Munich, which, to the great embarrassment of the Nazis, proved to be the most popular display of painting ever staged in the Third Reich. More than two million visitors came to see the works rejected by Hitler while a concurrent exhibition of ‘approved’ works of art aroused far less interest.
Adolf Ziegler died in September 1959 at the age of sixty-seven in Varnhalt near Baden-Baden.
