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February 24, 2014 - November 17, 2019
Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section, or MFAA.
the first time an army fought a war while comprehensively attempting to mitigate cultural damage, and it was performed without adequate transportation, supplies, personnel, or historical precedent.
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his personal architect, Albert Speer,
told Speer to build not just for today, but for the future. He wanted to create monuments that over the centuries would become elegant ruins so that a thousand years into the Reich, humankind would still be looking in awe at the symbols of his power.
He was not destined to create, but to remake. To purge, and then rebuild. To make an empire out of Germany, the greatest the world had ever seen. The strongest; the most disciplined; the most racially pure. Berlin would be his Rome, but a true artist-emperor needed a Florence. And he knew where to build it.
Aachen. For eleven hundred years the city, burial place of Charlemagne, Holy Roman Emperor and founder of the First German Reich
The Führermuseum.
Alfred Rosenberg
Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring
When the Nazis took Paris, the director of the Toledo Museum of Art wrote to David Finley, director of the not yet opened National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to encourage the creation of a national plan, saying, “I know [the possibility of invasion] is remote at the moment, but it was once remote in France.”
Francis Henry Taylor, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, and David Finley, the director of the National Gallery of Art.
How influential was Paul Sachs?
In the summer of 1942, in a pamphlet entitled Protection of Monuments: A Proposal for Consideration During War and Rehabilitation, Stout laid out in explicit terms the challenges that lay ahead:
these things belong not only to a particular people but also to the heritage of mankind. To safeguard these things is part of the responsibility that lies on the governments of the United Nations. These monuments are not merely pretty things, not merely valued signs of man’s creative power. They are expressions of faith, and they stand for man’s struggle to relate himself to his past and to his God.
For the meeting at the Metropolitan Museum in December 1941, he created a pamphlet about air raid techniques. It was only a few pages long, but it was culled from a decade of research. It was typical George Stout: detailed, timely, and understated. Here was a man who never hurried. Who was careful. Punctual. Precise. An expert and a precisionist makes his analysis first, he always said,
This was the moment for art conservation; there was not a second to lose if the world’s cultural patrimony was going to be preserved—and nobody would listen to him. Instead, the wartime conservation movement was being controlled by the museum directors, the “sahibs” of the art world, as Stout called them. Stout was a workman, a toiler in the trenches, and he had the nuts-and-bolts technician’s distaste for the manager’s world of committees, conversations, and the cultivation of clients.
January 1943, they had reached Leptis Magna, a sprawling Roman ruin only sixty-four miles east of Tripoli. It was here that Lieutenant Colonel Sir Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler, Royal Artillery, British North African Army, beheld the majesty of Emperor Lucius Septimius Severus’s imperial city:
Mortimer Wheeler
For the second time, the Italians had forsaken this cornerstone of their “empire” without even putting up a fight. The first time was 1940, when 36,000 British and Australian troops turned back an advance on
Sir Charles Leonard Woolley, a world-famous archeologist who in the years before World War I had been a close companion of Sir Thomas Edward Lawrence,
It was Wheeler and Ward-Perkins who insisted that, in addition to being protected, “the ancient sites and the Museums [of Greek and Roman North Africa] should be made accessible to troops and the interest of the antiquities be brought home to them.”2 An informed army, in other words, is a respectful and disciplined army.
Without realizing it, the British were inching their way toward the goal George Stout was pushing so earnestly back in the United States: the world’s first front line monuments protection program.
The Sicilian campaign would be a joint operation, unprecedented in history, with the United States and Great Britain sharing command on everything from air combat missions to laundry duty at the preparations base in Algiers.
The food was British and the toilets French, when it should have been the other way around. It was a harbinger of things to come.
Captain Mason Hammond, a Harvard classics professor working in Army Air Forces Intelligence.
Freedom, it seemed, was another word for nothing important to do.
On September 10, 1943, a week after the Allied landing in mainland Italy, a jubilant Paul Sachs wrote to George Stout: “I should have written to you some time ago to tell you that your ‘brain child’ has finally taken shape in an official kind of way and, as you know, the President has appointed an American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in Europe with Mr. [Supreme Court] Justice Roberts as Chairman, and I have been asked to be a member of that Commission and I have accepted.… It seemed to me… that I ought to post you at once because not only is
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Salerno
September 9, 1943.
Purple Heart Valley,
Monte Cassino.
The monastery had been founded by Saint Benedict around AD 529, during the last days of the Roman Empire, partly because its excellent defensive position offered protection from a pagan world. It was at Monte Cassino that the saint wrote the Benedictine Rules, establishing the tradition of monasticism in the Western world. It was there he died and was buried. The abbey was sacred ground, an intellectual center and “a symbol of the preservation and cultivation of the things of the mind and the spirit through times of great stress.”1 Now the grand and imposing abbey seemed to glare down at the
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General Dwight D. Eisenhower had issued an executive order stating that important artistic and historica...
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our men’s lives count infinitely more and the buildings must go.”
had also drawn a line between military necessity and military convenience,
The name Monte Cassino echoed around the world: the mountain of death, the valley of sorrow, the one building keeping Western Allied forces from Rome.
February 15, 1944, amid the cheers of Allied soldiers and war correspondents, a massive aerial bombing destroyed the magnificent abbey at Monte Cassino.
Germans and Italians turned the tables on the Allies, suggesting that if this was what the world could expect then the Allies were the barbarians and the traitors. Cardinal Maglione, speaking for the Vatican, called the destruction of the abbey “a colossal blunder” and “a piece of gross stupidity.”
Germans hadn’t been in the abbey—they had actually been respecting its cultural importance—and the bombing had not weakened their position.
In fact, it had strengthened it
The Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) subcommission had been formalized in late 1943 as an official joint operation between the United States and Britain, run by the Civil Affairs branch of the Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories (AMGOT) and answering primarily to the M-5 division of the British War Office.
There had been no Monuments Men north of Naples, for instance, when the decision was made to destroy the abbey at Monte Cassino. That failure not only catapulted the handful of Monuments officers in Italy into action, it proved how difficult it was to create an organization in the middle of a military campaign.
Each army, he wrote, would need a team of conservators. Each team would need a specialized staff, ten people at least, and sixteen would be preferable, including packers, movers, taxidermists (yes, taxidermists), secretaries, drivers, and, most importantly, photographers.
The staff couldn’t be acquired in the field, because Stout knew from his World War I experience that in the field no men were superfluous, and no commander would give up his men. They had to be assigned to conservation duty, and they had to be equipped: jeeps, covered trucks, crates, boxes, packing materials, cameras, aerometers to check air quality, all the tools of the conservator’s trade.
sahibs.
One thing certain: it will be, if it develops, a military job. It will not be run by civilian museum people but by the Army and the Navy. If this were civilian museum command, I’d ditch.
George Stout underestimated the sahibs. The civilian museum community, in the form of the Roberts Commission (and in time their counterparts in England, the Macmillan Commission), had been both a catalyst for the creation of a conservation corps and a guiding force in its development.
It is doubtful the U.S. Army would have tolerated the MFAA if not for the prestige of the Roberts Commission, which had been formed with Roosevelt’s explicit backing,
They had not assigned a single museum director to the officer corps of the MFAA.
