Monuments Men: The Salvation and Conservation of American Image

This is a response essay to the 2014 film, Monuments Men.  It is NOT a review of the movie.  It does however, broadly discuss ideas related to the film and as such does mention scenes.  I tried hard not to write spoilers but your definition may vary.

Also--I will point out--the ideas and errors are my own.

I recently watched Monuments Men, directed by and starring George Clooney.  Based on a true story (Robert Edsel, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, Center Street, 2010) an international team of art historians and architects and “regular” soldiers form the backbone of the search for Nazi looted art at the end of World War II.  The movie has many problems—not just Clooney’s direction that makes a movie that cannot decide if it is a war picture, a heist movie, a buddy flick, and several other genres—but most glaring is the lack of historical accuracy, served with a dazzle of American patriotism.

The premise of the team is a “big idea”—that art is what makes us stand apart as civilizations.  Art is what makes us “truly” human, what allows us to transcend our pedestrian lives and petty quarrels.  The line is repeated over and over: this is an important mission because of the value of Art.  I’m an art historian; on some level, I believe this.  Art is what we make to tell our cultural story, values, concerns, and fears.  (And as such, it includes ephemera and pop culture and music and films. Not just the Michelangelos.)  But it is certainly an arguable position—are paintings more or less valuable than the lives of soldiers and civilians?  Who gets to decide?

Hollywood’s Monuments Men exist in an idealized space.  They exist in a war without individual looting.  Soldiers (of all armies) have always carried off small objects—flags, pins, uniforms, ephemera; they are part of a memorializing process that links the objects to events and places and people and indeed, are part of how we come to terms with the acts and demands of war.  Our magpie eye is also attracted to shiny and beautiful things, as evidenced by stories like Fred Butts who served in 1945 with the battalion which looted Hitler’s chalet, the Eagle’s Nest (Charlotte Sun newspaper, Port Charlotte, Fla. on Monday, September 27, 2010). But Allied soldiers looted works of art as part of this process of repatriation.  The Quedlinburg treasure is one of the most glaring examples; eight works from the lot hidden to protect it were probably stolen by First Lt. Joe T. Meador who was on guard during their rediscovery in 1945.  Meador likely knew well the value of what he had taken; he graduated with a BA in art from North Texas State University.  The case was dropped in 1949 when Quedlinburg became part of East Germany.  Works began to resurface in the 1980s in Texas after Meador’s death and became the focus of legal attention to return the stolen property (William H. Honan, “A Trove of Medieval Art Turns Up in Texas”, NYT 6/14/90).  Hollywood ignored the question of looting on any level.

Hollywood largely ignored the complicated questions of repatriation of stolen art.  At one point, Matt Damon’s character, James Granger, simply picks up a work from a storehouse of Jewish possessions and returns it to the apartment on the label on the back; the apartment is, of course, horrifyingly empty with Juden graffiti on the wall but of course, he can see where the work used to hang and he puts it back on the wall.  This whole scene is supposed to show us how sincere he is when he says he intends the return to rightful owners.  The road to Hell is still paved with good intentions.  The scene indeed implies that it will be an easy job—just look at the back and take the painting there. Cate Blanchett’s character, Jeu de Paume staff member Claire Simone, admonishes him by emphasizing the empty apartment but Clooney’s filmmaking buries this in the characters’ relationship and the over-arching motif of earnest intentions.  600,000 works of art, in a sea of furniture, dishes, clothing, shoes, hair, teeth.  At a hearing in 2006, some 100,000 are still listed as missing (https://plone.unige.ch/art-adr/cases-affaires/liberation-of-saint-peter-from-prison-2013-feldmann-heirs-and-private-person/review-of-the-repatriation-of-holocaust-art-assets-in-the-united-states/view). Almost 70 years later, there are works still in dispute.  How do you return a work when the owner, the owner’s immediate and extended families are wiped out?  How do you prove ownership when all your papers and photographs were destroyed after your family was forced to flee or sent to the camps?

Hollywood isolated the Soviets as the systematic “bad guys” of the world, looking to make a quick profit in their sweep of found Nazi art into their own collections.  Matt Damon’s character, Garner, makes an offhand reference to the Soviets as having lost 20,000,000 people, as an excuse for their behavior, which Clooney’s character dismisses; the film makes the Soviets villains second only to the Nazis who not only stole art but also destroyed it rather than lose it to the Allies.  Systematic military intention to take works of art and move them into the Soviet museums is well documented. However, there is no denying that in the post-war period art entered the international markets when owners could not be easily found, and for those with ready cash, these works entered both private and museum collections.  Various museums have listed works of questionable provenance linked to the Nazi era (Metropolitan Museum: 393 works, Art Institute of Chicago: over 500 works, National Gallery of Art: 400 European paintings). Beginning in 1998 there has been a concerted effort towards acknowledging these works, tracing these works, and returning when possible. The Nazi Era Provenance Project (http://www.nepip.org) is a searchable database of works created before 1946 that changed hands to American museums between 1932 and 1945.  It currently has 28943 objects and 175 museum participants.  It is a step in the right direction but as has been frequently noted, it does not include dealer records or international museum records; other countries keep separate records, keeping searching limited.  Major museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, devote staff and resources to provenance research, an area growing alongside a global art market, global art trafficking, and continued wars.  As late as 2012, with the find in the home of Cornelius Gurlitt, however, new caches of Nazi-looted pieces are still being discovered.  Did dealers, collectors, and curators know that these works were likely looted? The market of the post-war years clearly suggests that they knew but were deterred by the difficulties (and impossibilities) of returning works and dazzled by the allure of acquiring these artistic masterworks.

Why does any of this matter?  Could you just dismiss this whole essay as the ramblings of another cranky historian? Certainly.  But it matters because the Taliban attacked the giant Buddha statues at Bamiyan in 2001, destroying a cultural heritage because they considered the works idols, contrary to their religious teaching.  It matters because during times of civil war, archaeological sites go unprotected and unguarded, and works of precious value slip away from towns like Balkh in Northern Afghanistan (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/whos-stealing-afghanistan-cultural-treasures/).  It matters because at times of political unrest, works are raided, damaged, and stolen as in Mallawi Egypt, perhaps never to be seen again (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/08/pictures/130823-museum-mallawi-egypt-looting-artifacts-archaeology-science-antiquities/); the Egyptian Antiquities Museum on Tahrir Square struggles in the instability of the climate, with reports varying about looting, thefts, and security.  If art matters, and I hold this as the tenet of the movie with which I do agree, then how we tell the story of the Nazis and their looted art matters.

What Clooney could have done with a few text slides at the end of the film was set the historical record straight from the inspirational story.  He could have acknowledged the magnitude in numbers of works stolen, the difficulties of restoring works to owners, and the efforts underway to do so.  He chose not to.  He chose to let his story stand.  So his story is simple in a world where we actually need the complex.  His story is one of unalloyed heroism and virtue, with America as the driving force of cultural right. If his story is the one we tell ourselves, then we underestimate the rapaciousness of power to sweep through culture as well as people; we miss the desperation that forces people to sell or abandon their cultural heritage; we miss the lessons that we could have learned about guarding and restoring patrimony. We are instead condemned to repeat these lessons. We are strong enough to be told the whole story.