Not All Monuments Men
Were Men
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/arts/design/not-all-monuments-men-were-men.html?action=click&contentCollection=Music®ion=Footer&module=MoreInSection&pgtype=article
In February 1952, as
Europe rebuilt after World War II, Ardelia Ripley Hall arrived in Bonn, Germany,
to play her part in a bold American military mission that had begun about a
decade earlier.
Ms. Hall was no
soldier. She was a petite, white-gloved scholar working for the State
Department and bearing a 350-year-old gift, a portrait of St. Catherine by
Rubens that had gone missing from a Düsseldorf museum during the war.
In her mannerly and
determined way, Ms. Hall was completing the work of an Army team patched
together in 1943 and charged with chasing down millions of cultural treasures
plundered by the Nazis.
The team members,
initially 30 men who were largely civilian art experts, crisscrossed Europe,
often alone and under fire, chasing after fabled works from great museums, gold
and silver heirlooms from Holocaust victims, even brass and iron bells from ancient
church towers. Among the masterpieces they rescued were the Ghent
Altarpiece (1432), the Madonna of Bruges
by Michelangelo (1504) and Vermeer’s “The Astronomer” (1668), all intended for
a colossal museum envisioned by Hitler. Their exploits were chronicled in a
2009 book by Robert M. Edsel, “The Monuments Men,” which has now been adapted
into a movie by that name, due out on Friday from George Clooney.
Less heralded have
been the contributions of women like Ms. Hall, who were pivotal in helping
rescue Europe’s art during the war and long
after the German surrender.
The art-hunting team,
officially known as the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section, grew to more
than 300 people in the postwar years. The women never numbered more than a few
dozen, but, like the men, they were dedicated scholars and at times notable
heroes.
Rose Valland, whose
role is depicted briefly by Cate Blanchett in the film, was a French Resistance
operative who spied on the Nazis and showed herself able to shoot and drink
with the boys. Edith A. Standen was a captain in the Women’s Army Corps who
went on to a career at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. And Ms.
Hall was a Smith College graduate who came to the task
from a career focused on the study of Asian art.
“The work done by
these women is extraordinary, especially after the war,” said Victoria Reed,
the curator of provenance at the Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston, where Ms. Hall worked before the war.
“The movie is overdue in terms of honoring the men, but we shouldn’t overlook
women like Ardelia.”
One of the Monuments
women survives, Anne Olivier Popham Bell, of Sussex,
England, a 97-year-old
Virginia Woolf scholar who handled logistics for the team in Germany. In a
telephone interview, she spoke of the “enormous amounts of damaged works to be
cared for,” among them thousands of medieval church bells seized by the Nazis
that were to be melted into armaments.
Of course, sorting
through so many bells, many of them unmarked, was no easy task.
“These pastors would
arrive and say ‘Can I have my bell back?’ ” she recalled. “It seemed rather
absurd. We decided to let them organize how it was to be done.”
By 1945, the
Monuments section, operating in Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, France and
Germany, consisted of curators, scholars and architects, some of them hurried
into battle zones with little military training, as well as a few G.I.s. They
found underground chambers where fleeing Nazis hid tens of thousands of
paintings and sculptures, and they prevented the advancing Allies from bombing
ancient monasteries. After months of detective work aided by Ms. Valland, they
found a castle in Bavaria where thousands of
stolen works once warehoused by the Nazis in the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris had been hidden.
Before Germany had
surrendered, two members of the section were killed near the front lines. After
the war, the teams set up collection points where they sought to undo, artwork
by artwork, the catastrophic pillaging by the Nazis. As the movie depicts, it
took Germany but a few years
to convert the art treasures of Europe into a
cultural diaspora. It took decades of postwar legwork, much of it by the
Monuments women, to restore order.
“Our attitude was
that we were not there to take spoils of war but to give them back,” said Harry
L. Ettlinger, 88, of Rockaway, N.J., who worked as a driver and translator. A
German-born Jewish refugee, Mr. Ettlinger, then 19, helped empty salt mines in Germany of
thousands of paintings hoarded during the war.
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Others in the team
were art restorers recruited when it became obvious that the Allies, in freeing
Europe, risked laying waste to its rich
cultural landscapes. James J. Rorimer, a 40-year-old medieval art expert who
served as an officer in France
and Germany, for example,
later became director of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art.
These efforts have
been laid out in academic papers and books like “The Rape of Europa” (Vintage,
1994), by Lynn H. Nicholas, which was made into an award-winning documentary in
2006. Mr. Edsel, who formed the Monuments Men Foundation while writing his book
so he could collect information about the recovery of World War II art, said he
and the filmmakers hope the movie will generate leads on long-missing
masterpieces by Raphael, Monet and Rodin.
On his website, Mr.
Edsel acknowledges the women who oversaw the “vital but often thankless task of
providing logistics for the men in the war zones,” and worked to return war
booty long after the Allies had departed.
Of Rose Valland, Mr.
Edsel, said, “There were many times when she could easily have been shot.”
She risked her life
daily, spying on Nazi officers as they emptied the Jeu de Paume on behalf of
Goering and Hitler. Posing as an unassuming assistant who spoke no German, she
listened in on their chatter, passed information to the Resistance and kept a
ledger of the thefts that was vital to their recovery.
Ms. Hall’s help was
more academic in nature, Ms. Reed said, but no less important. She became the
driving force at the State Department for postwar restitution between 1946 and
1962. The 30 boxes of material dealing with war-related looting and recovery,
kept at the National Archives in Washington,
are named the Ardelia Hall Collection in her honor.
The story of how Ms.
Hall, who died in 1979, returned Rubens’s “St. Catherine” highlights her
painstaking work and the unpleasant fact that some of the art left Europe with American servicemen.
The Rubens was one of
many works that arrived at an Army collection center in Wiesbaden, only to go missing, according to
archives from the period. It surfaced in Los
Angeles in 1950, when it was brought to a museum
official for evaluation. Ms. Hall, alerted by the official who recognized the
work on a list of missing items that she had created, used the force of law to
ensure it was surrendered for return.
Ms. Standen, the
Women’s Army Corps captain, described Ms. Hall in an article in the 1960s as
“the dominant force” in the return of the art long after the mission became an
unglamorous sidelight. In her career, Ms. Standen wrote, Ms. Hall alone oversaw
the return of 1,300 items, including a Monet that went back to the Rothschild
family in Paris.
Ms. Standen, who died
in 1998, went on to become the curator of textiles at the Met from 1949 to 1970
and was herself relentless about safeguarding and repatriating stolen works.
She was the officer in charge of the Wiesbaden Collecting Point in Germany until
August 1947, overseeing a depot that was heavily policed and included
weatherproofed storage and restoration areas.
In her papers, she
described mounds of museum objects that turned up at the depot, including
paintings by Dürer and Klee, and medieval armor, picks and axes. Ms. Standen,
who befriended Ms. Valland while in Germany, shrugged off some of the plaudits
she received in favor of praising those on the front lines. She described her
role as being like that of “a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants.”
One of those giants
was, of course, Ms. Valland, who, as the movie depicts, kept her cool in the
presence of a thieving Hermann Goering. She donned a captain’s uniform from
1945 to 1952 to chase after what the Nazis stole. While Goering awaited the
judgment of Nuremberg, Ms. Valland stood at his
former estate in Germany
overseeing the recovery of thousands of museum pieces, including two massive,
rose granite lions that had been taken from the Louvre.
“Most of these
heroes,” Mr. Edsel said, “were civilians who risked everything in the cause of
art.”