e d i t o r’s n o t e from 
The holiday season now fast approaching is that time of year when Hollywood’s better films are released. One that I particularly hope to catch is The Monuments Men, which features an all-star cast headed by George Clooney and Matt Damon. Clooney has not only directed and co-produced the film, but co-adapted its screenplay from the bestselling book published in 2009 by Robert M. Edsel and Bret Witter, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History.
The film and book tell the remarkable true story of a team of American and British art conservators, historians, and curators who worked fast, and effectively, to protect European artworks and monuments during and just after World War II. Clooney bears an uncanny physical resemblance to the man he plays, George Stout (1897-1978), who, before the war, had headed the
groundbreaking conservation department at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum.
Read the rest of Peter Trippi’s Editor’s Note column from the November/December issue of Fine Art Connoisseur here.
About Editor Peter Trippi
Peter Trippi has edited Fine Art Connoisseur since 2006. Previously, he directed New York’s Dahesh Museum of Art, which specialized in 19th-century European academic painting and sculpture; before that, he held senior posts at the Brooklyn Museum and Baltimore Museum of Art. In 2002, Phaidon Press published Trippi’s monograph J W Waterhouse, which reassesses the Victorian painter best known for his Lady of Shalott at Tate Britain. Trippi went on to co-curate the Waterhouse retrospective that appeared 2008-2010 in the Netherlands, England, and Canada. He is currently president of Historians of British Art, former chair of the Courtauld Institute of Art’s U.S. Alumni Group, and a board member of the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art, American Friends of Attingham, and Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation.
A Living Legacy of Preserving Art
