What Is Precious Is Never to Forget
In the brutal last days of World War II, US Captain Robert Posey and Pfc. Lincoln Kirstein were digging frantically through rubble in the Alps, searching for survivors. But not the kind that most soldiers were seeking.
Posey and Kirstein were part of AMGOT, the Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories, dubbed “Aged Military Gentlemen on Tour” by their fellow GIs. The nickname was fair enough—most of those in the division were well into middle age and almost comically unsuited to battle.
They were English and American art historians, museum curators, architects and scholars, some of whom were later commemorated as the “Monuments Men” in a book by Robert Edsel and a subsequent film, starring George Clooney and Matt Damon. Their counterintuitive mission was to track down and save the artistic and cultural heritage of Europe, at the same time that everyone else was trying to blow it up or carry it back home.
In fact, Hitler aimed to do both. History’s most bitter failed artist (young Adolf was rejected by Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts) and his flamboyant second in command, Herman Göring, used the war to orchestrate the greatest art heist in history, stealing trainloads of paintings, books, and sculptures with the intention of creating an immense Führer Museum in Linz. Perhaps realizing they would need more than paintings of big, strapping blond guys to fill it, they grabbed masterpieces from across the continent, including the Madonna of Bruges statue by Michelangelo, and hid them in secret warehouses buried deep in the mountains.
But when the tide of the war changed in 1944, Hitler issued the aptly-named “Nero Decree” which ordered his retreating troops to destroy behind them every Nazi storeroom holding anything of value. At the same time, Stalin’s Russian forces were doing their own pillaging and Britain and America were bombing Naples and Milan, even flattening the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie that housed Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper”. US General Mark Clark likened the whole European campaign to “waging war in a goddamn museum.”
If that was the case, the old men of AMGOT were among art’s few advocates. For more than a year, they had been tracing the location of Hitler’s secret hoard. Acting on a tip from a dentist Captain Posey had seen for a toothache, he and Kirstein now found themselves trying to blast and scrape their way into an ancient salt mine in the Austrian mountains they believed was hiding some of the greatest treasures of Western culture.
When I was invited last week to visit an open house at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Objects Conservation department, I wasn’t expecting drama on the level of Posey and Kirstein’s rescue mission. The work happening in New York is not likely to make it into a George Clooney movie. But in its quiet mix of scholarship, technology and crafty ingenuity, it’s no less inspiring.
While one team of researchers was using ultra-violet lights to analyze traces of paint on Egyptian reliefs, another conservator had created a tiny support stand out of Legos to allow her to repair a broken foot on a glass figurine. In a sun-flooded laboratory over Central Park, someone was fashioning a new nose for a 15th century Della Robbia putto who had clearly taken a punch. The Italian penchant for knocking the noses off statues was something even the experts couldn’t fully explain.
At the reception afterward, I talked with a young conservator from Italy who recently moved to the Met from a museum in Germany. She spoke of the childhood school trip to Florence that sparked her interest in the vocation, and the challenges faced by conservation teams as they battle on a thousand fronts to protect the world’s patrimony.
After all, the destruction of war is not the only thing to lay waste to artworks. Floods, earthquakes, poor air quality, and that great nemesis of all human endeavor, the ticking clock will take their toll as well. Grime, slime, and ultimately time have taken out as many artworks as crazy dictators, falling bombs and grave robbers. Art conservators, it seems, are forever dodging bullets.
The Monument Men could attest to that. As Posey and Kirstein fought their way into the Altaussee salt mine, it was with the knowledge that only months earlier one of their own, British historian Ronald Balfour, had been killed by shrapnel as he pursued Michelangelo’s stolen statue.
Entering the caves, the two men discovered that the Nazis had indeed attempted to explode the site, but had been thwarted by the Austrian miners who secretly removed the bombs. More than a mile into that cavernous space under the Alps, where the natural underground temperature actually created an ideal storage environment, the Monument Men uncovered a vast stash of the world’s greatest art. They found Michelangelo’s Madonna lying on a dirty mattress.
The soldiers immediately sent word to the unflappable leader of the Monuments Men, George Stout, the role played by George Clooney in the film. With the Russian army on the verge of taking control of the territory, Stout managed to excavate 80 truckloads of paintings and sculptures in less than a month. Kirstein later called Stout “the greatest war hero of all time— he actually saved all the art that everybody else talked about.”
In the end, maybe those who fight the wars and those who pick up the pieces are not as far apart as they first appear. When it comes to protecting a society, the art historians and museum conservators are the best kind of cultural warriors, the ones who defend our very identity.
So on a weekend that will launch America’s annual invasion of Europe’s beaches, museums and piazzas, those of us crowded into the Accademia or the Louvre should remember that the masterpieces we’re admiring are miracles of creation, but also preservation. Sometimes there’s as much valor in the latter as the former.
This Memorial Day, let’s celebrate those who protect the memorials. Not just the ones dedicated to our wars, but every piece of art, modern or ancient, that captures a fragment of this remarkable world to remind us who we are.
Oh wow-- would have loved to have seen that exhibit in the Quirinale. It really is miraculous the amount of things that have survived, when you think about all of the various inter-Italy battles throughout the medieval and Renaissance periods, the two World Wars, and all of the earthquakes, floods and various natural disasters over thousands of years. Now I have to look up Discobolus!
Just saw that you had done a piece on the Met as well-- can't wait to read it. The Met really is an amazing place-- we're very fortunate that our neighbor in NYC volunteers for the Conservation Department and invited us to their annual fundraiser. It's a fascinating evening and the conservators are happy to chat about their work and show you how they do it.
Have a wonderful time in Rome!! We're heading there on June 7! Thanks again for the very kind comments-- your support means so much.