The Monuments Men (5 page)

The result, at least for the officially neutral Americans, had been a gradual heightening of tension, a slow tightening of the cords that over the course of three years had created a great store of pent-up energy. The American museum community, like so many others, had buzzed with activity. Much of it centered on protection plans, from evacuations to the creation of climate-controlled, underground rooms. When the Nazis took Paris, the director of the Toledo Museum of Art wrote to David Finley, director of the not yet opened National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to encourage the creation of a national plan, saying, “I know [the possibility of invasion] is remote at the moment, but it was once remote in France.”
1
It had taken the British almost a year to retrofit an enormous mine in Manod, Wales, for the safe storage of evacuated artwork. Did the U.S. art community really have another year to prepare?

Now, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the worst attack ever on U.S. soil, the tension had turned into an almost desperate need to act. An air raid on a major American city seemed likely; an invasion by Japan or Germany, or even both, not out of the question. At the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Japanese galleries were closed for fear of attacks by angry mobs. At the Walters Gallery in Baltimore, small gold and jeweled items were removed from the display cases so as not to tempt firemen with axes who might enter for an emergency. In New York City, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was closing at dusk for fear of visitors running into things or stealing pictures in a blackout. Every night, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was moving paintings to a sandbagged area, then rehanging them in the morning. The Frick Collection was blacking its windows and skylights so that enemy bombers couldn’t spot it in the middle of Manhattan.

All this weighed on the minds of America’s cultural leaders as they stepped from their taxis and up the stairway entry of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the freezing cold morning of December 20, 1941. They had been summoned, via Western Union telegram, by Francis Henry Taylor, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, and David Finley, the director of the National Gallery of Art. The forty-four men and four women who filed through the Met that morning were mostly museum directors, representing the majority of the leading American institutions east of the Rocky Mountains: the Frick, Carnegie, Met, MoMA, Whitney, National Gallery, Smithsonian, and the major museums of Baltimore, Boston, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, and Minneapolis. Included were major names in the field like Jere Abbott, William Valentiner, Alfred Barr, Charles Sawyer, and John Walker.

Among them strode Paul Sachs, the associate director of Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum. The Fogg was a relatively small institution, but Sachs had outsized influence within the museum community. He was the son of one of the early partners in the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs (the founder, Marcus Goldman, was his maternal grandfather), and was the museum community’s primary conduit to the wealthy Jewish bankers of New York. More importantly, Sachs was the museum community’s premier educator. In 1921, Sachs had created at Harvard his “Museum Work and Museum Problems” course, the first academic program specifically designed to cultivate and train men and women to become museum directors and curators. In addition to the connoisseurship of art, the “Museum Course” taught the financial and administrative aspects of running a museum, with a focus on eliciting donations. The students met regularly with major art collectors, bankers, and America’s social elite, often at elegant dinners where they were required to wear formal dress and observe the social protocol of high culture. By 1941, Sachs’s students had begun to fill the leadership positions of American museums, a field they would come to dominate in the postwar years.

How influential was Paul Sachs? Because he was short, about five foot two, he hung paintings low on the wall. When American museums rose to prominence after the war, many of the directors hung their paintings lower than their counterparts in Europe. Sachs’s students had simply accepted it as the norm, and the other museums followed their lead.

Sachs, at the urging of George Stout, the dapper head of the Fogg’s obscure but groundbreaking Department of Conservation and Technical Research, had taken a strong interest in the condition of the European museum community. The men, along with others at the Fogg, had created a short slide presentation to highlight this predicament. On the afternoon of the first day, as the overhead lights dimmed and Sachs’s slide show flickered to life on the wall before them, the directors of America’s great museums were subjected to a series of horrible reminders of the artistic toll of the Nazi advance. England’s National Gallery in London deserted, its great works buried at Manod. The Tate Gallery filled with shattered glass. The nave of Canterbury Cathedral filled with dirt to absorb the shock of explosions. Slides of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the most famous national museum of the Netherlands, showed the paintings of the great Dutch masters stacked like folding chairs against empty walls. Perhaps its most famous holding, Rembrandt’s monumental painting entitled
The Night Watch
, was rolled like a carpet and sealed in a box that appeared unnervingly like a coffin. In Paris, the Grande Galerie of the Louvre, reminiscent in its size and majesty of a Gilded Age train station, contained nothing but empty frames.

The images conjured other thoughts: of the stolen masterworks of Poland, which had not been seen in years; of the obliteration of the historic center of Rotterdam, destroyed by the Luftwaffe because the pace of peace negotiations with the Dutch had been too slow for Nazi tastes; of the great patriarchs of Vienna, imprisoned until they agreed to sign over to Germany their personal art holdings; of Michelangelo’s
David
, entombed in brick by worried Italian officials, even though it stood inside a world-famous museum in the heart of Florence. Then there was Russia’s state museum, the Hermitage. The curators had managed to evacuate 1.2 million of its estimated two million-plus works of art to Siberia before the Wehrmacht cut the rail lines out of Leningrad. It was rumored the curators were living in the basement with the remaining masterpieces, eating animal-based glue and even candles to keep from starving.

Paul Sachs’s presentation had its desired effect: It focused the energies of the museum community. By that evening, they had unanimously agreed that America’s museums would remain open as long as humanly possible. Defeatism was not an option, but neither was complacency. During the next two days, charged with an uncommon nervous energy, the museum leaders argued the practical and strategic concerns of operating in wartime: Should they open their doors to citizens for protection in the event of air raids? Should the most valuable works be permanently stored and replaced with lesser works? Should special events and exhibits continue, even if they drew crowds too large for efficient evacuation? Should works be sent from museums on the coasts to museums in the interior states, where the dangers were few? What about incendiary bombs? Blackouts? Broken glass?

The final resolution, introduced the next day by Paul Sachs, was a call to arms:
2

If, in time of peace, our museums and art galleries are important to the community, in time of war they are doubly valuable. For then, when the petty and the trivial fall way and we are face to face with final and lasting values, we… must summon to our defense all our intellectual and spiritual resources. We must guard jealously all we have inherited from a long past, all we are capable of creating in a trying present, and all we are determined to preserve in a foreseeable future.

Art is the imperishable and dynamic expression of these aims. It is, and always has been, the visible evidence of the activity of free minds…. Therefore be it resolved:

1) That American museums are prepared to do their utmost in the service of the people of this country during the present conflict

2) That they will continue to keep open their doors to all who seek refreshment of spirit

3) That they will, with the sustained financial help of their communities, broaden the scope and variety of their work

4) That they will be sources of inspiration illuminating the past and vivifying the present; that they will fortify the spirit on which victory depends.

Despite the high-flown words, most of the major East Coast museums continued making preparations for war. The Metropolitan quietly closed its less important galleries, replacing the curatorial staff with firemen. On New Year’s Eve, in the dead of night, the National Gallery loaded seventy-five of its best works and secretly slipped them out of Washington, D.C. When the museum opened for the first time in 1942, lesser works hung in their places. On January 12, the masterpieces arrived at the Biltmore, the great Vanderbilt estate in the mountains of North Carolina, where they would remain hidden until 1944.

But all the energy of that December meeting wasn’t spent on evacuations. Sensing an opportunity, Paul Sachs and his dapper conservator George Stout invited the museum directors to the Fogg for a series of seminars on museum safety. Dozens came to be educated by Stout, who had been in close contact with leading conservators in Europe for years, about the difficulties that lay ahead. Stout taught about molds and fungus, the virtues of wire mesh, and heat damage. He explained why bombs blew out windows, and how best to crate paintings to avoid punctures from flying glass. For the December meeting at the Met, he had prepared a pamphlet on countering the effects of air raids. In the spring of 1942, he expanded that pamphlet into an article in his monthly trade journal,
Technical Issues
, providing the first attempt at a systemic approach to preservation of works of art in times of war.

At the same time, Stout pushed for a concerted, industry-wide response. In April 1942, he elucidated the problems of wartime conservation in a pamphlet sent to Francis Henry Taylor, the man behind the December 1941 meeting. American museums, he suggested, were unprepared to handle a crisis because “there [is] no collected body of knowledge; there [are] no accepted standards of procedure.” Museums must “be willing to pool all of their experiences, to share their losses as well as their gains, to expose their doubts as well as their convictions, and to maintain a regular method of co-operative work…. The good of all [will] have to be definitely and practically considered as the good of any one.”
3

Stout’s solution, beyond the sharing of information, was the immediate training of a large new class of conservators, “special workmen” who could handle the largest, most dangerous upheaval in the history of Western art. Stout suggested the training would take five years, even as he admitted the art world was in crisis. Already more than two million European works had been moved from their cozy museums to barely adequate temporary storage, often across bumpy roads and under bombardment by the enemy. And those were just the official evacuations; the number didn’t account for the rumors of mass plundering by the Nazis. It was going to take an extraordinary amount of effort and intelligence to put the art world right again. And what about the inevitable, and no doubt brutally destructive, aerial and ground attacks necessary to win the freedom of Europe?

In the summer of 1942, in a pamphlet entitled
Protection of Monuments: A Proposal for Consideration During War and Rehabilitation
, Stout laid out in explicit terms the challenges that lay ahead:
4

As soldiers of the United Nations fight their way into lands once conquered and held by the enemy, the governments of the United Nations will encounter manifold problems…. In areas torn by bombardment and fire are monuments cherished by the people of those countrysides or towns: churches, shrines, statues, pictures, many kinds of works. Some may be destroyed; some damaged. All risk further injury, looting or destruction.…

To safeguard these things will not affect the course of battles, but it will affect the relations of invading armies with those peoples and [their] governments…. To safeguard these things will show respect for the beliefs and customs of all men and will bear witness that these things belong not only to a particular people but also to the heritage of mankind. To safeguard these things is part of the responsibility that lies on the governments of the United Nations. These monuments are not merely pretty things, not merely valued signs of man’s creative power. They are expressions of faith, and they stand for man’s struggle to relate himself to his past and to his God.

With conviction that the safeguarding of monuments is an element in the right conduct of the war and in the hope for peace, we… wish to bring these facts to the attention of the government of the United States of America and to urge that means be sought for dealing with them.

And who was best able to handle such safeguarding? The highly trained corps of “special workmen” Stout had previously proposed, of course.

September 17, 1940

German Feldmarschall Keitel’s order concerning seizure of cultural property

COPY

The Chief of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces

Berlin W 35, Tirpitzufer 72-76, 17 Sept 1940

Tel: 21 81 91

2 f 28.1.4 W. Z. No. 3812/ 40 g To the Chief of Army High Command for the Military Administration in Occupied France.

In supplement to the order of the Führer transmitted at the time to Reichsleiter Rosenberg to search lodges, libraries and archives in the occupied territories of the west for material valuable to Germany, and to safeguard the latter through the Gestapo, the Führer has decided: