[MSN] Forgotten heroes of the fine art war intrigue America

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Forgotten heroes of the fine art war intrigue America
Tony Allen-Mills, New York

FOR a few happy weeks more than half a century ago, Harry Ettlinger, then a US army sergeant, found himself looking after a Rembrandt self-portrait, which had been looted by Nazi officials and then recovered by American soldiers from its hiding place in a disused salt mine.

If that 1650 painting came to auction today it would fetch tens of millions of dollars. Yet it never occurred to Ettlinger to do anything other than keep the painting safe until the unit he worked for could establish its rightful owner.

Ettlinger was one of the Monuments Men, a remarkable group of American, British and other allied art experts and curators whose efforts to retrieve looted treasures at the end of the second world war are suddenly attracting unexpected attention in US cultural circles.

A new book on the US army’s Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) section describes the little-known activities of a frontline military unit charged with locating, safeguarding and repatriating millions of pieces of stolen art — including works by Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Picasso — even while war was still raging in Europe.

Robert Edsel, a former Texan oilman who stumbled on the MFAA story while restoring a villa in Florence, has almost single-handedly revived interest in what he describes as the first time in history that an army fought a war while trying to protect its enemy’s art treasures.

“There are probably more books in book stores on the second world war than any other subject,” said Edsel, 49, who sold his oil business in 1995 and moved to Italy to study art. “It was inconceivable to me that there was a topic that had not been covered.”

While much has been written about Nazi looting and Hitler’s enthusiasm for art, Edsel found only limited historical references to the activities of the Monuments Men. Dismayed that so little was known about what he rapidly came to regard as a landmark episode in the history of western art, he ploughed £1.3m of his own money into hiring researchers, combing through archives and travelling across America in search of the fast-dwindling survivors who could still recount their escapades as hunters of looted masterpieces.

“To me it was like, wow, you wrote a western and left out John Wayne,” Edsel said of previous efforts to document the Monuments Men.

Yet American publishers were doubtful that readers would be interested in another pictorial history of an obscure US army unit. After three years of research that attracted “absolutely no interest” from commercial publishers, Edsel decided to produce his book himself.

He was vindicated when the US media swooped on his dramatic and previously unpublished pictures of US soldiers uncovering the Nazis’ treasures. In the spring of 1945 the Monuments Men had discovered hundreds of caves and mines where caches of artwork were stashed.

The first they investigated was a Westphalia copper mine that yielded paintings by Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Rubens and an original score of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. Some of the biggest finds at the end of the war came from castles at Berchtesgaden and Neuschwanstein.

Edsel has since been approached by Hollywood agents seeking film rights to his book — Rescuing Da Vinci — and stood proudly by this month at a formal ceremony in the US Congress honouring the 400 men and women, 60 of them Britons, who joined the allied art rescue effort. Only 13 of them are known to be still alive.

Among those featured in Edsel’s book and on the website that he devotes to updating the MFAA story are several colourful British army officers who joined the rescue effort. Sir Charles Leonard Woolley, the archeologist who discovered the ancient Sumerian city of Ur, was prominent among British experts who joined the MFAA to help to prevent the transfer of German-owned artworks to the United States.

As an MFAA major, Sir Ellis Kirkham Waterhouse, a British art historian, was inspecting a cache of recovered paintings in 1945 when he discovered that a work attributed to Vermeer, originally owned by a museum in Rotterdam, was a fake. The discovery of a second fake Vermeer among paintings looted by Hermann Goering led to the exposure of Hans van Meegeren, one of the world’s most notorious forgers.

One of two MFAA officers known to have been killed in action while attempting to save artworks was Major Ronald Balfour, a British scholar who came under German shellfire while evacuating sculptures from the town of Cleves, near the Dutch border.

Prominent on the American side was a New York intellectual named James Rorimer, who before the war had been curator of medieval art at the Metropolitan Museum. As an MFAA captain Rorimer presided over the recovery of the collections looted by Goering and Josef Goebbels, then returned to New York where he became the Metropolitan’s director. He was renowned for wearing his army boots to work every day, even when clad in a dinner jacket.

While controversy continues over the whereabouts of thousands of missing masterpieces, Edsel doubts that many were smuggled back to America, as is known to have happened in the celebrated case of the Quedlinburg treasures. Some of Germany’s most valuable medieval reliquaries were removed from a church by a US army lieutenant in 1945 and left for decades in a Texas bank vault.

“In some instances the art will have been taken as a trinket, a souvenir of war, which has occurred since the dawn of soldiering,” Edsel said. “But I seriously doubt that much of this art was taken by someone who knew its value.”

He believes that inquiries in the former Soviet Union and other former eastern bloc countries will yield information about missing masterpieces. He also expects to see plenty of lawsuits — both genuine and bogus — as old works are rediscovered and put up for sale.

Edsel’s greatest sorrow is that most of the people he celebrates are no longer alive to witness the surge of interest. Ettlinger is one of the youngest survivors — he is 80 — and was the only one able to attend the congressional ceremony three weeks ago.

Ettlinger said the MFAA’s work amounted to the first time in history that any army had agreed that “to the victors do not go the spoils of war”. As for his brief stewardship of the Rembrandt, which was returned to its owner, Ettlinger added: “To give is more rewarding than to take.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/