What the Monuments Men Wrought

Wall Street Journal ^ | 1-28-14 | Lynn H. Nichols

[afraidfortherepublic]

In the next few days "The Monuments Men," directed by George Clooney and boasting an all-star cast, will be previewed in staid and upper-crust locations such as the National Gallery of Art and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government before being released nationally on Feb. 7. This makes sense, for the film is about a small group of art professionals, many of them from Ivy League colleges and top U.S. museums, who, in the last days of the war and well after the surrender of Germany, secured and preserved millions of European cultural objects looted by the Nazis and returned them to the nations from which they had been taken. The adventures of this unlikely group make Indiana Jones look like an amateur.

About 400 of these men and women would eventually be placed in the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives sections of the Allied armies, a policy that resulted from lobbying by U.S. art-world leaders and politicians that also would persuade President Franklin D. Roosevelt to establish the Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic Historic Monuments in War Areas in 1943. The commission made sure the people selected were transferred to MFAA duties from all corners of the war effort. George Stout, a leading conservator at Harvard's Fogg Museum, had been perfecting airplane paint for the Navy. Others, good at geography and languages, had ended up in intelligence. They would have the adventure of their lives.

I was fortunate to have met many of them in the course of my work in museums, but was unaware of their wartime feats. That would change in 1980 when I read the obituary of Rose Valland. She had been a curator at the Jeu de Paume Museum during the German Occupation. The Nazis used the museum to warehouse their loot—mostly the...

[dmz]

I enjoyed the book and hope the movie is as good.

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I have never seen a movie that is as good as the book it is derived from.

[Bigg Red]

Clooney? No, thanks.