The "degenerate" that outlasted the Nazis - Klimt. His paintings were saved from the censorship and burnings associated with the regime, and despite the association with the wealthy Jewish community of Vienna and the eroticism of his work, most of his paintings survive intact. Plundered, stolen, but cherished by the Nazis who aspired to suck up to Hitler as a failed art student (the most famous, of course, being Göring who "first looked like he encountered evil" when it was relayed to him that his prized Vermeer for which he had exchanged 137 "lesser" paintings, Christ and the Adulteress, was a fake painted in 1937.), Klimt's paintings reach from across decades of turmoil. Though money is a crass way of looking at it, his paintings are among some of the most valuable in the world now - with one reason being that he anticipated the melding of East Asian culture and aesthetics like Schopenhauer did a century ago with philosophy. HIs Lady with a Fan sold for over $100mn to a Hong Kong collector. This was followed by his Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer for about $250mn. Personally, I find his paintings and prints reasonably good to look at and reflect over, but nothing special. But the twists and turns his art took to make it around the world (most famously chronicled in "The Woman in Gold"), I find deeply moving. It speaks of a story of cultures weaving together, and the divorce of the Jewish-German marriage into terrible atrocity - and the twists and turns of fate, of families split apart and of people living in the margins of history books and in their most meaty medium.