“Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said last week that she would be taking down two oil paintings by Emil Nolde, an Expressionist whose work she greatly admires, from the walls of her office. Her decision, widely discussed in German media, was interpreted as a symbolic gesture: a belated official rejection of an artist who yearned for Adolf Hitler’s approval and thought that banishing Jews from the country was a good idea.

One of the works, “Breakers,” from 1936, shows crashing dark green waves against a fiery evening sky; the other, from 1915, depicts a flower garden. The decision to remove them came just a week after Felix Krämer, an art historian and Nolde expert, questioned in a newspaper article whether “the works of a committed Nazi are appropriate” in the chancellery…

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