Book Artistas en los campos nazis. Nagrela Editores. Madrid, 2020

This book aims to address the complex and broad topic referred to by researchers as the Art of the Holocaust. Specifically, the research conducted is a compilation of works of art created by artists in the ghettos and Nazis concentration camps.

As such, the overall objective of this book is of dealing with art that emerged from the interior of the ghettos and concentration camps in its totality, with an amplitude that has not been addressed so far. The motivation and starting point of the research was with the realisation that there is a vacuum in terms of publications that address this complex topic in its entirety, because research to date in this regard has been presented with restrictions, such as geographical or the nationality of the artists; or they had focused only on a particular artist.

The book begins with a broad historical and artistic context in which we can contemplate the attitude of the Nazi Government to contemporary art and the subsequent reaction of the artists. Some were able to reconcile their style in acceptance to the tastes of the regime, others chose exile, while the rest bore the consequences derived from creating work that was not of the taste of the ruling political class. Many of the artists that followed the last option, were interned in ghettos and Nazi concentration camps.

Numerous prisoners created images during their internment in the ghettos and camps despite the hard conditions during their stay. It is impossible to know the exact number of professional artists who passed through the ghettos and concentration camps. For example, the 198 Polish artists, arrested on April 16, 1942 at the House of the Artists in Kraków were murdered immediately arriving at Auschwitz. Therefore, this book aims to focus on the artists who created works of art during their internment in the camps with a clear and decisive artistic vocation. Therefore, the artists included in this study had to meet the following requirements:

• To have had a prior artistic training before entering in the concentration camps.

• To have participated in exhibitions, collective or individual, before having been detained in the camps.

• If on entering the camps they were in their teenage years, rendering it impossible to comply with the above requirements, have subsequently developed an outstanding artistic career.

Over 90 artists have met the above requirements and are included in this book.

Currently there is no publication that intends to encompass the full possible number of artists who worked in the ghettos and camps regardless of their nationality, religion, or the Ghetto or camp in which they were held.

This book is a culmination of 12 years of research which developed in cities such as Berlin, Paris, Jerusalem, Prague, Amsterdam, New York, London and Auschwitz. Museums and archives visited include the George Pompidou Center, the Museum of Montparnasse and the Jewish documentation centre in Paris; the Jewish Museum, the Martin Gropius Bau, the Neue Nationalgalerie, the Museum of German history and the Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Berlin; the Yad Vashem and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem; the Jewish Museum in Prague; the Jewish Museum in New York; the Imperial War Museum in London; the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam; and the State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau.