The Rape of Europa (76 page)

The “202” on view: the National Gallery’s first blockbuster

But these comments were completely overshadowed by the publicity blitz at home. The show had by now become the most “in” thing to do. Ingrid Bergman came and stayed for three hours. On the fifth of April, 62,983 visitors, twice the capacity of the Washington Senators’ home stadium, were counted, and a small unexpected group consisting of President Truman and his guards were not. Truman carefully said that the collection should be returned “as soon as it was safe to do so.” Meanwhile, exhausted Gallery staff coped with more and more VIP visitors who were determined not to miss the art event of the season, and who were squeezed in alongside whole touring families fresh from viewing the cherry blossoms. Mrs. Henry Ford took a special train from Detroit. John D. Rockefeller and Lady Astor were given a quiet lunch at David Finley’s house after pushing through the mobs. The Duke of Windsor, arriving the day before the show was due to close, cabled to see if he could still see it. He could. The exhibition was extended an extra week. Final attendance would be close to 1 million.

On April 17 the Armed Services Committee held a second hearing. The Army, still desirous of returning its charges and keeping its word in Germany, now resorted to the principles stated in the mutinous Wiesbaden Manifesto to defend its point of view. The Army was backed by the State Department but refuted by former ambassador William Bullitt, who described western Germany as a “danger zone with the Red Army at its gates” and the Soviet government as determined to conquer the world for Communism. The Senators, somewhat puzzled by the fuss, suggested asking the Germans themselves for approval. The National Gallery witnesses, utterly dependent on Congress for operating funds, would not take a stand, although John Walker came closest to outright disapproval of a tour by quoting the Gallery’s own policy against lending any of its panel pictures. He was eclipsed by Perry Rathbone of the St. Louis Museum and a team from the Met, armed with reams of statistics and charts of how many things they had shown and moved since 1938 without damage, who pointed out that passage of the bill would enable the entire Middle West and some 12.5 million people in Greater New York to see the show. It was all over. The people had spoken, and the bill never came to a vote.

General Clay, who was now dealing with a semi-blockade of Berlin by the Russians and who had in fact sounded out German officials (who did not object to the tour), felt that an Act of Congress would be a bad precedent. He proposed that the 202 be exhibited “at the suggestion and with the approval of the Armed Services Committee, based on recommendations of
the Military Governor after consultation with representative Germans” and be sent back in a number of separate shipments every few months.
⁹¹

Fifty-two of the most fragile pictures, all on panel, were returned immediately. The rest, under military guard at all times and escorted by German curators, would slowly progress around the United States, visiting New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Cleveland, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Toledo. Because of “adverse climatic conditions,” the Deep South lost out.

Fifty-four pictures left after Boston, and the rest sailed from New York on April 22, 1949, again escorted by Comdr. Keith Merrill, who had helped bring them over in 1945. Some 10 million people had seen them, and several hundred thousand dollars was raised for German children, who wrote touching thank-you notes to the various participating institutions. There was no damage to any of the pictures, which rejoined the rest of the Berlin collections in Wiesbaden on May 4. While they had been travelling in the New World the Berlin Airlift had come and gone, but they would not return home until 1955, and then to the Dahlem Museum in the United States sector, not to the shattered Museum Island, which now lay behind the Iron Curtain.

Craig Smyth, director of the Munich Collecting Point, with U.S. and foreign officers.
Left to right:
Marcelle Minet, France; Craig Smyth; H. de Bry, France
(back);
Alphonse Vorenkamp, Holland; Doda Conrad, U.S.; Raymond Lemaire, Belgium; Charles Parkhurst. U.S.: and Pierre-Louis Duchartre. France

XIII

THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE

Fifty Years of Restitution and Recovery

The 202 German-owned paintings that had come to America and caused such a fuss were, of course, only an infinitesimal percentage of the millions of displaced works which continued to be discovered daily by Allied forces. There was no controversy over what should be done with the things which had been taken “by seizure or without compensation from the overrun countries.” They were to be returned to those countries, but just how was not so simple. In the West, liberated since the summer of 1944, there was, by the time of the German surrender, considerable agitation by the various recuperation committees for immediate action. Indeed, the director of the Belgian museums, Dr. van Puyvelde (who had spent the entire war in England in scholarly pursuits, and whose only military experience had been a few Sunday drills in Brussels’ Grand Place in World War I, but who had, to the considerable amusement of his colleagues, arrived home dressed in the battle dress of a full colonel), had commandeered a convoy of twenty-five trucks and without any authorizations headed for Germany to retrieve the Ghent altarpiece.
¹
This incursion was not well received by either Posey at Alt Aussee or Rorimer at Heilbronn, both of whom were still desperately trying to secure the works for which they were responsible and who in any case could not simply hand them over. The Belgians were thus forced to retreat empty-handed. (At about the same time Rose Valland, also sporting a uniform and the rank of captain, but less well equipped when it came to transportation, was refused access to Neuschwanstein, where she too arrived unheralded to check the confiscated French collections.) Van Puyvelde’s visit got a flurry of publicity in the press and inspired the Poles to ask the London office of the RC for similar “SHAEF permits.”
²

To calm everyone down, John Nicholas Brown proposed, in late May 1945, the immediate return of a number of universally recognized works and a program of “ad-interim” restitution to be agreed upon between the U.S. Army and the respective recipient nations.
³
This was a delicate matter.
The Americans, not wishing to become embroiled in claims disputes and deploring the “precipitate and unwarranted action of the French and Belgian governments,” felt that it was essential to keep careful control of the objects. Sumner Crosby cabled, “The entire procedure must appear as an act of good will on the part of our armies, and not as an accession to claims presented by the Occupied Countries.”
⁴
The Army saw in the plan an easy way to rid itself of an unwanted burden. If there was quick and unilateral action, there would be far less for the long-discussed but still nonexistent inter-Allied restitution commission to deal with and the more difficult problems related to unidentifiable and Nazi-purchased items could be quickly solved. The principle of ad interim returns was approved in late June by all concerned, and reaffirmed at Potsdam.

The Ghent altarpiece was the first work of art to be returned. Soon after Potsdam, John Brown rushed off to Brussels to make arrangements. It was decided that the Prince Regent of Belgium would formally accept the altarpiece in ceremonies at the Royal Palace in Brussels on September 3, the first anniversary of the liberation of the city. In mid-August the panels were packed in their ten boxes in Munich and, escorted by Captain Posey, loaded onto a military plane. Back in Brussels a delegation of dignitaries and a detachment of armed guards assembled at the airport to await them. But at the hour appointed there was no sign of the plane, and after “a long wait in the rain, various members of the party drifted into town.” After six hours absolutely everyone had gone and Brown initiated anxious inquiries. Worried MFAA officers preferred not to imagine that after all its adventures the altarpiece could have been lost. The plane did eventually arrive and the Ghent altar, home at last, spent its first night back in Belgium ignominiously locked in the garage of the American military mission.
⁵

Two days after the ceremony of transfer Mason Hammond, on a visit to London, was besieged by the representatives of the other “overrun” countries, all clamoring to have their treasures returned and their representatives admitted to the Collecting Points. Hammond counselled patience, as the U.S. Military Government was “complex” and might “appear to move slowly.” But the State Department too noted that the return of the altar-piece “may be expected to spur on the efforts of other claimant nations” and urged quick acceptance of the foreign representatives. This did not include the Axis powers: former belligerents Italy and Hungary would have to “wait in line” to reclaim their treasures until after the “liberated countries of the Allies” had received theirs.
⁶
Now things moved very fast. Eisenhower had already personally ordered that the Veit Stoss altar be prepared for return to Poland, and in early September sent a member of his
staff to recommend to Craig Smyth that as much as possible go back to the various nations “in bulk.” On the fifteenth a directive from headquarters officially set the process in motion and specifically required the immediate return of the Michelangelo
Madonna
to Belgium and “fifty of the finest and most representative paintings of French origin” to Paris.

Responsibility for organizing this enormous transfer of art objects once more fell entirely on the beleaguered MFAA contingent. Items from each country would first have to be identified, then be extracted from the general mass and taken to separated areas for inventorying and packing. Transportation would then have to be arranged to take them home. Although the American MFAA officers had at first not been pleased at the idea of dealing with foreign representatives, they now realized that their help was essential. The French, normally sticklers for checking each object, themselves suggested that the ERR things sent to Neuschwanstein, for which German documentation had been found, be returned to Paris unopened and inventoried there in the presence of an American representative. Shipments were planned in rotation so that no country would seem to have preference, and a token first delivery of major works was prepared for each one. In Munich each nation was assigned an office and given a German curatorial assistant, though no one was sure if certain representatives would be able to bring themselves to work with Germans at all. (Smyth worried especially about Estreicher from Poland, whose brother had perished in Nazi confinement.) Fearing disputes, the Americans in all cases reserved the right to have final say as to whether or not an object could be released. And so the return began.

Soon streams of art were flowing in both directions at the Munich Collecting Point. The Bruges
Madonna
, to the disappointment of all present who had longed to see her, was returned in the wrappings Stout had devised at Alt Aussee, looking much like a very large Smithfield ham. A little delegation saw her off to the airport. Rorimer arranged for the seventy-three cases containing the stained glass windows of Strasbourg Cathedral to go there direct from their refuge in the Heilbronn mine. They were received with enormous ceremony, which also served to celebrate the return of Alsace to French control. In the midst of it all, Rorimer, to his great satisfaction (and after a certain amount of lobbying by Rose Valland), became the first Monuments man to receive the Legion of Honor.