Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis (6 page)

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A NEW TYPE OF SOLDIER

LATE JULY–AUGUST 1943

I
n a classroom at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, some forty-two hundred miles from Rome, Professor Deane Keller began another in his series of lectures to soldiers bound for the Mediterranean theater, all part of the university’s Education for War and Reconstruction program. The observations on his subject—“American Impressions of Italians and Italian Customs”—derived from Keller’s experience as a student and artist living in Rome from 1926 to 1929. There he had learned firsthand how to deal with Italians, something he shared with his students: “The via del cuore (way to the heart) and success will be found through tolerance and understanding of a high-minded sort. And I might add, with
infinite patience
on your part.”

Nearing his forty-second birthday, Keller was already a man of achievement. A school publication described him as a “short, stocky blond chap with wide shoulders developed by his constant swinging of the paint brush . . . teaches at the Yale Art School and has a studio up in the tower there. He puts in long hours on his compositions, makes lots of sketches and studies of the model before a brush touches the canvas. Once he is ready to march, the work proceeds like any well-planned project.” Hardly an imposing figure at five feet seven and 170 pounds, Keller’s round, wire-rimmed glasses and brushed, light-colored hair gave him a resemblance to Woodrow Wilson, twenty-eighth president of the United States, who had led the country through World War I. But Wilson had been a Princeton man; Keller was Yale to the core.

As Keller’s students prepared to depart for war in 1943, they took some comfort in knowing that momentum had finally swung in favor of the Allies. Although the merciless German siege of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) continued, the Soviet Red Army had forced a surrender of the German Sixth Army in Stalingrad in January, a battle that claimed 1.1 million Soviet casualties alone. By May, the Western Allies had their first major victory with the surrender of German and Italian forces in North Africa. Planning for an Allied invasion of Europe was underway.

The war effort dominated life in the United States. Rationing of all rubber products, gasoline, and other petroleum derivatives began in 1942. Sugar and coffee were next. By 1943, the ration list expanded to include canned soups and juices as well as meat, fish, and dairy products. Wanting to contribute to the war effort, Americans planted more than twenty million “Victory Gardens” that, by 1943, accounted for one-third of all vegetables consumed in the country. The military deployment of so many men created masses of job openings and virtually eliminated unemployment. Three million kids aged twelve to seventeen took up the slack and went to work. On May 29, the cover of the
Saturday Evening Post
featured “Rosie the Riveter,” illustrated by Norman Rockwell, in recognition of the millions of women comprising almost a third of the nation’s work force.

Keller was the middle child—and only boy—of three born to Professor Albert Galloway Keller and his wife, Caroline. During World War I, Albert had been stationed with the army in Washington, DC. He and his wife instilled in their children the importance of national service. After his high school years at the elite Taft School, Keller followed in his father’s footsteps and enrolled at the college whose campus had been his childhood playground, Yale University. During his senior year at Yale, he began studying art at the legendary Art Students League of New York, an atelier-type school founded in 1875 by artists, for artists, without degree programs or grades, but one that provided a richly creative environment and self-directed course of study.

In 1926 Keller received a Rome Prize fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, an honor awarded annually to fewer than a dozen of America’s most gifted emerging artists and scholars. Such recognition placed his name among past greats—architect John Russell Pope and art historian Charles Rufus Morey—and others who would follow, including composer Aaron Copland; writers William Styron, Archibald MacLeish, and Robert Penn Warren; architects Louis Kahn and Richard Meier; and artists George Biddle and Chuck Close.

For the next three years, Keller lived and studied at the academy, where the learning environment was intoxicating. He became proficient in Italian and traveled throughout the country. Some of his acquaintances within the American Academy later developed into lasting friends, including two men who would play prominent roles in his life: Norman Newton, an accomplished landscape architect, and Walker Hancock, a gifted sculptor.
*
By the end of his term, Keller had advanced his knowledge and skill as an artist and fallen in love with the country and its people.

After returning home in 1929, Keller accepted the position of Assistant Professor of Drawing and Painting at the Yale School of the Fine Arts. In 1936, he rose to Associate Professor. While he continued developing his skills as a painter, drawing—a discipline he once said “leads an artist to all the possibilities”—was the medium that sustained him throughout his career.

Of the many joys that drawing provided, none outweighed the chance meeting with Katherine Parkhurst Hall, a student in Keller’s life drawing class at Yale. At thirty-five, he was the distinguished professor and artist; she was ten years his junior, pursuing her interest in the restoration of decorative arts. Their courtship lasted two years; they married in 1938. Two years later, they had their first child, Deane Galloway Keller, named after his grandfather and affectionately called “Dino.” Perhaps because Keller had become a father relatively late, dad and son, each with piercing blue eyes, bonded instantly.

By the summer of 1943, Keller had established a career, married a woman he loved, and fathered a son who had become the pride and joy of his existence. But the world had changed. Just a year after little Deane’s birth, the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. With the nation at war, Keller wanted to join the more than two hundred members of the Yale faculty already in military service. Yale, like all universities, underwent severe changes not just to redefine its relevancy during war but also to survive. Ninety-eight percent of Yale’s students continued their studies through the summer, reducing the normal four-year course work to two years and seven months. Military and physical training became a part of the curriculum. Yale officials even transformed parts of the campus—sandbags covered the windows of Wright Hall to protect the university’s central telephone switchboard.

Keller knew that his lectures to departing soldiers, now down to just two per week because of the dwindling number of stateside volunteers, fell far short of what he could and should be doing. Keller wanted to get into the fight. He first tried the Marines, but they turned him down, blaming poor eyesight. With the news that the Allies had bombed Rome a second time, on August 13, and the battle for Sicily at an end, Keller predicted that the invasion of the Italian mainland would soon follow. The riches of thousands of years of civilization—some of mankind’s greatest creative achievements—lay directly in war’s path. Italy would soon become a combat zone. And here he was, an expert on Italy and its cultural treasures, stuck in a classroom, lecturing.

Three months earlier, Keller’s friend and mentor, Theodore Sizer, Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, had written to suggest that he take a different path to serve his country, one that matched Keller’s experience with the military’s needs. Apparently a new unit was being formed to protect art. “Tubby,” as he was known to his friends, wasn’t so much suggesting Keller apply as he was demanding it:

Dear Deane:

. . . Suffice it to say that after a week here [US Army School of Military Government in Charlottesville, Virginia] . . . this above all else is the place for you. You are over 35 (requirement #1), know several foreign languages—Italian is very badly needed (requirement #2). . . . On receipt of this sit down & draft a letter to War Department . . . and apply. Stress your knowledge of Italy the country, of the people, their habits, etc. Language people are easy to get but they want those who understand the psychology of our enemies. . . . Most important—don’t be so damned MODEST—put it on thick. After the draft rewrite twice & boil down a bit—mail—forget about it. In this you have nothing to lose & a lot to gain. Don’t let the former disappointments blunt this necessary initiative. Do it NOW.

Yours, T. S.

Keller wrote the letter, but his continued lectures made it hard to take Tubby’s advice and just “forget about it.” Waiting made him anxious. After all, his poor eyesight hadn’t improved, and he wasn’t getting any younger. By August, however, Keller had become cautiously optimistic, informing his parents that if he passed the physical exam, he hoped to be shipped off to Italy to serve as a Monuments officer. “This is all very much might, for there is no word as yet.”

AS INFORMATION SPREAD
about the new art protection unit, another man from Yale ached to enlist. Deane Keller vaguely knew him, but he was considered a rising star within the community of art historians. On July 24, 1943, this tall, gangling scholar received his commission as a lieutenant in the United States Army. His name was Frederick Hartt.

Whereas Keller had grown up in a stable and nurturing family, Fred Hartt had endured a miserable childhood. Fred’s father, Rollin, was a Congregational minister and journalist in Boston. The first child born from his marriage to Jessie Clark Knight was stillborn. In 1914, almost forty years old, Jessie gave birth to Fred. In 1917, shortly after the family relocated to Staten Island, New York, Jessie died. Her death proved a crushing and formative loss for Fred, who “longed for her the rest of his life.”

Two years later, Rollin remarried, to a Miss Helen Harrington, whose kind demeanor offset Rollin’s rigidity and abusive behavior. Fred’s emotional connection with his stepmother improved his teenage years considerably, but then she too died, of cancer. This triggered a depression, aggravated by Rollin and Helen’s adoption of a French boy, Jack, that had Fred in and out of therapy for many years.

Fred commuted daily from Staten Island to attend Birch Wathen, a private school on New York City’s Upper East Side. Already six feet tall, his awkward appearance, accented by dark, heavy-rimmed glasses, set him apart from other boys his age. While most of his schoolmates longed to be on the athletic fields, mimicking the New York Yankees’ newest sensation, former Boston Red Sox pitcher-cum-hitter Babe Ruth, Fred Hartt was lost in a world of French Gothic cathedrals, Italian Renaissance sculpture, and Oriental silk screens. His gift for the arts was apparent almost from the day he arrived at Birch Wathen—as a student, he designed the school logo. Soon his talent as a draftsman led to an interest in sculpture.

Fred’s career as an artist ended abruptly, however. Despite his obvious ability and enthusiasm, his therapist expressed concern that “working with his hands in such materials as clay would trigger a very negative response from [his] subconscious. These negative responses would bring about thoughts of, if not [actual,] self-destruction.” The death of that dream proved a crushing blow. Fred’s later efforts to resume drawing produced more frustrations than results. Often he would begin a drawing only to stop early in the process and tear it apart. Any thought of becoming an artist was abandoned.

In addition to being an exceptionally gifted student and voracious reader, Fred impressed teachers and classmates with his photographic memory. Fred decided to apply those skills to the study of art history, specifically Asian art. At just seventeen years of age, he enrolled at Columbia University, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree. Graduate studies at Princeton soon followed. He then earned a Master of Arts degree from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. By this time, his interests had shifted to Italian Renaissance art. Not surprisingly, his thesis focused on the master sculptor Michelangelo, his favorite artist. Despite the brilliance of Fred’s academic work, and his growing reputation in the field, Rollin remained critical of his son’s achievements.

In 1942, while working as an assistant and cataloguer at the Yale University Art Gallery and studying for his doctoral degree, Fred met Margaret DeWitt Veeder, known as “Peggy.” As a fellow art historian, she and Fred shared a love of education, art, and travel. Their relationship provided Fred with the encouragement and support lacking from his earlier years, and they soon married. In many ways, she was the perfect partner for Fred, but Fred had one need that was beyond her ability to satisfy—he was interested in men.

America in the 1940s was structured around a norm of heterosexuality. A homosexual man seeking employment, especially at a prominent American museum or college, had to keep his sexual preference closeted. Fred Hartt, like millions of Americans who lived through the Great Depression, was acutely aware of the difficulties of getting a job, so marrying a woman he truly loved, who was a friend and companion, was an ideal solution for the times.

Hartt, like Keller, had a comprehensive understanding of Italy. What Hartt lacked in time spent living in Italy he made up for with his research on the country’s art and monuments. More than half of his young life had been spent studying Italy—its artists, its culture, its history. He first traveled there in 1936, arriving in Milan on August 15,
Ferragosto
, the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary: “I lost my heart to Italy at the time of my very first visit to that beautiful land.” Seven years later to the day, the city of Milan was ablaze and the survival of Leonardo da Vinci’s
Last Supper
in question. Much of what had brought meaning to Fred Hartt as an adolescent, and provided a career for him as an adult, was at risk of being destroyed. He had been denied the chance to create art, but nothing was going to keep him from saving it.

*
Both Newton and Hancock would also become Monuments officers. Newton would serve with Keller in Italy; Hancock, whom Keller nicknamed “Camminatore” (Italian for his first name, Walker), served in northern Europe.