Accounts of art looted from museums and private collections in Europe by the Nazis during the Second World War have been recounted many times in film, non-fiction and novels.
Join Bruce Guenther, recently retired Chief Curator of the Portland Art Museum, and Susan Winkler, author of Portrait of a Woman in White, for a lively conversation that explores historical and art historical insights into the subject of looted art.
Winkler's latest work of fiction follows the theft of a Matisse painting from a Jewish family and provides a provocative springboard on a subject - seventy years after the end of the war - that still captures our attention.
Ticket Info: General Public: $10; OJMCHE Members: $8; Students: $5
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Bruce Guenther is the former Chief Curator and the Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Portland Art Museum where he served from 2000–2014. He has written extensively on the art of the last one hundred years. A popular lecturer on contemporary art, Guenther is a frequent juror for regional and national exhibitions and serves as a peer panelist for the GSA Art in Architecture Program.
Formerly a curator at the Seattle Art Museum, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California, he has organized monographic and thematic exhibitions related to artists and cultural forces shaping contemporary art, such as Disquieted (2010), Object, Site, Sensation: New German Sculpture (1989), and States of War (1985). His numerous publications include In Passionate Pursuit: The Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Collection and Legacy (2014), Lee Kelly (2010), Hilda Morris (2006, with Susan Fillin-Yeh), Clement Greenberg: A Critic’s Collection (2001, with Karen Wilkin), Richard Deutsch: Sculpture (2001), Tony DeLap (2000), The Essential Gesture (1994), Guy Anderson (1986), and 50 Northwest Artists (1983).
Susan Winkler was born in Portland, Oregon and educated at Bennington College and Stanford University, L’Academie in Paris and at the University of Geneva. She was trained as a journalist at Fairfield Publications in New York, and had the enviable job of writing, and updating four editions of The Paris Shopping Companion: A personal Guide to Shopping in Paris for Every Pocketbook.
Susan currently lives in Portland, Oregon and has a lifelong interest in art.