monuments men and women
Who were the monuments men and women?
Was The Monuments Men a true story?
monuments men and women, informal name for members of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) program run by the Allied powers during World War II. The MFAA was active between 1943 and 1951 and worked to preserve items and landmarks of cultural and historical significance in the wake of the Allied advance through Europe. In 1945 the MFAA was extended to include the Pacific theater, with a branch in Japan. MFAA agents were also known as “monuments officers” and “Venus fixers” (a reference to the artworks Venus de Milo and the Birth of Venus). Despite severely lacking resources, the monuments men and women were able to find and retrieve more than five million items, many of them artworks that had been stolen by the Axis forces.
Establishment
A conservation strategy was necessitated by the Nazi Party’s targeting of “degenerate” art (created by non-Aryans) in parallel with Adolf Hitler’s ambition of amassing an art collection. Efforts to prevent looting had been made even before the formation of the MFAA. The Mona Lisa, for instance, was among thousands of works moved out of the Louvre in 1939 before the war began. In December 1943 the MFAA was established at the behest of the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas, known as the “Roberts Commission” for its chair, Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts. The commission aimed to create a task force that would prioritize the preservation of important artifacts rather than treat it as a distraction.
The MFAA counted 27 women in its ranks, recruited after World War II ended in 1945. They included Anne Olivier Popham (later Bell), an English woman who was stationed in Germany and helped restore 5,000 stolen church bells; American Mary Regan (later Quessenberry), charged with identifying German dealers trafficking stolen art; and French museum curator Rose Valland, who had been retained by the Germans after they commandeered her Paris museum to store looted art and gained invaluable information in her post.
About 345 men and women from more than 10 countries were assigned to the MFAA; they included art historians, museum curators, artists, architects, librarians, and archaeologists. Some two dozen of the monuments men operated at the front lines of the war, of whom two died in battle: British Maj. Ronald Balfour was killed by the explosion of a shell in March 1945, and U.S. Army Capt. Walter Huchthausen was shot the following month.
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Activities
When the MFAA was first deployed to Italy, its scope of work included restoring and preserving structures such as churches and palaces, as well as recovering looted art. One of its greatest successes was achieved after monuments officer Maj. Robert Posey, suffering from a toothache, visited a German dentist and learned that the dentist’s son-in-law was an art scholar who had once worked for Nazi Party leaders Hermann Göring and Alfred Rosenberg. The information that Posey and his assistant, Private First Class Lincoln Kirstein, later obtained from the son-in-law resulted in the discovery of an enormous repository of artwork looted from all over Europe—thousands of paintings, manuscripts, sculptures, pieces of furniture, and other cultural artifacts, all hidden in a salt mine outside Altaussee, Austria. The goods were shipped to Munich, where they were identified, cataloged, and returned to their owners or countries of origin.
In one memorable instance, the monuments officers risked being court-martialed for a collective act of protest against the United States government, which had shipped some 200 paintings by German artists to Washington, D.C., in November 1945 for a tour of 13 U.S. cities. More than 30 officers supported a letter, known as the Wiesbaden Manifesto, which urged for the immediate return of the artworks, arguing that the U.S. government had no moral right to display them and highlighting the risk of damage by unnecessary travel. The letter never reached the intended authorities; it was suppressed by Maj. L. Bancel LaFarge, an MFAA section chief, in order to protect the protesting officers. However, it was made public the following year.
Legacy
After the war many monuments officers returned to their positions at some of the most respected cultural and educational institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. Kirstein cofounded the New York City Ballet in 1948. Other officers remained in Europe, continuing the work of returning stolen items to their owners.
The achievements of the monuments officers were popularized by the 2014 film The Monuments Men, directed by George Clooney and based on the 2009 book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, by Robert M. Edsel and Bret Witter. The film featured an ensemble cast including Clooney, Matt Damon, and Cate Blanchett. Edsel also founded the Monuments Men and Women Foundation (originally Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art) in 2007.
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