ABSTRACT
This chapter details the planning and execution of a series of Dutch-German exchange exhibitions as well as the creation of the propaganda trade magazine De Schouw. Painter Pyke Koch played an influential role in cultivating the tastes of top officials at the DVK and Kultuurkamer, leading them to view Neorealism as a viable form of modernism for cultural programming aimed at promoting a stronger bond between The Netherlands and Germany, just as the former was being absorbed into the Greater Germanic Reich. Showing how the Neorealist paintings were framed in both the Dutch-German exchange exhibitions and in the pages of De Schouw, this chapter demonstrates the ways in which (in many but not all cases) the wishes of the artist, and the inherent ambiguities and film-like character of the Neorealists paintings, were obscured or overlooked so that they could be repurposed as propaganda.
