This weekend, George Clooney’s newest film, The Monuments Men, arrives in theaters, highlighting a fascinating chapter in World War II. The movie is a fictionalized adaptation of Robert M. Edsel’s authoritative nonfiction book of the same title, which focuses on an international unit of art experts tasked with preserving priceless works throughout the European theatre.
The subject is explored in Edsel’s book (but not on screen), and in even sharper relief in Lynn H. Nicholas’ The Rape of Europa, published in 1994. (The book was followed by a powerful documentary in 2006, which is currently streaming on Netflix, as well as a comprehensive website that dovetails with Edsel’s research.) As Nicholas writes, Americans had every reason to fear an invasion: “If the Japanese had managed to cross thousands of miles of ocean undeterred to turn the huge military complex at Pearl Harbor into a smoking shambles, it seemed quite possible that they could do the same to San Francisco, and the increasing successes of the German U-boat fleet in the Atlantic underlined the vulnerability of the eastern seaboard.”
One trustee at the Chicago Art Institute
even pondered the “advisability of
camouflaging the building by smoke screens.”
Throughout December and the capricious months that followed, American museum owners “with visions of London’s Blitz on their minds” stirred to action. Paintings on the top floor of the Museum of Modern Art were removed each night and hidden in sandbagged storage rooms. Paintings and sculptures from the National Gallery of Art were surreptitiously taken down and transported by train for safekeeping at the Biltmore near Asheville, North Carolina, the largest private estate in the country. By February 1942, 15,000 items from the Metropolitan Museum of Art—90 truckloads in all—were stashed in an empty mansion outside Philadelphia.
As for the evacuation of the Art Institute’s holdings, paperwork and small museum objects were to be stored in a fireproof vault in a Michigan Avenue bank, while larger, “irreplaceable” art objects would be trucked 40 miles outside the city to an unoccupied bank building, guarded round the clock by two guards (“at the expense of about $2,400 a year”) along with a local night watchman. The museum ordered metal barrels and made preparations to produce wood crates and boxes for the transportation of art. By December 1943, however, the minutes note that the contracts for the rental of off-site storage facilities were cancelled, “as the hazard of fire raids from foreign nations does not seem to be imminent.”
Meanwhile, American archeologists, selected by the U.S. State Department in 2012, are trying to restore and register priceless items from Afghanistan. In March 2001, the Taliban led a campaign to smash “every museum artifact that they could find that bore a human or animal likeness.” Over 70,000 objects, some reaching as far back as the Stone and Bronze Age, were lost. The losses could have been even worse had a group of “key keepers” not kept some of the museum’s most valuable treasures stashed “in obscure corners of the storerooms scattered around the museum,” as well as “three safes inside the presidential palace that the Taliban never found.”
The group responsible for salvaging the remains was dispatched from theUniversity of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, located just 10 miles south of the Art Institute of Chicago—a museum whose own world-renowned collection seemed, for a brief time, as vulnerable as any in the world.
