[MSN] G.I. Joes to the Rescue of Rembrandts and Raphaels.

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December 19, 2006
G.I. Joes to the Rescue of Rembrandts and Raphaels 
By RANDY KENNEDY
Through the centuries many people have been haunted by the work of Raphael,
but probably few have been haunted in quite the same way as Bernard Taper.

Even now, at 88, he says he finds a certain painting continuing to surface
in his memory. It is an elegant portrait of a young man that Mr. Taper knew
in 1947 only from a black-and-white photograph he had been given, much in
the way a detective is handed a snapshot of a missing person.

At that time, in the ruinous aftermath of World War II in Europe, the
Raphael portrait was one of the most prominent masterpieces to have
disappeared, but it had considerable company. Thousands of paintings,
sculptures and artifacts that had been looted by the Nazis — many of them
bound for Hitler’s long-envisioned Führer Museum in Linz, Austria, his
boyhood home, or confiscated for the collection of Hermann Goering, Hitler’s
chief art-looting rival — remained missing at war’s end. 

Mr. Taper, then an Army lieutenant charged with tracking down the Raphael,
spent months interrogating jailed Nazis and trying to connect the dots, but
he never found the painting, which had been taken from a family museum in
Krakow, Poland.

“I still dream about it sometimes,” he said in a recent interview. “I wonder
if it’s out there.”

The story might sound like grist for a Dan Brown novel or a Steven Spielberg
treatment. But the efforts of Allied officers and soldiers like Mr. Taper to
save and repatriate stolen treasures during and after the war is a chapter
of World War II history still not particularly well known. Even during the
war their work — when compared with saving lives and preserving ways of life
— was sometimes discounted. Some members of the military referred to these
soldiers as “Venus fixers,” a term with more than a hint of the effete.

But the accomplishments of these soldiers, better known as the Monuments
Men, are finally starting to come into sharper focus. “Rescuing Da Vinci,” a
lavishly illustrated book devoted to them, with dozens of pictures newly
unearthed from archives, has just been published by Robert M. Edsel, a
retired Texas oilman. Mr. Edsel, 49, became obsessed with the story several
years ago and even established a research office in Dallas, his hometown,
with the goal of telling it better. 

This month, in large part because of his work, Congress passed a resolution
honoring the Monuments Men (whose number also included some women and
civilians), saying that the value of their work “cannot be overstated and
set a moral precedent” for the preservation of culture.

Mr. Edsel, who came late to an appreciation of art history, said in a recent
interview that he became aware of the vast art-rescue story when he was
living in Florence in the late 1990s and read “The Rape of Europa,” an
award-winning book by Lynn H. Nicholas that chronicles the Third Reich’s
pillaging of museums, churches and private collections. 

The book goes into considerable detail about the formation and work of what
became the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section of the United States
military, some of whose members had art backgrounds and would go on to
become civilian art-world luminaries, like James J. Rorimer, a future
director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Lincoln Kirstein, then a
lowly private but later a founder of the New York City Ballet. Most of the
recovery effort was American, but soldiers from more than a dozen countries
also participated.

Mr. Edsel quickly became frustrated, he said, as he combed through other
World War II history books and found surprisingly little about what he
thought was a gripping story of high-culture derring-do. “To me,” he said,
“it was like, wow, you wrote a western and left out John Wayne. I couldn’t
believe it.”

Armed with the kind of bluster and directness that made him wealthy in the
oil business, Mr. Edsel sought out Ms. Nicholas “pretty much cold, ” he
recalls. He asked for her guidance in putting together a book devoted
exclusively to the Monuments Men, a book he eventually published himself, he
said, because he got “absolutely no interest” from commercial publishers. 

He paid researchers who set to work in Washington, Moscow, Munich and other
cities. Even as this work was under way, he said, he knew that professionals
in the art world like Nancy Yeide, curator of records at the National
Gallery of Art in Washington, whom he approached about finding pictures,
wondered whether he was just a well-meaning dilettante.

“I could tell that she didn’t know whether to trust me, whether to think I
was a kook, whether it was like some vanity project,” he said.

But Mr. Edsel kept at it, putting $2.5 million of his own money toward the
project. Over time he also became a co-producer of a documentary based on
Ms. Nicholas’s book, which is now making the rounds of film festivals. He is
planning exhibitions of the photographs and archival material featured in
the book and is now crisscrossing the country trying to find and
interviewing the few living members of the Monuments Men squad, like Mr.
Taper.

“The problem is, we’re in a race with time now,” Mr. Edsel said in a recent
interview in New York.

The urgency of that race was underlined last month by the death of S. Lane
Faison Jr., 98, an art-rescue officer who worked for the Office of Strategic
Services, which helped the Monuments Men. Mr. Faison later became a renowned
art professor at Williams College whose students went on to become directors
and curators at many prominent American museums.

Mr. Edsel interviewed Mr. Faison before his death and tracked down several
other former officers who helped recover thousands of paintings and
artifacts. One, Harry Ettlinger, now 80, joined the Monuments, Fine Arts and
Archives in 1945 and was assigned to sort out the contents of a vast
makeshift storehouse in Heilbronn, Germany. It was a salt mine where the
Nazis had hidden thousands of crates of loot, including all the stained
glass removed from the Strasbourg Cathedral in France, which Mr. Ettlinger
helped return. 

In Mr. Edsel’s book Mr. Ettlinger can be seen in a crisp black-and-white
photograph that could serve as the inspiration for a climactic movie scene:
he and an officer are standing deep in the mine, staring in awe at a
Rembrandt self-portrait that has just been raised from its crate.

But in a telephone interview Mr. Ettlinger said that much of the work done
by the Monuments Men was not particularly cinematic. It was the tedious but
immense job of archiving, translating documents, collating records and
extracting needles from thousands of haystacks to ensure that works returned
to their rightful homes. And it was frustrating: for every paper trail that
led to a restitution, there were many more that led nowhere, and priceless
works that were never found.

Of course, in the midst of the paperwork, there was a little wartime drama
every so often down in the mine shafts, Mr. Ettlinger recalled.

“I remember once in a hallway I saw a doorway that was bricked in and no one
knew what was behind it,” he said. He ordered someone to find out. “And lo
and behold it was nitroglycerin, which was about to come along and blow us
all to kingdom come, never mind the art.”

Mr. Edsel said the more he delved into the stories of the men, the more
amazed he became at how little Americans seem to know about it, especially
in an era with a newfound devotion to the Greatest Generation.

So, he was asked, is a feature film somewhere down the road?

He smiled and, in his best Texas dare-me voice, said not to rule it out.

“This has got heroes,” he said. “It’s got buried treasure. It’s got untold
stories. It’s got everything. You want excitement? We’ve got it in spades
right here.”

http://www.nytimes.com/