In December 1942, Stone took their proposition to President Franklin D. Roosevelt who, in turn, created the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in Europe. Later the Commission's scope was expanded to include all war areas. He appointed Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts as chairman; hence, the new group became known as the Roberts Commission.
Behind the Scenes: The Roberts Commission at the National Gallery of Art
Throughout the war, the Gallery provided offices and staff for the Roberts Commission and was deeply involved in its activities: Finley served as vice-chairman and de facto head; the Gallery's Secretary and General Counsel Huntington Cairns was secretary; Chief Curator (and Finley's eventual successor as director) John Walker was a special advisor.
Edith Standen and Rose Valland with art to be restituted to France, 1946 May / unidentified photographer. James J. Rorimer papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
In its nascent days, the Commission sought to formalize the MFAA program within the War Department and to recommend would-be Monuments Men. Later the Commission sought to feed information to military strategists, including the locations of churches with spires tall enough to imperil Allied bombers and targets that should be spared because of their cultural importance.
True stories from the Frontline: Lieutenant Charles P. Parkhurst and WAC Captain Edith Standen
The MFAA's officers bravely followed frontline troops into war zones. Among them were Lt. Charles P. Parkhurst, Jr., the Gallery's former registrar and eventual assistant director, and Women's Army Corps (WAC) Capt. Edith Standen, secretary to the Widener Collection, the great gift of donor Joseph P. Widener that had only recently been installed in the museum's galleries.
"The finding [of looted art] was either easy or accidental, " Parkhurst told a Gallery oral historian 45 years after his service in the MFAA. "Usually we had clues from shippers, from local residents who said, 'well, there's something funny about that castle.' "
Chasing one such rumor, Parkhurst happened upon a full-sized cast of Rodin's Burghers of Calais (1884–95), which German soldiers en route to Baden had been forced to abandon on a mountainside. Parkhurst continued up the mountain to the castle at its peak and found room upon room of plundered art. "The owner of the castle gave me a cup of tea and a list of the objects. [He] said 'I've been wondering how long it would take you guys to get here!'"
For her part, Edith Standen dug up an antique bronze cannon with her own bare hands. The Nazis had taken the priceless mortar from Paris — where it had been since Napoleon captured it more than a century before — and buried it in Stuttgart shortly before the Allies arrived. "I was delighted to [have been] able to give the cannon back, " she later said, though the gesture was tinged with controversy. Some felt that the cannon should remain in Stuttgart because that was where it had been cast in the late 16th century. "Of course [the idea] was rubbish, " she said. "It had been taken from the Musée de l'Armée. It went back to the Musée de l'Armée."
Similar disputes followed, particularly in the wake of the War Department's decision to send 202 masterpieces from Berlin museums to the National Gallery of Art for safekeeping. The paintings included works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Tintoretto, El Greco, Daumier, and Botticelli. Amid murmurings that the Gallery was claiming these masterpieces as the spoils of war, Finley conferred with Stone, who approved the measure. "If the government asks us to take care of these paintings, " he said. "We must do it. It is a duty. "
The 202 — as the Berlin paintings were popularly called — arrived in Washington in 1945 under military escort and remained there until 1948. The Gallery put the 202 on view with very little ceremony, but within hours, visitors flooded in. For 40 days, the line often wrapped around the block. The exhibition drew in 964,970 people, an unprecedented number at the time. Everyone, it seemed, was talking about these works or trying to catch a glimpse, from President Harry S. Truman, who dropped in twice, to Clara Bryant Ford (the wife of Henry Ford) and John D. Rockefeller. All 202 works were returned to Germany: the most fragile paintings went directly back, while the others were sent on a tour of a dozen cities first.
A Continuing Legacy
The Roberts Commission also worked with the Office of Strategic Services to create a special unit to investigate and document Nazi art appropriation. Just as Hitler's officers took meticulous pains to record their own wartime activities, MFAA officers and the Roberts Commission collected archival records of Nazi acts of aggression and Allied efforts to protect and return stolen art.
From its first meeting in August 1943 to its last in June 1946, the Roberts Commission upheld the spirit of the National Gallery of Art's mission and its founding benefactor, Andrew W. Mellon, who had funded construction of the West Building, donated his personal collection, and created a sizeable endowment to secure the Gallery's future. As Roosevelt so eloquently said upon accepting Mellon's gift to the nation:
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