The Faustian Bargain

The Faustian Bargain is all about the art world inside Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. Petropoulos chronicles the artists, art dealers, art professors, art journalists, and many others who were forced to live under Hitler’s cultural rules, which forbade modernist art of any kind. Some profited from this arrangement, others subtly fought against it. This is an inside look at a culture choked and suppressed by its own leadership.

Painstakingly researched and written with a novelist’s eye for telling details and colorful personalities, Petropoulos’s book is an early (2000), ambitious attempt to bring to life the most influential and, because of their collaboration with the Hitler regime, controversial figures in German art under National Socialism—the directors of museums, art dealers, art journalists, art historians, and artists.