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| Part of the Ghent Altarpiece by Jan van Eyck (Wiki Commons) |
I saw The Monuments Men this morning. Clooney was Clooney, Matt Damon was Matt Damon, and John Goodman was John Goodman, and Bill Murray was sort of Bill Murray, all acting like soldier not-wannabes to rescue stolen artwork from the Nazis. There was one French actor, Jean Dujardin, one of only five French actors ever to win an Academy Award for his role in The Artist (I guess I'll have to see it!), but one who could give Clooney himself a run for his money as aging heart-throb.
Despite the box-office gold casting, it was a good film. Not a great one. Good. But it did highlight the perfidy of Nazi officers and the overweening hubris of their miserable excuse for a Fuhrer, Der Fuhrer. Little Dolph, failed artist, failed everything.
WWII Redux
I've been reading a lot of WWII books lately, some fiction, some factual. There was one otherwise forgettable book a while back about young British women working at Cadbury's during WWII. I noticed later that the book was sponsored by Cadbury; I guess they needed some good PR to overcome the rather diminished character of their chocolate after the takeover by American food conglomerate Kraft, Inc. (It could be worse; they could have sold out to Nestle, reputedly the world's largest food company by revenue, headquartered in Switzerland...which, in my current mind frame...seems too damn close to Deutschland. Plus one wonders how many Nazi-thieved artworks live today in Swiss vaults. But I digress....)I also read a book about Bletchley Park. What amazing feats those young and untried cipher-breakers did. Probably their work did shorten WWII by two years, simply by breaking the Nazi codes and never letting Dolph's Boys know their codes had been broken. This did, unfortunately, mean some Nazi targets were sacrificed so the commanders would not know their plans were known; shortly, the British command figured out they could keep the Nazis off-kilter by simply beefing up reconnaissance in the area the code breakers had revealed to be the next targets; then the Nazis thought the obvious recon and not code-breaking was responsible for their defeat.
I suspect that, despite the finding of five million--yes, FIVE MILLION--artworks stolen by the Nazis, there are an equal number left to find, or to prove definitively were destroyed by the Nazi horde. Spite, it would seem, was part and parcel of the Nazi mindset, not surrendering like gentlemen but pillaging like brutes.
WWII goes on and on and on....
Some of the remainder were found not too long ago in Austria, although the man whose house they were in claims they were not stolen, either from museums or Jewish collectors. Believe what you wish, but his father was an art dealer to Little Dolphie...and there is no honour among thieves.There are many great collections on the continent with questionable provenance. The Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, supposedly amassed by a family with Dutch and Hungarian ancestry, some connections in England and apparently great connections with the Nazi-tainted American Bush family (yes, THAT Bush family) is, I think, open to discussion. It is claimed much of the collection was purchased from embarrassed American millionaires after the 1929 stock market crash. Sure. Maybe. Who knows? Who will ever know? But taking at face value the provenance of any artwork in any private collection--in the aftermath of WWII's Nazi depredations on the artworks of the world--is simply being gullible. Provenance is not exact. Expert opinion is even less exact.
Film recreates life
What the real Monuments Men--about 350 of them, both men and women, and from half a dozen concerned nations--did to restore art stolen by the Nazis to their rightful owners is astounding. If they had done no more than recover the Ghent Altarpiece, 17 Renaissance panels of incredible beauty and value, they'd have done a good day's work.The Monuments Men deals with the theft and recovery of that altarpiece in a very dramatic way (I won't spoil it). But it is true that Little Dolphie ordered it seized; eventually, it was stored in the Altaussee salt mines to protect it from Allied bombing (Dolphie still expected to win, apparently, even as his 1000-year reich was being stillborn in a hail of bombings and routing of his soldiers). When the altarpiece was restored and returned to Belgium in a ceremony with the Belgian royal family, the French were not invited; the Vichy government had allowed the Nazis to take the painting in the first place.
It's a good movie, worth watching if only to assure one's self that there were, in the Allied nations, men and women of good will and deep convictions regarding the need to same humanity's artworks from brutalization, theft and destruction by the Nazis, and were willing to put their lives on the line to do it.
I salute Clooney, writer, producer and actor in The Monuments Men, for bringing it to public attention.
