THE MONUMENTS MEN Part 6
The Finale
Moving on to Italy and the
Tuscan and Florentine treasures…
In Italy, museum officials
had evacuated their holdings to various countryside locations such as the
Tuscan villa of Monteguifoni, which housed some of the Florentine collections.
As Allied Forces advanced
through Italy, the German army retreated north, stealing paintings and
sculptures as they fled. As German
forces neared the Austrian border, they were forced to store most of their loot
in various hiding places such as a castle at Sand in Taufers and a jail cell in
San Leonardo.
Beginning in late March 1945,
Allied forces began discovering these hidden repositories in what would become
the greatest treasure hunt in history.
In Germany alone, US forces found about 1,500 repositories that
contained art and cultural objects looted from institutions and individuals
across Europe, as well as from German and Austrian museum collections
Some repositories of special
note were:
Berchtesgaden, Germany – 1,000
paintings and sculptures stolen by Hermann Goring. The cache had been evacuated from his country
estate, Carinhall, and moved in 1945 to protect it from invading Russian
troops.
Bernterode, Germany – four
coffins containing the remains of Germany’s greatest leaders including
Frederick the Great and Field Marshal
Paul Von Hindenburg
Merkers, Germany – General
George Patton in April 1945 found
Reichsbank gold, along with 400 paintings and
other crates of treasure. More dismal
discoveries included gold and personal belongings from Nazi concentration camp
victims.
Altaussee, Austria – This
extensive complex of salt mines served as a huge repository for stolen art
including Vermeer’s The Astronomer and The Art of Painting, and paintings from the Capodimonte Museum in
Naples stolen by Hermann Goring.
San Leonardo, Italy – In the
jail cell of this very northern town Allied officials discovered paintings from
the Uffizi that had been hurriedly unloaded by retreating German
troops…paintings by Botticelli, Filippo Lippi and Giovanni Bellini.
This is a very superficial
listing, and the scope of the project truly defies imagination.
By July 1945, US forces had
established three central collecting points within the US Zone in Germany, and
American organizational skills started to take over.
The first director of the
collecting points, Captain Walter Farmer,
and 35 others who were in charge of the Wiesbaden collection point, were
compelled to draw up what has become known as the “Wiesbaden Manifesto” on 7
November 1945 declaring “We wish to
state that, from our own knowledge, no historical grievance will rankle so long
or be the cause of so much justified bitterness as the removal for any reason
of a part of the heritage of any nation even if that heritage may be interpreted as a prize of war.”
Among the co-signers was Lt.
Charles Percy Parkhurst of the US Navy.
Regarding the occupation of
Japan, as the war neared its end in
Japan in 1945, George Stout
and fellow Monuments Man Major Laurence Sickman recommended creating an MFAA
division in Japan. Consequently the Arts
and Monuments Division …of the Allied Powers in Tokyo was established.
Langdon Warner, archaeologist
and curator of Oriental art at Harvard’s Fogg Museum, and early mentor of
Laurence Sickman, advised the MFAA Section in Japan until September 1946.
To sum it all up, the
American museum establishment led the efforts to create the MFAA section both
in Europe and Japan. Included in this
group were current museum directors, curators and art historians, as well as
those who wanted to be museum
directors, curators and art historians.
Upon returning home from
service overseas, these men and women led the creation or improvement of some
of the leading cultural institutitons in the US. Many major museums employed one or more MFAA
officers before or after the war, including the National Gallery of Art, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Nelson-Atkins
Museum of Art.
Many other Monuments Men were
professors at esteemed universities such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, New York
University, Williams College and Columbia University, among others. Paul J. Sachs’ famous “Museum Course” at
Harvard educated dozens of future museum personnel. S. Lane Faison’s passion for art history was
passed on to hundreds of students and future museum leaders at Williams College
in the 1960s and 1970s, some of whom are currently directors at major US
museums.
Other MFAA personnel became
founders, presidents, and members of cultural institutions such as the New York
City Ballet, the American Association of Museums, the American Association of
Museum Directors, the Archaeological Institute of America, the Society of
Architectural Historians, the American
Society of Landscape Architects, and the National Endowment for the Humanities
and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as respected artists,
architects, musicians and archivists.
Two Monuments Men officers
were killed in Europe, both near the front lines of the Allied advance into
Germany.
They were Captain Walter
Huchthausen, an American scholar and architect attached to the US 9th
Army, killed in April 1945 by small arms fire somewhere north of Essen and east
of Aachen, Germany
And Major Ronald Edmund
Balfour, a British scholar attached to the Canadian First Army, killed in March
1945 by an explosion in Cleves, Germany.
May they rest in peace.
THE END
No comments:
Post a Comment