The Monuments Men by Robert M. Edsel
He thought back twenty-four hours, to his first sight of the painting. He had recognized the style immediately. Flemish. Sixteenth century. Was it by Peter Breughel the Elder, the great Belgian master, or someone who worked closely with him? He had seen works of comparable quality at Maastricht, but none had taken his breath away like this one. To see a painting of this quality leaning against the wall of a command post amid the bullets and the grime was to understand that great works of art were part of the world. They were objects. They were fragile. They were lonely, small, unprotected. A child on a playground looks strong, but a child wandering alone down Madison Avenue in New York City—that’s terrifying.
“Where did you find it, sir?” he had asked the commanding officer.
“Peasant cottage,” the CO had replied.
“Anything with it?”
“That’s all.”
Hancock’s mind had slipped through the facts. This was no peasant painting, but a museum-quality work. It was clearly stolen, then left behind as the Germans retreated. But it was only one painting, casually cast aside. Probably the result of individual looting, found by a passing officer in some country estate and abandoned when it became a life-threatening burden. It wasn’t the key to anything. But that didn’t make it any less valuable as a work of art.
He had stared at the painting, thinking about the muddy road back to Verviers, open for miles to German shelling. The uncovered jeep was protection enough for his own life, but he didn’t feel comfortable trusting it with a cultural treasure.
“Congratulations, Commander,” Hancock had said. “This is a real find.” An artillery shell detonated outside, shaking splinters from the roof. Hancock had jumped; the CO seemed not to even notice. “I knew it,” he said. “I knew it.”
“Unfortunately, sir, I don’t have a truck. I’ll have to leave it here for now, but I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Are you going back to headquarters?”
“Yes sir, I am.”
“For God’s sake,” the officer said, “get them to send out a lamp. We haven’t got anything that will give light here—not even a candle—and this is a hell of a place to be after dark.” 2
At headquarters the following day, Hancock had picked up not only the lamps but the colonel, who had just arrived from SHAEF and was eager to witness actual combat, and George Stout, who had just returned from the field. The American presence in Western Europe had grown to more than a million soldiers, so Eisenhower had created an administrative division under the command of General Omar Bradley. Bradley’s U.S. Twelfth Army Group had jurisdiction over First Army, Third Army, Ninth Army, and the newly arrived Fifteenth Army. George Stout had just been assigned to the Twelfth as their Monuments Man. In short, his worst fear had come true: He’d been kicked upstairs to management. Hancock had noticed Stout was in no hurry to head back to Paris to assume that command.
The man was a true professional, a real working fellow, and the one qualified conservator in a world of curators, artists, and architects. An expert and a precisionist first makes his analysis, Hancock thought as he drove, recalling Stout’s advice on one of their first trips together, then his decision. 3 Hancock was glad to have him along because George Stout always knew what to do. He would make the decisions and accept the responsibility. The colonel he could take or leave. He was nothing but back-office blowhard, the kind that infuriated the grunts, but at least agreeing to bring him along for a sightseeing tour of the front meant an enclosed staff car instead of a hazardous one-ton truck. After months in the field, Hancock felt like a chauffeur in a limousine.
“There she is,” the colonel said. “It’s about damn time.”
The command post looked precarious, a rickety wooden cottage in a muddy yard. Allied aircraft roared overhead as Hancock hit the brakes. The air was thick with smoke and dust. The fighting, Hancock noticed, seemed closer than it had been the previous day. Maybe the fire’s just hotter, he thought, as the big guns recoiled. He could hear shells exploding, but he couldn’t tell whether they were coming or going. This was clearly no place for artwork—or a Monuments Man. Hancock’s plan was simple: Grab the painting and go.
Stout had other ideas.
“You take the notes,” he told Hancock, kneeling before the painting after a wave of introductions all around. 4 Gently, he ran his fingers over the surface like a blind man greeting an old friend. “Kermess,” he said firmly. “Sixteenth-century Flemish, workshop of Peter Breughel the Elder.” 5
I knew it, Hancock thought. “Workshop” meant the master had advised on it, at least, if not worked on some of it himself.
Stout turned the painting over. “Support: oak panel.” He pulled out his tape measure. “0.84 meters by… 1.2 meters by… 0.004 meters. Three members of equal width, joined on the horizontal.”
The concussion of shells rattled the ceiling beams, knocking loose plaster dust and debris. Outside the window, Hancock noticed the colonel standing atop a pile of rubble, watching the battle through his binoculars.
“Cradle: low, seven longitudinal, oak, ten sliding transverse, pine. Multiple warp. Slightly worm-eaten. Broken lower corners, planed down at the time the cradle was applied.”
Stout again turned the frame over to examine the painting. Analysis first, Hancock thought, then decision. Stout never hurried. He never guessed. He never acted out of fear or ignorance, even if just this one time Walker Hancock wished he would.
“Ground: white, very thin. Broken and flaked, sparse, buckled: lower moderate, extensive upper.”
Hancock noticed men gathering out of the shadows. These were infantrymen, young soldiers drafted right out of school, the first into the fight. For months they had been shot at, mined, counterattacked, and shelled. They bathed out of their helmets, or not at all, and ate out of ration tins, wiping their spoons on their pants. Their billet had been destroyed, so they threw themselves down wherever they could find a comfortable spot. As always, Hancock wanted to say something to them, to thank them somehow, but Stout spoke first.
“Paint: oil, rich, and generally thin with translucent film in dark areas and monochrome drawing sparsely visible underneath.”
Outside, the colonel was cheering, delighted by his first encounter with warfare. Inside, two Monuments Men bent over a four-hundred-year-old painting in the faint light of a newly arrived lamp. The first was kneeling on the ground, studying its surface like an archeologist in an Egyptian tomb or a medic with a wounded man. The second hunched behind him, concentrating on his notes. The soldiers, tired and dirty, huddled around them like the shepherds at the manger, staring silently at a painting of expressive faces and peasant villagers and at the two adult men in soldiers’ garb fussing over every square centimeter of its surface.
Letter from George Stout To his colleague Langdon Warner
October 4, 1944
Dear Langdon:
The news about our directors’ resignation [from the Fogg Art Museum] did not come from them first or in fact at all. Margie told me…. I suppose I should write them but I’m mildly troubled as to what I should say. Hall’s “Social and Business Forms,” a sure guide to propriety in such matters and one that stood on my father’s bookshelf, had no example of a letter addressed to co-directors of an art museum in which the writer has worked, upon being indirectly apprised of their retirement from office.…
Koehler is quite right. The job ought to fall to somebody who will make the museum a working part—one working part—of the department…. I don’t believe I’ve ever been more certain than I am now that the development and understanding of man’s workmanship is the fundamental need of man’s spirit; or that we can never look for a healthy social body until that need, among others, is fed. I hope to put in the rest of my life really working at that job.
From my point of view, this [being a Monuments Man] is not a bad job. During the last three weeks I’ve been in harness with an Englishman who’s gone horribly sour and says we’re wasting our time. I don’t know what he
Yours,
George
CHAPTER 18
Tapestry
Paris, France
November 26, 1944
More than 250 miles away in Paris, a more traditional art museum—the Louvre—was finally alive with artwork. The pieces were mostly the classical sculpture collections, and not nearly as much as James Rorimer would have preferred, but Rorimer knew what an extraordinary accomplishment even this much was. The French government was finally closing the void in leadership that had developed after the Nazi departure, but the bureaucracy was a nightmare. And everyone, at every level, seemed to be pushing their own agenda. Rorimer had been pushing everywhere as hard as he could; he was, as one observer would later note, “not by talent much of a diplomat.” 1 The staid French were often mystified by his bravado and more than one had complained of his “cowboy tactics.” 2 But even with his bulldog tenacity and take-no-prisoners attitude, Rorimer hadn’t been able to make much headway.
He was convinced it had something to do with his rank. He wouldn’t trade his infantry training if he could, but coming in as a private put him at a tremendous disadvantage. He was a second lieutenant, and he was never going to be promoted, even though many of those around him felt he deserved a rank of major for the work he was doing. It chafed him. He couldn’t help it. And it wasn’t just personal pride, although that was part of it. His lowly rank was interfering with his work.
He thought of the day, back in September, when he learned that General Eisenhower’s office in Versailles was being furnished with items from the palace and the Louvre. Jaujard, the patrician director of the French museums and hero of the Louvre, knew of the “loans,” but had acquiesced in the interest of Allied cooperation. Rorimer did not. He raced to Versailles—Eisenhower’s office was in a house in the surrounding town, not the palace—and found soldiers moving furniture. A beautiful Regency desk sat on top of an ancient Persian rug from the Mobilier National. A terra-cotta statue was in the corner, while paintings and etchings from the Museum of the Palace of Versailles leaned against the wall.
The captain in charge, the delightfully named O. K. Todd, had personally selected the items, and he was not taking the opportunity to ingratiate himself with the Supreme Commander lightly. When Rorimer began to argue with him, Todd simply stepped out of the room and called Colonel Brown, Eisenhower’s headquarters commandant. Rorimer had argued with him, too: impractical, expensive, unguarded. Was it necessary? Was it wise? “General Eisenhower would be personally embarrassed,” Rorimer had said, “if it should leak out that he was using protected works of art for military purposes contrary to his explicit orders. And wouldn’t the German propaganda office have a holiday if it could report that General Eisenhower had appropriated art objects from Versailles for his personal use?” 3
He had gone too far. “Let’s see what your General Rogers has to say about this,” Brown thundered, seizing the phone and dialing Rorimer’s commanding officer. 4
As luck would have it, General Rogers was out. Colonel Brown was in no mood to wait. The next morning, the cultural objects were returned. O. K. Todd received a commendation from the city of Versailles for this selfless act. Eisenhower, arriving a few days later, found even the stripped-down office too large and grand, so he ordered a dividing wall installed and gave half the space to his secretaries. In the end, it was a small event, a piece of trivia perhaps, but except for a lucky break it might have cost Rorimer his commission. And that was the problem: too many toes to step on, too many egos to stroke, too much time wasted. It was almost as frustrating as museum work!
Rorimer banished the thought. He had spent much of the last month in the Île-de-France region, at a series of ancestral estates that ringed Paris. The great rooms of many châteaux had been blackened because neither the Germans nor the Americans knew how to use the old fireplaces. Four lovestruck American soldiers had given important paintings to young women from a local village. At Dampierre, the Germans had installed a cocktail bar in front of Golden Age, one of France’s most celebrated murals. But all in all, it had been a good trip. Damage was minimal; spirits still high. Another story from Dampierre seemed to epitomize the situation. The Germans had used the library’s renowned Bossuet letters for toilet paper, but after they left, the caretaker found the letters in the woods, cleaned them off, and returned them to the library. Now that was dedication. That was service!
Besides, this was no time to be negative. It was November 26, 1944—the Sunday after Thanksgiving in America—and James Rorimer had much to be thankful for. After weeks of demands, arguments, and supplication, the military trucks had been moved from the Jardin des Tuileries, and the garden was officially opened to the public. And now the Louvre was open, too. Voices were echoing where, two months ago, Rorimer’s footsteps had been the only sound. The Bayeux Tapestry, which he had discussed with Louvre director Jacques Jaujard so many weeks before, was on display in Paris for the first time in almost 150 years. He had accompanied General Rogers to the opening two weeks before; he was back now to walk the halls. The heart of Paris was coming to life, and Rorimer couldn’t help but think of his contribution.
He needed that encouragement because the rest of his work was slow. On the surface, the city of Paris looked majestic and indestructible, but underneath the Nazis had hollowed out catacombs of theft and destruction. The French national collections had been preserved through the cunning of Jacques Jaujard and the “good” Nazi Count Franz von Wolff-Metternich, but the collections of private citizens had been ransacked. Before the war, much of the artistic wealth of Paris had rested in the hands of its prominent citizens and art dealers—the Rothschilds, David-Weill, Rosenberg, Wildenstein, Seligman, Kann—all of them Jewish. Under Nazi law, Jews weren’t allowed to hold property, so the collections had been “appropriated” by the German state. When the looters had exhausted those collections, the confiscations trickled down to the lower-level Jewish aristocracy, and then to the Jewish middle class, and finally to anyone who even had a Jewish-sounding name—or possessed something the Gestapo wanted. In the end, it had been a mass pillage, as Gestapo officers broke down doorways and hauled valuables away—artwork, desks, even mattresses. Jaujard estimated that 22,000 pieces of important artwork had been stolen.
So far, Rorimer had been able to find information on approximately none of it. The Nazis had taken or destroyed almost all their records. The victims were usually absent, having fled the country or disappeared into the Nazi work camps. Witnesses were reluctant to speak. The wave of terror had subsided—no more forced public haircuts of young women or summary
The French museum establishment wasn’t faring much better. The first meeting of a group calling itself the Commission de Récupération Artistique (Commission for the Recovery of Works of Art) had occurred on September 29, 1944. The commission’s leader was Albert Henraux, the art patron and one of Jacques Jaujard’s key contacts in the French Resistance. The secretary was Mademoiselle Rose Valland, the assistant in charge of the Jeu de Paume museum. This was enough to prove to Rorimer that, no matter who took the lead, considerable power would always lie in the hands of his friend Jaujard. And yet, with all of Jaujard’s influence, the commission had only been formally recognized by the government two days ago, on November 24. As far as Rorimer knew, they had not made much headway in the recovery of artwork either.
So at the end of his tour of the Louvre—perhaps his first afternoon of sightseeing, he realized, since his arrival in Paris three months before—Rorimer stopped by his old friend’s office. It was almost time for closing, the last patrons being hustled swiftly out of the museum, but Jaujard, as always, was still at his desk. The man was indefatigable.
“Quite a success,” Rorimer said, referring to the opening. The crowds had been lining up and waiting hours to see the Bayeux Tapestry despite a ten-franc charge (about 20 cents U.S.); only the military was being allowed free entry.