Gerald Reitlinger

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Christopher Wood, 1926, Ashmolean Museum

Gerald Roberts Reitlinger (born 1900 in London, United Kingdom – died 1978 in St Leonards-on-Sea, United Kingdom) was an art historian, especially of Asian ceramics, and a scholar of historical changes in taste in art and their reflection in art prices. After World War II he wrote three large books about Nazi Germany. He was also a painter and collector, mainly of pottery. Reitlinger's major works were The Final Solution (1953), The SS: Alibi of a Nation (1956), and between 1961–1970 he published The Economics of Taste in three volumes.

Career

Born in London to the banker Albert Reitlinger and his wife Emma Brunner, Reitlinger was educated at

Al-Hirah, financed by Oxford, where he was co-director with David Talbot Rice. These inspired not only his book A Tower of Skulls: a Journey through Persia and Turkish Armenia published in 1932, but also his collecting interest in Islamic pottery.[1][2]

He travelled extensively and wrote non-fiction works on his trips to

anti-aircraft battery and then lectured to troops, before being discharged because of ill-health. Postwar, he wrote articles about art for newspapers and art journals, and with his second wife Eileen Anne Graham Bell he became known for hosting parties for members of London society.[1]

During the 1950s he wrote two books about the Holocaust: The SS: Alibi of a Nation and The Final Solution, both of which achieved large sales. In the latter book, he alleged that Soviet claims of the

Holocaust.[3] Subsequent scholarship has generally increased Reitlinger's conservative figures for death tolls, though his book was still described in 1979 as being "widely regarded as a definitive account".[4] In January 2020, the BBC gave the death toll as 'at least 1.1 million' of which 'almost one million were jews'.[5]

In 1961, he published the first of three volumes of The Economics of Taste, a work on the art market from the eighteenth century onwards, mostly in Britain and France, with much detailed information on historic prices,[1] and a very lively commentary, though the reviewer for The Burlington Magazine of Volume III criticised "a tone of provocative flippancy".[6][1] The tone of the Economics of Taste aroused mixed feelings among reviewers, but they and those reviewing the books on the Nazis found large numbers of points of detail that were incorrect.[7]

Reitlinger was a great fan of the work of London artist Austin Osman Spare, and purchased the sole copy of Spare's 1924 sketchbook of "automatic drawings", The Book of Ugly Ectasy, which contained a series of grotesque creatures.[8] He would later tell Frank Letchford that while he would happily sell his prints by Henri Matisse, he would never part with his Spare drawings.[9]

Donation and death

Reitlinger died of a

cerebral hemorrhage at his home, "Woodgate", Beckley in East Sussex. His collection of Islamic pottery, Japanese and Chinese porcelain was donated in 1972 to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, where a gallery is named in his honour. The carefully recorded collection had been kept in his house at Beckley, East Sussex, which he also gave to the museum, intending it to be displayed there, and with the condition he lived there for the rest of his life. However the house was severely damaged by fire in February 1978, a few months before his death, though most of the collection was saved.[10]

Main publications

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d Reitlinger, Gerald (Roberts), Dictionary of Art Historians.
  2. ^ Edward Chaney, "Lewis and the Men of 1938: Graham Bell, Kenneth Clark, Read, Reitlinger, Rothenstein, and the Mysterious Mr Macleod: A Discursive Tribute to John and Harriet Cullis", Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies, 2016.
  3. Royal Institute of International Affairs, JSTOR
  4. ^ Luck, David, "Use and Abuse of Holocaust Documents: Reitlinger and "How Many?", Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 41, No. 2, Articles Devoted to the Holocaust (Spring, 1979), pp. 95–122, Indiana University Press, JSTOR
  5. ^ "Auschwitz: How death camp became centre of Nazi Holocaust", BBC, 2020
  6. ^ The Economics of Taste: Volume III: The Art Market in the 1960s by Gerald Reitlinger, review by: Keith Roberts, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 113, No. 822 (Sep. 1971), pp. 555–556, JSTOR
  7. ^ See all those cited above, Denys Sutton on Volume I of Economics, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 104, No. 715 (Oct. 1962), pp. 437–438, JSTOR, and David Loshak on the same in Victorian Studies, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Jun. 1962), pp. 348–349, Indiana University Press, JSTOR
  8. ^ Baker 2011. pp. 144–145.
  9. ^ Baker 2011. p. 146.
  10. ^ Ashmolean Museum biography

References

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