Product Overview
From Follett
"This catalog accompanies the exhibition Paintings, Politics, and the Monuments Men: The Berlin Masterpieces in America on display at Cincinnati Art Museum, June 26, 2020-September 6, 2020"--Colophon.;Includes bibliographical references and index. "This exhibition catalogue focuses on the transfer of 202 paintings from the Berlin State Museums--including many of the greatest 15th to 18th-century works in the Gemaldegalerie--to the United States in the aftermath of World War II. In November 1945, the U.S. military government in Germany ordered that 'at least 200 German works of art of greatest importance' be sent to Washington for safekeeping. After two years in storage, they were exhibited at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., and in thirteen other cities across the country in 1948-49, before returning to Germany. The essays in the catalogue explore the controversy that surrounded this transfer of patrimony, as well as the reception of the paintings themselves in the United States. At the heart of the book is Walter I. Farmer, who served in the US Army as a Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives officer--a 'Monuments Man'--and as Director of the Wiesbaden Central Collecting Point (1945-46), which housed thousands of artworks recovered at the end of the war. Farmer is responsible for the Wiesbaden Manifesto, which protested the shipment of paintings to the United States and was signed by two-thirds of the Monuments officers active in Europe. Following the war, he was a resident of Cincinnati and stalwart supporter of the arts in the region for almost fifty years"--OCLC.
From the Publisher
This new volume tells the story of some of the paintings rescued by the the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) organization, the so-called "Monuments Men." In December 1945, 202 paintings, found in German salt mines 2,100 feet underground, where they had been hidden to escape the allied bombing of Berlin, were brought to the United States "for safe keeping" by the Department of the Army. They were exhibited in 1948 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, before some of them were sent on a whistle-stop tour of 13 US cities, despite furious opposition from museum directors, Gallery staff, the public, government officials, and a resolution from 98 leading art authorities demanding the immediate return of the works to Germany. All the paintings, examples of Flemish, Dutch, German, French, English, and Italian Schools, were from museums in Berlin, and had been found in April 1945, along with 100 tons of Reichsbank gold, by the special team of art historians and experts, seconded in the US army, and charged with locating and restituting works of art looted by the Nazis. This book is the first to consider the paintings themselves; it features 22 artworks that were in the original NGA exhibition, including four paintings on loan from Berlin, augmented by others from Cincinnati Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Washington, The Getty Museum, Miami University (Oxford, OH), and the Taft Museum.