The defense for keeping poorly-constructed Confederate monuments (which are really just monuments to racism) erected in the south is that it's their "history". What should actually be done is to place those shittily-made statues in a museum, and displayed to recognize the history of the war, and explain why racist morons would think that placing monuments to losers in the middle of their cities was a good idea.
Put the artwork in a museum. Don't gloss over the atrocities committed after the paintings were made. People like to think of people like Mao Zedong, Josef Stalin, and Adolf Hitler as "monsters", but that's reductive, and more importantly, naive. Saying they're monsters says that they're beyond humanity, and that we're better than them because we're not "monsters".
Monsters don't make art. Humans makes art.
Humans have the capacity to be monstrous. But they are not monsters themselves. Dehumanizing them to distance yourself from their actions is foolhardy at best, dangerous at worst. Some of the most despicable people to ever live thought they were working to better the world, or at the very least, their world.