"Great works of art … belong so obviously to all who love them — they are so clearly the property not of their single owners but of all men everywhere. The true collectors are the collectors who understand this — the collectors of great paintings who feel that they can never truly own, but only gather and preserve for all who love them, the treasures that they have found. "
Editor's Note: The New York Times published an article, Not All Monuments Men Were Men on Sunday February 2, 2014
Edith A. Standen: A "Monuments Man" in Germany 1945-1947, from the National Archives and Records Administration. Complete post:
This is the fifth in an ongoing series of posts on real-life Monuments Men by Dr. Greg Bradsher. See also his posts on Sir Charles Leonard Woolley, Walter J. Huchthausen, Seymour J. Pomrenze, and Mason Hammond.
The forthcoming movie, The Monuments Men, has focused great attention on the Monuments Men (and women) and their work during and after World War II. Of course the movie cannot tell the story of the over 300 individuals involved in Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFA&A) work, so focuses on three: George Stout, James Rorimer, and Rose Valland, played by George Clooney, Matt Damon, and Cate Blanchett respectively. Over the course of the next two months, I thought it would be illustrative to discuss some of the lesser known individuals.
This post focuses on Edith A. Standen, and is the fifth in the series of blogs on the Monuments Men.
Edith A. Standen was born at Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada in 1905, the daughter of Robert Standen, a British Army officer stationed in Nova Scotia, and an American mother, granddaughter to Nathan Appleton, a Massachusetts textile mill founder. She was raised in England and Ireland, and received her B.A. in English from Oxford in 1926. In 1928, she immigrated to the United States, and settled in Boston where her mother’s family lived. She began working for the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, which had been founded in 1910 by her uncle, William Sumner Appleton. During the winter of 1928-1929, she took Paul Sachs museum curatorship course at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University. In 1929 she was hired as art secretary to collector Joseph Early Widener at his Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, estate (outside Philadelphia). She retained that position until Widener transferred his collection to the National Gallery of Art in 1942. That year she became an American citizen and the following year she joined the Women’s Army Corps, and was stationed with the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) in Ohio.
Monuments Men: On the Frontline to Save Europe's Art, 1942–1946
February 7 to April 20, 2014
Washington, D.C. at the Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery, Smithsonian
Voices of the Monuments Men
Audio excerpts from the Archives’ oral history interviews.
See more: oral history interview podcasts
Stanton Catlin on Rose Valland (4:24 )
S. Lane Faison on the O.S.S. (8:36 )
Walker Hancock on locating looted art (24:01 )
Thomas Carr Howe on restitution efforts (34:54 )
Charles Parkhurst on the Weisbaden Manifesto (14:03)
Andrew Carnduff Ritchie on the MFAA (13:00 )
George Stout on conditions in the salt mines (44:40 )
Otto Wittmann on the Art Looting Investigation Unit and postwar restitution work:
Join us for gallery talks about the exhibition: March 13 and 28, at 1:00 p.m.
During World War II, an unlikely team of soldiers was charged with identifying and protecting European cultural sites, monuments, and buildings from Allied bombing. Officially named the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) Section, this U.S. Army unit included art curators, scholars, architects, librarians, and archivists from the U.S. and Britain. They quickly became known as The Monuments Men.
Towards the end of the war, their mission changed to one of locating and recovering works of art that had been looted by the Nazis. The Monuments Men uncovered troves of stolen art hidden across Germany and Austria — some in castles, others in salt mines. They rescued some of history’s greatest works of art.
Among the holdings of the Archives of American Art are the papers of Monuments Men George Leslie Stout, James J. Rorimer, Walker Hancock, Thomas Carr Howe, S. Lane Faison, Walter Horn, and Otto Wittman. These personal archives tell a fascinating story.
Related blog posts:
“Monuments Men in Japan: Discoveries in the George Leslie Stout papers”
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