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One thinks of the arts in Nazi Germany as struggling in an oppressive system, yet evidence has repeatedly shown that conditions were far more favorable than we assume. Potter conducts a historiography of Nazi arts, examining writings from the last seven decades to demonstrate how historical, moral, and intellectual conditions have sustained a distorted characterization of cultural life in the Third Reich. Showing how past research has revealed the decentralized nature of Nazi arts policies, Potter argues that the insulation of academic disciplines allowed outdated presumptions about Nazi micromanagement of the arts to persist. German exile experiences in the 1930s first inspired these notions, and they gained currency during the occupation of Germany (as careers and trends from the Third Reich continued despite implications of the “Zero Hour”) and throughout the Cold War (as direct comparisons of Nazi and Soviet repression gained momentum). The first histories of Nazi arts, which appeared in the late 1940s, reflected these immediate concerns, but over the next decades, arts scholarship failed to benefit from debates that problematized concepts of totalitarianism, intentionalism, and fascism. They also adhered to explicit definitions of modernism that sustained a narrative of Nazi antimodernism comparable to that of Stalin. The end of the Cold War spawned new comparisons between Nazi Germany and East Germany, but recent considerations of popular culture, economics, and global conditions in the 1930s and 1940s can offer a deeper understanding of the similarities and differences between culture in Nazi Germany and the rest of the industrial world.

What can we learn about nationalism by looking at a country’s cultural institutions? How do the history and culture of particular cities help explain how museums represent diversity? This book takes us around the world to tell the compelling story of how museums today are making sense of immigration and globalization. Based on first-hand conversations with museum directors, curators, and policymakers; descriptions of current and future exhibitions; and inside stories about the famous paintings and iconic objects that define collections across the globe, this work provides a close-up view of how different kinds of institutions balance nationalism and cosmopolitanism. By comparing museums in Europe, the United States, Asia, and the Middle East, the author offers a fresh perspective on the role of the museum in shaping citizens. Taken together, these accounts tell the fascinating story of a sea change underway in the museum world at large.

This book builds on the author’s previous groundbreaking work to offer this new, systematically integrated theory of the study of religion as visual culture. Providing key tools for scholars across disciplines studying the materiality of religions, the author gives an accessibly written theoretical overview including case studies of the ways seeing is related to touching, hearing, feeling, and such ephemeral experiences as dreams, imagination, and visions. The case studies explore both the high and low of religious visual culture: Catholic traditions of the erotic Sacred Heart of Jesus, the unrecognizability of the Virgin in the Fatima apparitions, the prehistory of Warner Sallman’s face of Jesus, and more. Basing the study of religious images and visual practices in the relationship between seeing and the senses, the author argues against reductionist models of “the gaze,” demonstrating that vision is not something that occurs in abstraction, but is a fundamental way of embodying the human self.