‘Part of a continued journey towards equity, decolonization, and reconciliation,’ WAG says. The Winnipeg Art Gallery is dropping the Ferdinand Eckhardt name from its main entrance hall, website, and all other gallery materials. The decision comes after recent allegations and research show that while living in Germany in the 1930s, the former WAG director was a Nazi supporter, the gallery posted in a statement on its website last month. The gallery is also conducting research into the origins of donated materials made by Eckhardt and the Eckhardt-Gramatté Foundation to ensure none of it is artwork confiscated during the Nazi regime. If that is discovered “all efforts would be made to return it to the rightful owners or their heirs,” the statement says. (…) Eckhardt’s connection to, and support of, Nazi Germany was reported in an article by Conrad Sweatman that was published in The Walrus last November. According to the article, “Eckhardt’s public endorsements of Nazism include signing an oath of allegiance to Hitler and producing several polemics in far-right and Nazified journals in the early 1930s, urging, among other things, that Germany’s cultural arena align itself with the goals of the Nazi state.” Sweatman also noted “Eckhardt went to work for one of the most notorious players in Hitler’s war machine, IG Farben, the same company that built the Auschwitz concentration camp and manufactured Zyklon B, used in the gas chambers.”
via cbc: Winnipeg Art Gallery dropping Nazi-linked Ferdinand Eckhardt name
