Vincent Van Gogh's Vase With Five Sunflowers

Adolph Hitler, a dictator of World War II, was once an artist. Despite his artistic skills and passion towards art, he was continuously rejected by art academies, and therefore, came to be an unsuccessful artist. This was one of the main causes of the Degenerate Art Commission, also called the Nazi art theft. Hitler’s personal antipathy towards modern art created the Degenerate Art Commission which destroyed and concealed thousands of modern artworks (Allsop). Starting from 1937, the looting went on throughout the entire war. A small portion of the artworks from the plundered by the Nazis had been recovered. However, most of the artworks still remains a mystery, since much of them were destroyed, hidden, and little has been found. Among all of the unfound artworks, the Amber Room is one of the most well-known treasures looted by Nazis during …show more content…
Vincent van Gogh is one of the great sufferers of the Nazi plunder; five of his famous paintings were destroyed in fire during World War 2 (Van Gogh Gallery). One of the destroyed paintings is his still life painting, “Vase with Five Sunflowers” (Van Gogh Gallery). This painting was done in 1888 and was created for the purpose of decoration of Van Gogh’s studio. In 1945, this artwork was the private collection of Koyata Yamamoto; however, the painting was soon “destroyed by fire in an American air raid on Japan” (Van Gogh Gallery). One other painting created by Van Gogh, that was burnt during World War 2 is an oil painting named “Painter on His Way to Work. This piece was also destroyed in 1888. The “Painter on His Way to Work” was a self-portrait of Van Gogh, which showed his isolation in detail (Meier). Van Gogh painted himself walking on a road in Provence, with his art supplies on his two hands and his back (Meier). This artwork was placed in Kaiser Freidrich Museum in Berlin and was eventually lost to fire in 1945