'Monuments Men': a disappointing tribute

From time immemorial, men have sacrificed everything for victory — certainly art did not stand in their way. Most of ancient literature, including hundreds of classical Greek works, was lost when the great library of Alexandria was destroyed. The Parthenon was partially destroyed when the Turks used it to store gunpowder during an attack by the Venetians. Thousands of other great works of art have been lost due to war. They can never be retrieved.

During WWII, the danger to art was even greater, not only because of the devastation caused from aerial bombardments, but because the Nazis were intent on looting whatever they could and destroying whatever they couldn’t. To stop them, we created a group commonly known as the Monuments Men.

The birthplace of the Monuments Men was right here in Philadelphia. They were the brainchild of Owen J. Roberts, a Philadelphia lawyer. A graduate of Germantown Academy and the University of Pennsylvania, he became an assistant district attorney and soon gained a national reputation as a great investigator of corruption. In the 1920s, he investigated the Watergate of that time, the Teapot Dome scandal. In 1930, he was appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States, where he served for the next 15 years. Roberts was the swing vote on the court, and his vote in favor of New Deal programs saved the country from undergoing a constitutional crisis from which it might not have survived.

Roberts was never an ideologue. While he would vote for New Deal programs that changed the structure of government in America, he also voted against the government’s forced internment of Japanese-Americans. It was ironic that he was the man President Roosevelt picked to investigate the Pearl Harbor attack in the first Roberts Commission. And when FDR needed someone to save the art of Western Civilization from the Nazis and the “dogs of war,” again, he turned to a man whom he trusted.

In 1943, the Allies were preparing to invade Europe. Any path chosen by the Allies was certain to include cities containing bastions of great Western Art: Paris, Rheims, Cologne, Ghent. While priority was given to military objectives, FDR wanted to preserve as much art as was possible in the circumstances. So, he turned to Justice Roberts. The second Roberts Commission led to the establishment of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) section of the Army or as its members became known — the Monuments Men.

Recruits for the 345 Monuments Men (and women) came from all parts of the art world — and beyond:

• Lincoln Kirstein was a cofounder (along with George Balanchine) of the School of American Ballet.

• Gordon O. Chadwick was a prominent New York architect who had apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright.

• Joseph Paul Gardner was already a decorated veteran of WWI, a former ballet master, and a museum director.

• James B. Larwood was a former newspaperman who owned his own public relations firm.

• Everett Parker (Bill) Lesley Jr. was a professor of classical literature at the University of Minnesota.

• Mary Regan Queesenberry was a high school art teacher.

And one recruit came from Philadelphia.

Philadelphia connection

In 1941, Walker Hancock was teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He was director of its sculpture department and had a blossoming career as one of America’s premier sculptors. Hancock spent his days helping young artists find their style while creating a style of his own: He began a series of commissions of monumental works that eventually would lead to his most acclaimed work, the Angel of the Resurrection (bronze, 1950–52), Pennsylvania Railroad World War II Memorial, 30th Street Station, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

But in 1941, Hancock, along with the rest of America, slept while a firestorm raged across Europe and Asia, a firestorm that would streak across two oceans and engulf them on December 7, 1941.

Although Hancock was 41 years old, he was drafted in 1942 (the draft age was 45 at the time). Initially, he was assigned to create an Air Corps medal for valor but his war contribution changed when the army discovered his fluency in Italian. He was reassigned to the newly constructed Pentagon, where he did intelligence work. Even though he rose to the rank of Captain, he was not happy pushing papers while working in the largest office building in the world.

When Walker Hancock heard about the MFAA, he joined up and was sent to Europe.

Before D-Day, Hancock spent his time drafting a manual to be used by Allied army commanders in Europe to help identify and preserve works of art. Then he followed the troops onto the beaches of Normandy and began the dangerous work of saving the art of western Europe not only from the Nazis but also from his fellow soldiers as the war raged across Europe, destroying cities and towns, castles and private homes, cathedrals and museums filled with art.

Hancock was a realistic sculptor and a realistic soldier. He knew that the art he strove to save was in danger not only because the Nazis were stealing it and destroying what they could not steal, but also because soldiers, all soldiers, were unconcerned with preserving anything but their own lives. His job was to find the art and store it away in a safe place until the war was over and it could be returned to its rightful owners. In the midst of a modern war, it was as tough, as perilous, and as thankless a job as ever there was. He had to fight not only the Nazis but the bureaucracy and the hopeless muddle of the U.S. Army.

A tribute unworthy of its subject

I wish I could say that the movie The Monuments Men is worthy of its subject and of the people who strove and died to save the art of western Europe. Instead, The Monuments Men is an action-comedy whose action is dull and whose comedy is formulaic.

While the movie begins with that worn-out title card, “based on a true story,” the names of all the actual Monuments Men have been changed. More importantly, their individual personalities have been painted over with a gloss of sentimentality. Their own art is mentioned briefly, if at all.

In Walker Hancock’s case, we see Walter Garfield (John Goodman) sculpting a huge figure as Captain Frank Stokes (George Clooney) walks into his studio to recruit him. That is the last reference to his calling. The same introduction is used for each Monuments Man: James Granger (Matt Damon) is seen restoring a fresco, Richard Campbell (Bill Murray) is atop one of the buildings he designed, Jean Claude Clermont (Jean Dujardin) is painting a pin-up on the side of a bomber, and Preston Savitz (Bob Balaban) is rehearsing a ballet. A Brit, Donald Jefferies (Hugh Bonneville), is signed up, and we are told he had a drinking problem and that seems to be his qualification. After that, the movie forgets about their art and their individuality. Except for the accents, each of these actors could have played any of the other characters.

The movie is constructed as a series of incidents, some of which are meant to invoke our sympathy with these aging soldier-artists and some of which are meant to be funny, showing us these very unsoldierly artists trying to adapt to the requirements of being soldiers in a war zone. One example will tell you the formula: Walter Garfield comments, “Basic training isn’t so bad — just a lot of crawling through mud while teenagers fire blanks over your head.” Beat. Donald Jefferies responds, “Well, Walter, you’re half right. Those are teenagers, but they’re not blanks that they are firing over your head.” Bada-bing!

There is the compulsory scene in which Capt. Stokes explains why it is so important that they save the art, telling his men that what lasts is what people make and that if the art is not saved, all that will be left are the ashes. Oh wait, he makes that speech about four times. In the final scene of the movie, the new president, Truman, asks Stokes if he thought saving the art was worth the loss of lives. There is a dramatic pause. Stokes looks soulful and responds — no, you guess what he says.

No detail tells us who these artists-stuck-in-war are or why we should care about them. We are given no clue what motivates these men to face death for art. And yes, they are all men except for Cate Blanchett, who plays the director of the Jeu de Paume, again, “based on a real person.”

A more realistic portrayal

Her character reminded me of a film made almost 50 years ago that tells the same story — saving art from the Nazis — but from the French point of view. In John Frankenheimer’s movie The Train, Labiche (Burt Lancaster) leads a group of French resistance railway workers who are asked to sacrifice their lives to stop a German train laden with paintings stolen from the Jeu de Paume. At the beginning of the film, the resistance railway workers want to know why they should waste their lives to save art. Mle. Villard, the Jeu de Paume director, tells them:

They wouldn't be wasted! Excuse me, I know that's a terrible thing to say. But those paintings are part of France. The Germans want to take them away. They've taken our land, our food, they live in our houses, and now they're trying to take our art. This beauty, this vision of life, born out of France, our special vision, our trust. . .we hold it in trust, don't you see, for everyone? This is our pride, what we create and hold for the world. There are worse things to risk your life for than that.

Now that’s a speech! But The Train, while not ‘based on a true story’ is, more importantly, true to life, so the speech doesn’t motivate the resistance workers to sacrifice their lives for art, as most speeches don’t get anyone to sacrifice anything. What happens instead is that a grandfatherly railroad worker, alone, futilely tries to stop the art train and is brutally executed for trying. That senseless act of brutality to one of their own makes stopping the train personal to the other railway workers — it’s that personal touch that The Monuments Men lacks.

This impersonal quality is in every frame of the movie and even in its soundtrack. Every important speech is underscored with tinkling sounds that resemble nothing so much as butterscotch poured over chocolate éclairs, while every battle scene is accompanied by a machine gun beat rip-off on The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

The work goes on

Walker Hancock and his fellow artist soldiers deserve better — and get it. Their memory is better served by the work of The Monuments Men Foundation, a nonprofit whose purpose is to find lost works of art stolen in WWII and return them to their rightful owners. Their website serves as an online history of the men and women who served in the MFAA and as an educational tool: educators can purchase an entire lesson plan about WWII, Nazism, art, and the battle to find the stolen or lost art that continues to the present.

There is an incredible story to be told about the men and women who, perhaps for the first time in the history of warfare, went into battle to preserve rather than to destroy. They used their common asset, their imagination, to save some of the great art of the world from being a calamitous, culture-sized casualty of war.

If only this film’s creators had a touch of that imagination.

For Robert Zaller's review of The Monuments Men, click here.

For Naomi Orwin's essay on the ultimate worth of art, which includes a consideration of The Monument Men, click here.