Gerald Reitlinger

Gerald Roberts Reitlinger (born 1900 in London, United Kingdom – died 1978 in St Leonards-on-Sea, United Kingdom) was an art historian, especially of Asian ceramics, and a scholar of historical changes in taste in art and their reflection in art prices. After World War II he wrote three large books about Nazi Germany. He was also a painter and collector, mainly of pottery. Reitlinger's major works were The Final Solution (1953), The SS: Alibi of a Nation (1956), and between 1961–1970 he published The Economics of Taste in three volumes.

Born in London to the banker Albert Reitlinger and his wife Emma Brunner, Reitlinger was educated at Westminster School in London before a short service with the Middlesex Regiment at the end of World War I. He then studied history, concentrating on art history, at Christ Church, University of Oxford and later at the Slade School and Westminster School of Art, during which time he also edited Drawing and Design, a journal "devoted to art as a national asset" from 1927–29, and exhibited his own paintings in London. He appears under the name of "Reinecker" in Robert Byron's early travel book The Station (1928). In the 1930s he took part in two archaeological excavations in the Near East, one in 1930–31 financed by the Field Museum of Chicago to Kish, now in Iraq, and the second in 1932 to Al-Hirah, financed by Oxford, where he was co-director with David Talbot Rice. These inspired not only his book A Tower of Skulls: a Journey through Persia and Turkish Armenia published in 1932, but also his collecting interest in Islamic pottery.

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