When the Monuments Men pushed back against the U.S. to protect priceless art

by NORA McGREEVY

The U.S. Third Army discovers Édouard Manet’s The Winter Garden in the salt mines at Merkers on April 25, 1945. PHOTO/Courtesy of National Archives at College Park, MD

It may have been the first blockbuster art exhibition of modern times.

In late 1945, as Europe took its first steps toward rebuilding post-World War II, the United States government shipped 202 paintings by famed artists—including Botticelli, Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Vermeer—from Germany to Washington, D.C. Beginning in 1948, the works were exhibited at the National Gallery of Art before traveling to major museums in 13 other cities, including Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, Detroit and San Francisco.

All told, a record-breaking 2.5 million Americans saw the exhibition during its cross-country tour. But while audiences were enthusiastic, many onlookers also expressed outrage: Just a few years earlier, Allied forces had rescued these paintings from a salt mine in central Germany where the Nazis had housed thousands of evacuated artistic treasures.

The U.S. returned the artworks to Germany in 1949. But officials’ decision to transport and tour the German-owned paintings (they had previously resided in the collections of the State Museums of Berlin) around the country was “morally dubious,” curator Peter Jonathan Bell tells the Art Newspaper’s Martin Bailey. Now, in a new exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum (CAM), co-curators Bell and Kristi A. Nelson unpack the complicated intersections between art and politics in the post-war era by tracing the history of the so-called “Berlin 202.”

Paintings, Politics and the Monuments Men: The Berlin Masterpieces in America” opens today and runs through October 3. Per a statement, the show will not travel anywhere else. Four of the original “202” are featured, including Sandro Botticelli’s Ideal Portrait of a Lady (1475–80), on loan from Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, and Fra Filippo Lippi’s Madonna and Child (1440), on loan from the National Gallery in D.C., as Susan Stamberg reports for NPR.

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