The two artists probably never met.

Yussuf Abbo, who was born in the Ottoman Empire and studied sculpture in Berlin;

the prophetic gallery owner Paul Cassirer still exhibited it when he was still at the Academy.

Critics praised his sensitive portraits, museums bought them, and Else Lasker Schüler dedicated a passionate poem to him.

Because he was a Jew, the artist's remarkable career came to an abrupt end when the National Socialists came to power and was not continued in English exile.

Abbo has to support the family as a laborer, he destroys many of his works and dies in London in 1953.

On the other side stood Adolf Ziegler, a painter of sterile female nudes who was compatible with the system, but as a cultural functionary was also primarily responsible for the “degenerate” art campaign, which Abbo also defamed.

The Munich Lenbachhaus brings both together (Ziegler only with a separate catalog chapter) in the exhibition "Art and Life", which, based on fifty artist biographies, takes a close look at a time marked by radical upheavals: from the dawn after 1918, to the catastrophe of National Socialism, until 1955, when West Germany tried to get back into the international art scene of democratic societies with the first Documenta in Kassel.

It tells of celebrated greats of the liberal Weimar Republic, who were then racially persecuted by the Nazis, some even murdered, such as the Jewish artists Otto Freundlich or Moissey Kogan.

From those who fled into exile, like Paul Klee, because they were pilloried for “psychopathic art”.

Still others who escaped persecution by retreating into internal emigration and were only able to start their careers in the young Federal Republic.

Fritz Winter offers a striking example: he had to hide his biomorphic compositions in the attic.

Its heyday, however, began after 1945 when abstraction, which was politically unsuspicious and equated with freedom, asserted itself.

This in turn caused others to stumble, such as Karl Hofer, whose representational style was considered too formalistic in the East and unfashionable in the West.

From A to Z as in the encyclopedia, the four curators arranged the show according to family names: an attempt to provide an unadulterated view through neutral equal treatment, which also perpetuates the biographical explanations by refraining from any moral judgment.

When evaluating works of art, it becomes clear that the historical context should also be considered, the systemic conditions at the time of their creation as well as later reception.

That is why what the catalog says about the Ziegler non-person is generally true, that whether he likes it or not, he too belongs “with all its facets to the art history of the 20th century.

That's how he should be treated.” Because it's time to deal with them, profiteers loyal to the regime weren't left out either.

With Hermann Tiebert, a representative of the "God-gifted list" of those artists who were exempt from military service and labor service due to Hitler's and Goebbels' appreciation appears.

Tiebert's new-objective "painting "My Wife and I" from 1923 demonstrates a high level of mastery, with which the painter later served folkish ideas.

Although most of the regime's favorites disappeared into obscurity after 1945, a few slipped smoothly into the new art scene - just as one knows from people from politics, business or law who unhesitatingly hung their flag after the new wind.

Hermann Kaspar, for example, should be mentioned here, he too is a “God-given man”, almost forgotten today.

As a mosaic specialist, he not least created the swastika meander at the Munich "Haus der Deutschen Kunst" and, commissioned by Albert Speer,

plenty of mosaic decorations for the Berlin Reich Chancellery.

He was also responsible for the artistic side of the huge processions on the Day of German Art.

As if nothing had happened, public commissions rained down for him even after the war thanks to the best of connections, and Kaspar was allowed to return to his position as professor at the Munich Academy of Art as early as 1946 and held posts in various associations for years.