Beyond the Dreams of Avarice: The Hermann Goering Collection

As commander of the German Luftwaffe and second only to Hitler in the Nazi Party, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering amassed both political power and a vast collection of confiscated artwork.

Beyond the Dreams of Avarice: The Hermann Goering Collection by Nancy H. Yeide, is the first study devoted to Goering s entire paintings collection, providing the only opportunity to look at the collection as a whole and evaluate its place within art collecting and the history of Nazi looting. This carefully documented catalogue, painstakingly assembled from archival documents identified as primary to the Goering collection, is critical to the clarification of provenances of the objects and brings to light information about paintings whose histories and whereabouts have been hidden for decades.

A culmination of seven years of research by Ms. Yeide, an internationally recognized expert in World War II-era provenance research and co-author of The AAM Guide to Provenance Research which helped define provenance research standards in the United States, this volume is a must for collectors, art dealers, auction houses, researchers, curators, art historians and other scholars. Includes an introduction by Robert M. Edsel, author of The Monuments Men.

The head of the Department of Curatorial Records at The National Gallery of Art since 1990, Nancy Yeide has been involved in World War II-era provenance for the last decade. As an internationally recognized expert on the history of art collecting in the 19th and 20th centuries, she has taken a leading role in conducting provenance research on works in the Gallery s collection and has spoken and written widely on the subject. In 2001, she co-authored the American Association of Museum s Guide to Provenance Research, helping to set and define national standards of provenance research. Ms. Yeide was awarded the prestigious Ailsa Mellon Bruce Sabbatical Curatorial Fellow for 2002-2003, during which time she began the research on the art collection of Reichsmarschall Hermann for her catalogue raisonné Beyond the Dreams of Avarice: The Hermann Goering Collection. Ms. Yeide s work has also appeared in such distinguished publications such as Apollo, Archives of American Art Journal and Museum News. She holds a Master of Arts from American University and serves on a number of professional advisory panels as well as frequently lecturing on a variety of topics and universities and museums around the world Ms. Yeide and her husband Harry, a foreign affairs analyst and author of World War II military history, live in Maryland.