The Rape of Europa
Page 27
Many of their own institutions had hastily ordered protective actions not always the best for their works of art: at the Museum of Modern Art the major paintings on the third floor were taken down every night, put in a sandbagged storeroom in the center of the floor, and rehung every morning before the public arrived.7 In all the museums millions of candles were ordered in preparation for power failures, fire crews were on duty around the clock, nursing stations were set up, and first-aid supplies were distributed along with gas masks. Building engineers and maintenance crews basked in unaccustomed board-room limelight. There was much solemn practical advice: “Gather up shattered fragments and wrap in cloth marked with collection number,” advised one memo. “Two men should hold the picture while a third cuts the wire” and “Haste should be avoided except where it is necessary to remove works of art from immediate danger” confided another.
Engineers at the National Gallery informed the administrator, after study, that the Gallery’s roof would not be suitable for an antiaircraft gun emplacement. This opinion was based not on the safety of the collections, but on the engineers’ fear that the roof would not support the guns and the dome of the Gallery would interfere with the field of fire. In Boston the Japanese galleries were immediately closed to prevent misguided demonstrations of patriotism. In New York the Met was closing at dusk, fearing that people caught in a blacked-out museum would be tempted to make off with the exhibits. The Frick had already begun to paint its skylights black, probably in vain, for, as one member dryly observed, the island of Manhattan would be quite unmistakable from the air except in the foulest weather. Indeed, skylights, so essential to the lighting of virtually every museum, would be a nearly insoluble problem from every point of view; not only could they be seen for miles, but the danger to paintings and people from shattering glass was extreme. Fear of sabotage was even greater than fear of damage—the directors envisaged bombs hidden in packages and mobs bent on destruction.
For two days these issues and others were debated: Should loan exhibitions continue? What should be evacuated and when? But on one issue the directors were united and adamant: the museums would stay open. They were fortified by a resolution of the Committee on the Conservation of Cultural Resources hand-delivered by David Finley, director of the National Gallery: there should be no general evacuation until the military and naval authorities deemed it advisable. The consensus was that it was the duty of museums to provide relaxation and a refuge from the stresses of war. If their best things were sent away, they would show objects long relegated to storage—one director wondered out loud if the public would even notice. They would provide public shelters in case of bombing. Natural History even proposed installing pianos in its shelter areas to entertain and calm the occupants.
A request from the Treasury Department for the museums’ help in advertising the good aspects of American life in order to promote the sales of war bonds, greeted coolly at first, soon attracted strong support and even an endorsement as “good” propaganda. Somewhat carried away in the heat of patriotism and by the prospect of government funding, the directors discussed organizing, with the help of Ringling Brothers, a huge travelling exhibition designed to “restate great things in America,” an idea MoMA had proposed in July 1940 but dropped as too expensive. In this excited condition, they attached a ringing resolution to the statement of intent they were readying for the press which declared: “That American museums are prepared to do their utmost in the service of the people of this country during the present conflict…. That they will be sources of inspiration illuminating the past and vivifying the present; that they will fortify the spirit on which victory depends.” At the end of the reading of this text, Juliana Force of the Whitney exclaimed, “I think it is wonderful!” and Alfred Barr suggested a standing vote on “a beautiful resolution,” which was done.
With the directors as they headed home were copies of a pamphlet written by George Stout, chief of conservation at the Fogg and the country’s greatest expert on the techniques of packing and evacuation. A veteran of World War I who had witnessed its terrible destruction at first hand, Stout had been in Paris and Germany as early as 1933 as a member of an international committee for the conservation of paintings. From his European correspondents, whose censored letters somehow reached him from Holland, Germany, and France across the submarine-infested Atlantic, he had been gleaning precise details of the effects of modern weaponry on fragile objects. The British had learned from unfortunate experience that windows should be boarded and reinforced on the outside, as bomb blasts otherwise caused coverings to be blown inward. In Spain it was found that the concussions of such blasts could affect even pictures packed and padded in boxes. Dr. Martin de Wild wrote ominously from The Hague in early March 1941 that he had “recently examined Rembrandt’s great Night Watch, which is now in a shelter somewhere in the dunes, well air-conditioned, but in darkness. The painting is in good condition, but of course every varnish yellows in darkness.” It had also been found that darkness promoted the growth of certain parasitical organisms on canvases. To impart these new findings to his colleagues, Stout devoted the January 1942 issue of his periodical, Technical Studies, to the subject, and organized a two-week symposium at the Fogg in March.8
The major museums immediately began to move their most prized objects to safety. Officials at the National Gallery of Art were clearly nervous about taking things out of Washington, despite the fact that the board of trustees had given permission for these preparations. They worried about the effect of such action on other institutions, which would follow the lead of the museum most closely in touch with the national government. Director Finley insisted that “before any removal actually takes place … inquiries should be made of the Committee on the Conservation of Cultural Resources, National Resources Planning Board, to ascertain whether such action would conflict in any way with the general policy of the Government.”9 There being no instructions to the contrary forthcoming from this body, the trustees saw no reason to wait, and the removal was authorized. Similar decisions were made at the Frick, the Metropolitan, and other institutions, and the cream of the great American collections now, in their turn, began journeys to undreamed-of places.
It was carefully done. The National Gallery is closed only two days of the year: Christmas and New Year’s Day. On December 30, 1941, chief curator John Walker wrote a memo instructing the staff, when questioned about missing pictures, to reply that “they cannot say what paintings are on exhibition, since certain galleries are being rearranged and some paintings have been temporarily removed. No statement should be given as to which pictures have been removed or as to when they will again be placed on exhibition.”10
On New Year’s Eve, after the Gallery had closed, seventy-five preselected paintings were removed from their places throughout the building. When it reopened January 2, the gaps had been filled by other works or by rearrangement of the hanging. In the storage areas the chosen pictures were inspected and packed in their specially prepared cases. On the freezing cold morning of January 6, the seventy-five (which included, suitably for the season, Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi, David’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt, and the van Eyck Annunciation, as well as three Raphaels, three Rembrandts, three Yermeers, two Duccios, and two sculptures by Verrocchio—the David and Giuliano de’ Medici) left for Union Station. Only two American pictures made the cut: Savage’s Washington Family and the much-reproduced Gilbert Stuart portrait of the first President. The Railway Express receipt for the shipment listed the total value as $26,046,020. By January 12 the National Gallery pictures, in perfect condition, were comfortably lodged in their mountain mansion, attended day and night by rotating squads of Gallery guards and curators.
The infinite variety of the huge Metropolitan collections took far longer to remove. Galleries were quietly closed, one by one, and their contents packed in the night. By February some fifteen thousand items of every description were stashed away, having been transported
in more than ninety truckloads to the wilds of suburban Philadelphia. Fearing both air raids and possible commando attacks from submarines, curators at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, true sons of Paul Revere, kept lookouts on the roof, and moved the best objects into three buildings provided by Williams College in the calm of western Massachusetts. The Frick Collection and Philadelphia Museum of Art used vaults beneath their own buildings. The Phillips Collection in Washington sent a shipment to Kansas City, and from San Diego and San Francisco collections were removed to Colorado Springs. But at the Detroit Institute of Arts, on the personal orders of Henry Ford (who believed the possibility of attack was so remote as to be nonexistent), nothing was moved at all.11
Elsewhere, the work continued for months. In early November 1942 the President requested a progress report from the ever-sluggish Committee on the Conservation of Cultural Resources. The document, finally produced in March 1943, could report the removal, from Washington alone, of more than 40,000 cubic feet of books, manuscripts, prints, and drawings, plus the original “Star-Spangled Banner,” all of which constituted “an irreplaceable record of the development of American democracy,” to “three inland educational institutions.” The Declaration of Independence went to Fort Knox. The fortress-like National Archives building, built in 1934 and the first government building to be air-conditioned, in 1942 alone received nearly 175,000 cubic feet of records. Even after this influx the eighteen stories of the Archives, today stuffed to the ceilings, still had plenty of room, but these sequestrations only represented a tiny fraction of the collections and archives of the nation.
The National Gallery of Art pictures move into their shelter at Biltmore.
George Stout and his colleagues were not only interested in the protection of American collections. It had long been clear that the United States must, sooner or later, become involved in the war on the European continent. This conviction was especially strong in the eastern academic bastions traditionally oriented in that direction and was reinforced by the presence on these campuses of numbers of refugee professors. Those involved in war planning in the Roosevelt administration were well aware that these university communities were a vital source of the intelligence needed to pursue any campaign in a Europe virtually in the total control of the enemy. Within days of the fall of Paris in June 1940, a group of Harvard faculty and local citizens wishing to contribute to the war effort established the American Defense Harvard Group as a clearinghouse which could direct available expertise to the most useful areas. Similar organizations sprang up at other centers of learning.
They would soon be set to work: the Selective Service Act was passed on September 16, 1940, and the War Department was faced with the preparation of millions of recruits for duty in undreamed-of places. They started from zero, but within weeks lectures and seminars were being prepared and delivered by American Defense volunteers. Later, the famous Office of Strategic Services (OSS) would include a large complement of these academics among its analysts.12
American art historians were no less eager than anyone else to join the growing effort, but they did not at first think of working through such groups as American Defense Harvard. Once the safety of the museums was assured, George Stout and W. G. Constable, in late September 1942, wrote to the Committee on the Conservation of Cultural Resources, still regarded as the proper forum for art matters, suggesting that a subcommittee be formed to study the physical conservation of endangered works of art in both the United States and Europe, in order to “give a lead to the world when peace comes.”13 Off the record, Constable specifically recommended against any museum directors being on the subcommittee, as they “had neither the experience nor particular interest necessary.” He and Stout had in mind a technical group, which would analyze the frightening problems Stout’s European friends had so vividly described. The response was bland and polite—the committee would study the matter.
Despite Constable’s feelings about museum directors, they too had become interested in the protection of Europe’s treasures. Francis Henry Taylor, director of the Metropolitan Museum, had already discussed the idea of a committee on protection with David Bruce, then president of the board of the National Gallery and soon to head OSS operations in London. They envisaged a group which might work under the United Nations Refugee and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) being formed by Governor Lehman of New York. In November 1942, after conversations in Cambridge with Stout and Paul Sachs of the Fogg Museum, Taylor took the long train ride to Washington through the blacked-out autumn countryside to discuss his ideas further with “the people at the National Gallery,” which, in the continued absence of action by the Committee on the Conservation of Cultural Resources, had now become the museum community’s lobbying organization. This was no frivolous choice. In Washington, then as now, access was everything. The board of the National Gallery included the Chief Justice and the Secretaries of State and the Treasury, and its administrator, Harry McBride, a former State Department officer, had, since the outbreak of war, performed a number of delicate missions at the personal request of Secretary of State Cordell Hull.
Francis Henry Taylor, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Taylor was immediately ushered in to present his proposals to Chief Justice Harlan Stone, who promised to discuss the matter with FDR. A few days later, William Dinsmoor, president of the Archaeological Institute of America and another recruit to the cause, also met with the Chief Justice. The matter was formally discussed by the board of the National Gallery on November 24; David Finley was able to inform Taylor the very next day that Stone would accept chairmanship of a national committee. Archibald MacLeish, Librarian of Congress, would take Stone’s nomination to the President; John J. McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War, also expressed enthusiasm.
Full of optimism after this high-level response, Taylor wrote Sachs on December 4, 1942: “I do not know yet how the Federal Government will decide to organize this, but one thing is crystal clear: that we will be called upon for professional service, either in civilian or military capacity. I personally have offered my services, and am ready for either.”14 To reinforce their actions, Taylor and Dinsmoor had both written a memorandum for presentation to the President, recommending “a corps of specialists to deal with the matter of protecting monuments and works of art in liaison with the Army and Navy.” As flamboyant as the man himself, Taylor’s long memo somewhat undiplomatically referred to the centuries-long dispute over British possession of the Elgin marbles, and to Napoleon’s removal of the bronze horses of Saint Mark’s in Venice, in the same paragraph as the confiscations by the Nazis.15 (Dinsmoor, clearly feeling otherwise about Napoleon, suggested that the specialist corps actually be modelled on the art historians who had accompanied the future Emperor to Egypt during the campaign of 1798.16) Taylor felt that an expert committee, under his leadership, should immediately be sent to Spain, England, Sweden, and Russia to study the situation and report back to the President. How this was to be accomplished, given the recent invasion of North Africa, the deadly situation at Stalingrad, and the continued bombing of Britain, was not addressed.
The Chief Justice, as good as his word, sent his recommendations to the White House on December 8, set forth in a no-nonsense memo from which all historical references had been removed and replaced by the proposal that the British and Soviet governments be requested to form similar groups. During invasions, it suggested, the committees would furnish trained personnel, many of whom were already serving in the armed forces, to the General Staffs “so that, so far as is consistent with military necessity, works of cultural value may be protected.” The committee should also compile lists of looted works. At the time of the “Armistice,” it should urge that the terms include the restitution of public property, and if such property were lost or destroyed, that “restitution in kind” be made by the Axis powers from a list of “equivalent works of art… which should be transferred to the invaded countries from Axis museums, or from the private collec
tions of Axis leaders.”17 Three weeks later the President replied in favorable terms to the Chief Justice. The “interesting proposal,” he said, had been referred to the “appropriate agencies of the Government for study.” Then there was silence.
What the stymied museum men could not know was that a tremendous struggle had been going on for nearly two years in the bosom of the government over the whole concept of the control of the areas soon to be in the hands of the Allies.18 Traditionally this had been the Army’s job, but long-term occupation was a problem the military establishment had never before faced on such a scale. President Roosevelt and the Army itself favored civilian control as soon as possible. And indeed, as soon as war had been declared, civilian agencies of every stripe, government and private, of which the Harvard and museum groups were but two, began making plans, forming committees, and clamoring for attention. Uneasy at the thought of losing all control to a plethora of civilians untrained in military ways, the Army, in June 1942, set up a small Military Government Division in the office of the Provost Marshal General, and a school of military government in Charlottesville, Virginia. American Defense Harvard and the museum men, having joined forces, immediately proposed that instructions on the preservation of monuments and works of art be included in its curriculum.
For a while this arrangement seemed sufficient, and when General Dwight D. Eisenhower requested a civil administration section for the staff planning the invasion of North Africa, several of the newly trained Charlottesville officers plus a State Department contingent were quickly sent off. This group was to deal mainly with issues of local government. Economic problems, such as food supplies for the local populace, were rather vaguely assigned to the “appropriate civil departments of the United States and the United Kingdom.” Eisenhower could hardly wait to be rid of all this and concentrate on fighting the war: “Sometimes I think I live ten years each week, of which at least nine are absorbed in political and economic matters,” he commented to General Marshall.19