Museum’s Future Clouded by Chance Discovery: Swastika Hiding in Plain Sight

THE NEW YORK TIMES 

By Thomas Rogers

The “art temple” of the Kunststätte Bossard, a museum in the former home of the Swiss artist Johann Bossard and his wife, Jutta. Gordon Welters for The New York Times

JESTEBURG, Germany — In 1911, the Swiss artist Johann Bossard came across an empty property in the grasslands near this small town south of Hamburg. Since 1997, the site has been a museum known as the Kunststätte Bossard, and an off-the-beaten-path destination for fans of expressionist art and architecture. But in 2017, Alexandra Eicks, an employee on the site, made a discovery that threw the project in a more sinister light. Ms. Eicks was preparing for a children’s art class when she noticed a geometric shape on the studio’s mosaic floor that nobody at the museum had seen before: a swastika. Because the tiles had been installed after the Nazis’ rise to power, it raised the possibility that the Bossards held more troubling views than had previously been known. [More]