One of the best things to come from the “Monuments Men” movie

(I apologize for the lateness of this post. Sometimes life gets in the way of blogging.)
In the special “Museums” supplement to the March 20, 2014 issue of The New York Times, there was an article by Carol Kino titled “Monuments Man in War, Conservationist in Peace”. Leaving aside the grating use of the word “conservationist” instead of “conservator”, this is a brief but well-researched(thanks to consultations with Francesca Bewer, Joyce Stoner, Sarah Staniforth, and Jerry Podany ) look at George Stout’s life and work. Presenting the real Stout to thousands of readers, this article may be one of the best things to come as a result of the “Monuments Men” movie

Japanese television documentary features Nishio Conservation Studio

Nishio Conservation Studio staff
Nishio Conservation Studio staff, from their website

Yoshi Nishio, Kyoichi Itoh and their conservation work at The Nishio Conservation Studio were featured in a one-hour TV documentary series, broadcast on the WOWOW Cable Channel (a channel similar to PBS in the US) in Japan on March 28th and 30th, and April 7. The documentary highlights technical aspects of Asian Painting Conservation, including the type of materials used, and how Asian Paintings are conserved using traditional techniques with a modern scientific approach at NCS. The program also showed how those Japanese paintings came to the US, as well as a feature on Yoshi Nishio as an artist, educator, musician and film maker. The documentary includes location footage of the Decatur House/White House Collection, Johns Hopkins Library, North East Document Conservation Center, and interviews with their conservators. This is the second time the Nishio Conservation Studio was featured on television in Japan. These broadcast programs increase public awareness of the importance of conservation. Numerous Japanese corporations support conservation outside of Japan. The video will be available on Youtube with English subtitles later this year.
–Submitted by Yoshi Nishio

When for profit businesses can do what not-for-profits can’t

In the March 13, 2014 issue of The New York Times, David W, Dunlap writes about the rebirth of the Williamsburg Savings Bank building in Brooklyn which was built in 1875 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places (“From Floor to Grand Dome, Landmark is Restored”). It was abandoned for more than thirty years before it was turned into an event space by developers who also have plans for the adjacent parcels of land. The owners spend $27 million dollars to salvage the building and undertook a painstaking restoration of the interior. Those well-funded profit seeking owners did what no not-for-profit organization could have afforded to do.

If it takes a village to dismantle an exhibit, shouldn’t that village have a conservator?

In a short article in the February 28, 2014 issue of The Wall Street Journal (“The Herculean Task of Moving Mike Kelley”), Anna Russell discusses the complex process of deinstalling, packing, and loading onto trucks the more than 200 works from the Mike Kelley retrospective that had been at MoMA PS1 in New York and was moving on to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. There is no mention of a conservator among the thirty-four workers involved in the project. Shouldn’t there have been at least one them there?

Didn’t I just read this article?

Yesterday, March 4, 2014, in the “Arts, Briefly” column of The New York Times, I read a short piece by Elisabetta Povoledo entitled “Parts of Pompeii Crumble Under Heavy Rains”. The title and content seemed so familiar—as if I had read them before. There was a good reason for this. I had—in December 2010 and December 2011 and November 2012 and April 2013. If the Italian cultural and archaeological authorities do not take things in hand, I am bound to be reading the same story during or after next year’s rainy season.

If you own it, you can break it

As a February 19, 2014 New York Times article, “Behind the Smashing of a Vase” by Nick Madigan notes, Miami artist Maximo Caminero destroyed a vase by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei that was on display at the Perez Art Museum Miami in a protest against Miami museum policies. Caminero was arrested and charged with criminal mischief. The irony of this situation is that one of Weiwei’s earlier works involved the destruction of a vase. The difference in the situations seems to be that Weiwei owned the vase he destroyed and Caminero did not. As conservators should we not be troubled by the implication that ownership is what determines whether an object can or can’t be destroyed.

What happens to meaning or integrity when an architectural element is separated from its context

When looked at together, two recent articles in The New York Times inspire one to think about the question of how meaning and integrity are related to context and how they are affected when an architectural element or interior decoration is separated from that context. In the February 13, 2014 article, “Building May Be Lost, But Its Façade Will Live (In Storage Someplace)”, David W. Dunlap notes that the sixty-three cast copper-bronze panels comprising the façade of the American Folk Art Museum are to be dismantled and stored although they could be re-erected on a free-standing armature in the same location. He quotes architect Elizabeth Diller as saying, “Facades and buildings and their organization, their logic, are tied entirely together. You either have the integrity of a building with all its intelligence and connected ideas, or you don’t.” In the February 4, 2014 article, “At Four Seasons, Picasso Tapestry Hangs on the Edge of Eviction”, David Segal quotes architecture critic Paul Goldberger saying about the Picasso curtain “Le Tricorne” that was to be removed from its place in the Seagram Building, “It can’t be treated like just another picture that happens to be hanging on that wall and could be interchanged with something else. By virtue of years of being there, it has the effective status of being part of the architecture even if it’s not part of the architecture.”

Exploring the FAIC Oral History Project in Light of the "Monuments Men" Film

By Rebecca Rushfield, for a Google Art panel that was organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Feb. 7, 2014
The FAIC oral history interviews contain material on a wide variety of subjects some of which are of interest primarily to conservation professionals while others will have a much wider audience. The recent opening of the film “Monuments Men” gave Rebecca Rushfield a chance to explain what the archive of interviews held on the subject of the preservation of Western cultural heritage before and during World War II.
The Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives program under the Civil Affairs and Military Government Sections of the Allied armies was just one aspect of the effort to protect Western cultural heritage during World War II. Each nation put in motion plans for protecting its monuments be it by encasing historic buildings in scaffolding, supporting walls, and sandbags or by moving its most important artifacts far from the line of fire. Information about these efforts is available in archival documents and publications, but the events are most vividly and personally captured in the reminiscences of their participants.
The Oral History Project of the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation was established in 1974. Its first interview was a five-person discussion held in Mexico City on September 4, 1974. That interview touched upon the subject of conservation efforts during World War II and included as a participant George Stout, one of the “Monuments Men.” Using excerpts from interviews in the FAIC archives, I will present several individuals’ stories of the art and monuments protection efforts leading up to and during World War II.
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In 1941, George Stout was the head of the Harvard University Fogg Art Museum conservation department. He recalled the preparations for the coming war that took place at Harvard University. ” I was asked to sit with the American Defence Harvard Group – they were interested in public opinion and cultivating attitudes. When Pearl Harbor came and everyone got the wind up. Francis Taylor had a meeting of mostly museum directors and a few technical people … there were half a dozen of us – discussing what are we going to do about evacuating our museums – getting things out where they won’t be bombed, all that kind of thing.”
A conference on the emergency protection of works of art was planned. Stout recalled, “It was planned after December of ’41 – and held … March, ’42.”
Well, actually, we had it almost demanded of us really, by kind of a general pressure of public opinion – what are you doing? Are you getting ready? Everybody thought we were going to be bombed any moment the way London had been. There was all that pressure of public alarm that was quite current in those early months of our entry into the Second World War.”
In1941, Craig Hugh Smyth was a senior research assistant at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. When the decision was made to move the Gallery’s treasures away from Washington, D.C. to a location less likely to be bombed, he was put in charge of the move. He said, “In December of ’41 came Pearl Harbor and the National Gallery had to evacuate its pictures and I was sent with them, to take care of the collection of the country. So I had the experience of nothing to do, except look at pictures and sculpture. I was there for about 6 weeks to 2 months, I think. With my wife—we had just gotten married that year. It was a great start—I must say—to have our own collection. “ … “[The paintings] were in the Biltmore House at Asheville, N.C. The National Gallery never did things by halves…if it was going to have a house in the country, it would have the best house in the country—so to speak.”… “It was great. But it was far in the country and nobody was supposed to know that National Gallery pictures were there. But the National Gallery wasn’t very wise and they shipped these things down with great labels on the outside…that said precisely what was in them! So the whole countryside knew and we had a guard—a force of guards there—my first administrative post. And one of the guards decided that the Germans would attack and come up the river—which was so small that no one could come up it.”
Harold Plenderleith, head of the Scientific Laboratory at the British Museum remembered that in the 1930s, “I was once asked about giving lectures to the Portuguese army by our foreign office. Well, I happened to know something about the war, you see. I was asked to go and give them a talk about preservation of the cultural property in the event of armed conflict. About a fortnight before, the foreign office telephoned to say, “Was everything all right for my lecture?” “Oh, yes,” I said. “Oh, that’s all right then you will be lecturing in French, of course.” “Not on your life,” said I. “Oh yes but we want you to do it in French. What I did was to write out the lecture in detail in English and get it to a professional to put it into French. Then learn the thing off by heart in French which was a terrific effort. I first of all had to give this lecture in Madrid. Half the audience was in uniform-brass hats and so on. I did my little histories and showed them some frightful war time slides that I had drawn and painted specially to horrify them and they were tremendously impressed! I was immediately invited to go and do it again in Oporto.”
He recalled that “A few years later, in 1938 a year or so before the outbreak of the Second World War, we realized that we were heading for possible disaster if war should break out. [Ian] Rawlins and I wrote a little booklet about first aid treatment of museum material. I forget what it was called–our text was never published. It was diverted to the protection of museum objects in war-time. This got to the attention of the directors of museums in London, particularly the British Museum. They asked if they could see it and later on said they would take it over and they published it. That was fine. We were involved by this means. We had gotten most of the practical information disseminated and urgently needed before we were involved in war in 1939. For example, how to make standard boxes to be stored in minimum space so that they could be speedily made up into containers in emergency. Lists of stuff we should get together while the going was good and could have standing by. We had all that planned and they published the thing so that it was ready in good time. Then the Ministry of Works purchased large quantities of essential materials and made them available to museums and picture galleries for use in protecting the collections in war time.”
As war came nearer, “My job was to assist the director whose name was Sir John Fordyce. He planned the actual siteing of the objects when it became necessary to decentralize and I used to trudge around to help him in selecting sites and in deploying caretaker staff. [The objects] were taken to about 15 of the sort of major house in England – country houses. Decentralization we called it. Then after that there came what we called, “The Baedeker bombing.” The Germans started bombing these bigger houses. (for the coming war Baedeker is a well known guidebook.). That became a great source of worry and we couldn’t by this time get any of the good bomb-proof sites for they had all been acquired already by others. We were quite stumped. Someone went to Churchill for advice and he said, ‘Well, you might like to have a look at an underground limestone quarry near Bath. I’ll allocate a quarry and you can see that.’ “
When war came, Plenderleith was too old to be commissioned, so he was put in charge of the safety of the Museum. He said, “I had no staff. You see everyone who was there was in the army or engaged in war work. I had had my “whack” in the army in the First World War. Of course, I was now over age and of course much more useful at the museum than anywhere else. I knew the museum. It was a very complicated structure; acres of rooms. I had to train staff from other departments who didn’t know the museum. Where were the places you could get out if you were trapped? Where were the places where the most valuable things were kept? Where were the keys? … I used to arrange training emergencies you see on Sundays for example, a wooden hoop covered with paper like a drum and marked as an incendiary bomb – 500 pounds bomb, I would stick that somewhere in the museum and then I would blow off the alarm. These trainees were the salvage people, it was their job to find the so called bomb and take appropriate action. They were timed, you see. They had to report what action they had taken. Where was the nearest hydrant, because we had our own pressure hydrants all over the museum? They had to act as firemen too. We used to have that sort of emergency training and it served to be very valuable… I lived at the museum all the time. I was asked to go in and do this by Sir John Fordyce the Director to come in on the weekend that the war was declared, September 1939.”
When the U.S. entered the War, Craig Smyth was young and was commissioned in the Navy. He recalled how he became part of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives unit. “Well at the end of the war, the Allies knew that they were going to have to deal with the art objects in Germany. That A: which Germany owned, that which was stored off in various repositories and B: the works of art that the Nazis had taken from occupied countries. There was already a Monuments Art and Archives section of the United States army, but as the war drew to a close, I knew they were going to have more people in it. So they looked for people already in the armed services, who had some experience. And I was suddenly ordered to—in France and then into Germany, and then assigned there to establish a collecting point in Munich for works of art in that—in the Southern section of Germany, which had to be taken in from repositories. And above all, the Hitlerian loot, which was in the salt mines in Austria especially—but in other places too—so for a year, I was the head of this establishment and ran the Collecting Point and began repatriation of works of art to the countries that they were stolen from. And obviously—yet again—it was a question of taking emergency care of objects that were in bad condition. So I learned something about that in the process, but I also learned how hearty works of art can be. Some of them had been through an awful lot.”
A laboratory was established and staffed. Smyth recalled, “This was a thing that required in the end, a staff of—well, first and last—over a hundred people, which had to be Germans. We had to find people whom we thought we could trust. Which was not hard to do in fact. There were people who came out of the walls, who had stayed away from the Nazis. And among them, some really good people…. So yes, I was the one who made decisions, but very often there was somebody else who said, this has to be done. It was an odd thing that the amount of responsibility that came to the head of a Collecting Point like that, because the Allies were supposed to have a great international committee to decide about all such things and decide about what works of art went back to the countries from which they had been taken. And in the end, the head of the Collecting Point was the person to ask—so it was all very odd.”
While Smyth’s recollections were of the work that took place at the end of the war, Caroline Keck recalled her husband Sheldon Keck’s participation in an earlier, more dangerous event. She said, “In England by D-Day and in France a few weeks later, he [Sheldon] was almost lost during the debacle in the Heurtgen Forest. At long last he was assigned to the Arts Unit as a technical sergeant.” Sheldon and Walter Huchthausen, another member of the MFAA unit were together and accidently drove their jeep into a battle line of the Ruhr Pocket. “Walter’s body saved Sheldon’s life. Both fell from the jeep into foxholes. Later, our advancing troops found Sheldon. Walter had been killed instantly.”
Caught up in the glamour of our talk about great art, we sometimes forget that the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives personnel were part of the military and as such were exposed to all of the dangers of war.
MFAA_Officer_James_Rorimer_supervises_U.S._soldiers_recovering_looted_paintings_from_Neuschwanstein_Castle

When it rains, it pours

Sometimes weeks can pass by without an article in the general press related to conservation or the technical aspects of works of art. Then, there are the days when it seems that everyone is writing on those topics. The last two days of January 2014 and the first day of February 2014 were such days. On them, The New York Times published the following articles:
 “At Restored Landmark in Times Square, Mixing ‘Brash and Beautiful”, by David W. Dunlap, January 30, 2014
Salvage Drive for Rare Jewish Mural in Vermont”, by Jess Bidgood, January 31, 22014
Triage for Treasures After A Bomb Blast”, by Sarah Gauch, February 1, 2014
 
And, not to be left out, The Wall Street Journal published :
The Dynamic Duo Saving Pompeii”, by Jennifer Clark, January 31, 2014
Da Vinci Code Red: Restorations Spur Debate”, by Inti Landauro
 Plus, on January 31st, each newspaper published a review of the film, “Tim’s Vermeer”, a documentary about one man’s attempts to recreate Johannes Vermeer’s methods and techniques.

Monuments Men on the Silver Screen

The American Institute for Conservation of Historic & Artistic Works applauds The Monuments Men movie, whose cast depict some of those who served in the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program under the Civil Affairs and Military Government Sections of the Allied armies during World War II. This group of approximately 350 men and women protected and preserved millions of pieces of artwork, sculpture, and other cultural artifacts in Europe that had been stolen by the Nazis.
stoutclooneyPublic awareness of the heroic accomplishments of the Monuments Men is being raised by The Monuments Men movie, based on the book of the same title by Robert Edsel and being released in February. With big-name stars like George Clooney, Matt Damon, Hugh Bonneville, and Cate Blanchett in the film, we hope that while audiences enjoy the action and adventure, they will also leave the film with an appreciation for the importance of preserving cultural heritage. What few know today is that men and women continue in the footsteps of the Monument Men-protecting art for future generations.
The American Institute for Conservation (AIC) honors the Monuments Men, in addition to the profession that grew in the wake of their work. George Stout, depicted by George Clooney in the movie, was one of AIC’s founding members and a proponent of the creation of formal conservation training programs. Conservators today are highly skilled professionals, many of whom are willing and able to respond to human conflicts or natural disasters that threaten cultural property anywhere in the world. AIC members are experts in treating damaged art and educating owners and stewards of art in preservation practices. AIC’s Foundation manages a specially-trained group of experts in emergency preparedness and response (AIC-CERT), teams that respond at no cost to calls for assistance from collecting institutions and others in need following a disaster.
The Monuments Men movie creates an opportunity to highlight the incredible work that AIC members, our modern-day cultural heritage heroes, are performing on a daily basis. To connect the work happening now with the efforts of the Monuments Men in the past, AIC has created a social media campaign to help those interested in the film learn more about conservation projects and the conservators behind the work.
If you are active on social networking sites please use the movie’s hashtag #MonumentsMen, with another hashtag, #TodaysHeroes if you or your organization post on a conservation-related topic. Using both of these hashtags on microblogging and social networking platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc., will allow users interested in these topics to find out about the work that you do.