World War II – Illicit Cultural Property

The Kennedy Center: The name on the front and the Art Inside

The recent Kennedy Center controversy has mostly been told as a story about a name. That is understandable. A national cultural institution created as a living memorial to John F. Kennedy was, for a time, refashioned into another surface for presidential branding. The litigation over that move has now produced an important result: a federal judge has ruled that the Center cannot be renamed without Congress, and the institution has been ordered to remove references to “Trump Kennedy Center” from its official materials and signage.

But the more revealing heritage story may not be the name on the front of the building. It may be what was happening inside.

Josef Palermo, the Kennedy Center’s former curator of visual arts and special programming, has described a chaotic year inside the institution: artist cancellations, shrinking audiences, staff firings, leadership turnover, and a political takeover grafted onto an institution that had long served as one of the nation’s central cultural stages. His account is especially striking because Palermo was responsible for the artworks in the building. Shortly after the announcement of a planned two-year closure, Palermo says Richard Grenell instructed him to “get rid of everything” in the permanent collection because new art would be needed after the reopening. Palermo says that if donors did not want to pay for the removal of works, they could be auctioned or given away.

That allegation is not a theft. It should not be described as one. But it may be something nearly as revealing: administrative looting applied to America’s cultural heritage.

The Kennedy Center is not simply a theater complex. Since its opening in 1971, it has also functioned as a site of cultural diplomacy. Palermo’s account lays out the quieter history of the Center’s rooms. The Israeli Lounge, the Chinese Lounge, the Circles Lounge (formerly the Russian Lounge until the invasion of Ukraine), and the African Room were not just donor hospitality spaces. They were material expressions of international relationships, memory, and diplomacy. The Israeli Lounge, Palermo notes, was decorated with support from the Israeli government as a gift to the American people and in tribute to President Kennedy, celebrating the connection between Judaism and music. Other rooms similarly gave physical form to the Kennedy Center’s role as a venue where culture, diplomacy, and national memory overlapped.

That is what makes the reported treatment of those spaces so troubling. Palermo describes a sudden decision to sell sponsorships of the Center’s lounges. The Circles Lounge became the SyberJet Lounge. The African Room was transformed into “A Tribute to America’s Intelligence Community.” Among the items taken down from the former African Room were handmade textiles, a wooden sculpture donated by Ghana to represent African grief after Kennedy’s assassination, and carved doors made from centuries-old wood depicting Yoruba village scenes.

In 1973, the Nigerian carver Lamidi Olonade Fakeye was commissioned by the Nations of Africa to carve a pair of doors and transom that would then be given as a gift to John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to be installed into the African Lounge. The doors were made from the wood of a single, 700 year old tree and depict Yoruban village scenes.http://www.schuettinger.com/kennedy-center-african-lounge-doors-and-transom.html

Those carved doors deserve more than a passing reference. In 1973, the Nigerian carver Lamidi Olonade Fakeye was commissioned by the Nations of Africa to carve a pair of doors and a transom as a gift to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, to be installed in the African Lounge. The doors were made from the wood of a single 700-year-old tree and depict Yoruba village scenes. They were not just decorations. They were a material act of cultural diplomacy, made for a specific place, with a specific commemorative purpose.

A current Kennedy Center staffer told The Atlantic that these objects were placed in the building’s archives for safekeeping during construction. That may prove true. It may also be that the works are carefully inventoried, preserved, and returned to meaningful public display. But the episode still reveals a deep failure of care: diplomatic rooms became naming opportunities, and cultural objects became obstacles to grift.

The legal case over the name gives the controversy a useful constitutional and statutory frame. Representative Joyce Beatty, an ex officio trustee of the Kennedy Center, challenged the attempted renaming, arguing that Congress named the institution and that the board could not unilaterally attach Trump’s name to it. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper agreed that the name change was unauthorized without congressional action and ordered the removal of Trump’s name from official materials and signage. The court also preliminarily blocked the board’s planned two-year closure, while making clear that needed capital repair work could continue and that the board could revisit closure only after a proper, prudent decision-making process. So the formal legal holding is not about the art collection. It is about statutory authority, governance, and the limits of a board’s power. But those are precisely the issues that matter for cultural-object stewardship. Who has authority over public cultural institutions? What duties follow from that authority? And what happens when trusteeship is treated as a political prize rather than a public trust?

The temptation is to reach for the most dramatic analogies: Nazi looting, wartime plunder, occupied museums. But that is not quite right here. The Kennedy Center is not Kherson, and Washington is not an occupied city. No invading army packed paintings into trucks. The better comparison is not armed conflict but institutional capture.

In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s government, until its recent defeat, offered a contemporary model of how cultural life can be reshaped without soldiers or bonfires. Cultural institutions can be redirected through appointments, funding, foundations, grant-making, and ideological management. Museums, theaters, universities, and arts bodies do not need to be destroyed to be controlled. They can be made to understand which histories, artists, and institutions will receive support, and which will be shunned.

Turkey offers another version of the same pattern. Recent changes there have raised concerns that the central government can seize historic properties from local authorities, including opposition-run cultural sites in Istanbul. Again, the issue is not battlefield plunder. It is a legal and administrative machinery that turns heritage into a lever of political control.

The same pattern is visible in the administration’s treatment of the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian is not just another museum network. It is the country’s great national cultural institution: a sprawling public trust of museums, research centers, collections, archives, and the National Zoo. Yet the administration’s March 2025 executive order treated it less as an independent cultural and scholarly institution than as a messaging problem to be corrected. The order directed Vice President J.D. Vance, in his role as a Smithsonian Regent, to work to remove “improper ideology” from Smithsonian museums and programs. It also directed Vance and the Office of Management and Budget to work with Congress to condition future appropriations so that federal funds would not support exhibits or programs deemed inconsistent with the administration’s preferred account of American history. That is an effort to make the nation’s cultural memory bend toward the uses of the party in power.

The broader danger is not only that art might be lost, damaged, auctioned, or hidden away. The danger is that a public cultural institution can be treated as a trophy of political victory. Rename the building. Purge the leadership and call it renovation.

None of this requires calling the Kennedy Center episode a theft. The more precise word is capture. Or perhaps administrative looting: the use of lawful-looking authority to strip an institution of its independence, expertise, history, and public purpose.

The Kennedy Center story matters because it shows how cultural heritage can be damaged in stages. First the name changes. Then the staff changes. Then the donors change. Then the rooms change. Then the objects come down. By the time anyone asks where the collection went, the institution may already have been remade.

I do not want to live in a country where public cultural institutions become trophies of political victory. I want to live in a republic, where museums, monuments, theaters, archives, and collections are held in trust for the public, not redecorated to flatter whoever happens to hold power. My family did not send men to Europe in World War II so that, eighty years later, public institutions could be treated as ornaments for a strongman’s vanity. That is not the republic they fought for. And it is not the republic we should accept: a republic cannot preserve its heritage if every public institution is available for capture by the next man who wants his name on every building.

Bibliography

Josef Palermo, “What I Saw Inside the Kennedy Center ($),” The Atlantic (Apr. 16, 2026).

Beatty v. Trump, No. 25-cv-4480, Memorandum Opinion (D.D.C. May 29, 2026).

Steven Sloan & Meg Kinnard, “Kennedy Center moves to erase Trump references after judge said they were illegally added,” Associated Press (June 4, 2026).

Andrew Chung, “Kennedy Center to remove Trump name after court decision,” Reuters (June 5, 2026).

Schuettinger Conservation Services, “Kennedy Center African Lounge Doors and Transom.”

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, “African Lounge.”

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, “The Kennedy Center: A Historical and Artistic Tour,” Google Arts & Culture.

Executive Order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” The White House (Mar. 27, 2025).

Veronika Molnar, “Dismantling Orbán’s 16-Year Grip on Hungary’s Art World,” Hyperallergic (Apr. 17, 2026).

Artistic Freedom Initiative, “Systematic Suppression: Hungary’s Arts & Culture in Crisis,” Jan. 2026.

Richard Unwin, “‘The extremely happy part of the crowd’: Hungarian arts figures hope for change after 16 years of Orbán rule,” The Art Newspaper (Apr. 16, 2026).

Ayla Jean Yackley, “Turkey’s heritage power grab: new law threatens Istanbul’s opposition-run cultural sites,” The Art Newspaper (Feb. 20, 2026).

Supreme Court to Hear Case involving Nazi-era sale of the Guelph Treasure

The United States Supreme Court has granted certiorari and will weigh in on a Nazi-era dispute over artworks, involving the sale of a collection of medieval artworks known as the Guelph Treasure. The collection is described as something out of a film: gold, silver, and jeweled liturgical objects from the Church of St. Blaine in Brunswick, Germany. Many of the objects were crafted in what is today present-day Germany, but other objects came from the Italian peninsula or the Byzantine empire.

Here’s a quick background on the dispute. The Welfenschatz, or Guelph trove is currently in the possession of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and has been claimed by successors of art dealers who were fleeing the holocaust. These objects were originally housed in the cathedral in Braunschweig, owned by the House of Guelph. During the First World War, the House of Guelph lost reign over Braunschweig and in the 1920s the pieces were sold to a consortium of Frankfurt art dealers, including 82 items in 1929. Later in 1935 the Prussian state, led by Hermann Goering, bought the remaining pieces of the treasure in what the claimants allege was a “genocidal taking”. In 2014, a German government commission found that the transaction was not a forced sale.

The claimants then brought suit in the United States. The current possessors, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation have defended that action on the grounds that as a Foreign Government, they are immune from suit in the United States under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. Claimants have argued that the actions of the Prussian government fall under one of the exceptions to that law, that the actions of the Prussians was a violation of International law, namely genocide. The Supreme Court has agreed to consider two issues:

Whether suits concerning property taken as part of the Holocaust are within the expropriation exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA). This is the legal treasure which gives the claimants a jurisdictional foothold to sue a foreign government in the United States, something that ordinarily is not allowed under American law.
Whether a foreign state may assert a comity defense that is outside the FSIA’s “comprehensive set of legal standards governing claims of immunity in every civil action against a foreign state.” In essence the appellants are attempting to use the idea that Courts should refrain from entering into the realm of foreign policy in a broader way. At least that is how I understand that issue.

Nicholas O’Donnell, an attorney for the claimants stated:

[W]e are grateful for the opportunity to address the Supreme Court on these important questions about holding Germany accountable for its Nazi-looted art. A 1935 transfer from German Jews to notorious art looter and war criminal Hermann Goering is the quintessential crime against international law, regardless of Germany’s Holocaust distortion in defending this case. Germany seeks to eliminate recourse for Nazi-looted art and the Court will have the chance to answer this question of critical importance for Holocaust victims.

Being on the side of the possessors and having to defend that possession by justifying the acquisition by such an evil historical figure as Hermann Goering cannot be an easy legal argument. The Court will likely hear the case in the Fall, likely via telephone if the never-ending pandemic continues to outwit the hapless policy makers here in the United States. The case could impact the future of Nazi-era claims, and claims for wrongdoing more generally during similar periods of atrocity. The Court will also hear a case involving Hungarian nationals who lost property during World War II.

Stewart Ain, Supreme Court to Hear Guelph Treasure Case, Jewish Week New York (Jul. 2, 2020), https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/supreme-court-to-hear-guelph-treasure-case/.

Christopher F. Schuetze, U.S. Supreme Court to Rule on Medieval Treasure Bought by Nazis, The New York Times, Jul. 10, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/world/europe/guelph-treasure-germany-us.html.

Supreme Court agrees to hear Nazi art case, AP NEWS (Jul. 2, 2020), https://apnews.com/3fe60cf650bee8997d7f091fe2e8d84e.

Supreme Court waiting on Solicitor General before deciding on certiorari in the Guelph Treasure dispute

The Art Newspaper has a useful update on the current state of the Guelph Treasure dispute. The Supreme Court has asked the Executive Branch, specifically the Solicitor General of the United States for an opinion on the case, in order to aid in its decision over whether or not to hear an appeal of the case from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Here’s a quick background on the dispute. The Welfenschatz, or Guelph trove, a collection of 42 objects dating from the 11th-15th centuries is currently in the possession of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and has been claimed by successors of art dealers who were fleeing the holocaust. These objects were originally housed in the cathedral in Braunschweig, owned by the House of Guelph. During the First World War, the House of Guelph lost reign over Braunschweig and in the 1920s the pieces were sold to a consortium of Frankfurt art dealers, including 82 items in 1929. Later in 1935 the Prussian state, led by Hermann Goering, bought the remaining pieces of the hoard in what the claimaints allege was a “genocidal taking”. In 2014, a German government commission found that the transaction was not a forced sale.

For some further helpful background from the perspective of the claimants, Nicholas O’Donnell, counsel for the claimants, has an excellent blog where he often updates this dispute.

Martha Lufkin, Supreme Court Delays Guelph Treasure Appeal so US Government Can Add Its Views to Case, The Art Newspaper, Jan. 21, 2020, http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/supreme-court-delays-guelph-treasure-appeal-so-us-government-can-add-its-views-to-case [https://perma.cc/3UGP-SCJ2].

A dark threat to commit crimes against Iranian culture

*Letter, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Commander-in-Chief, AFH to All Commanders, Subject: Historic Monuments, December 29, 1943* (via).

The treatment of cultural heritage during armed conflict has received an unwelcome wave of attention after President Trump made the decision to threaten Iranian cultural sites with an attack over the weekend. In a series of tweets on Saturday, Trump stated that “if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets,” that the United States has targeted 52 Iranian sites. This troubling threat would violate the Pentagon’s own War Manual, and the 1954 Hague Convention on Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. Article 4 of the 1954 Convention requires Parties to respect cultural property by refraining from using such property or its surroundings for any purpose which may lead to its damage or destruction.

This is the kind of shortsighted and callous thinking I never thought I’d see displayed by an American President. But sadly President Trump has joined many of the absolute worst leaders in history in choosing to threaten the culture of another people. The threat marks a sharp reversal of decades of work done by the State Department and others in American public life to protect and preserve the cultural heritage of all nations. What a disgrace.

It might be useful to compare the current President’s callous indifference to culture with that of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1943, during the Second World War, General Eisenhower issued an order to his commanders to protect monuments and culture on the eve of the allied invasion of Italy:

Today we are fighting in a country which has contributed a great deal to our cultural inheritance, a country rich in monuments which by their creation helped and now in their old age illustrate the growth of the civilization which is ours. We are bound to respect those monuments so far as war allows.

If we have to choose between destroying a famous building and sacrificing our own men, then our men’s lives count infinitely more and the building must go. But the choice is not always so clear-cut as that. In many cases the monuments can be spared without any detriment to operational needs. Nothing can stand against the argument of military necessity. That is an accepted principle. But the phrase ‘military necessity’ is sometimes used where it would be more truthful to speak of military convenience or even of personal convenience. I do not want it to cloak slackness or indifference.

Note that there was no hint of military necessity in Trump’s words.

A wave of sharp condemnation has followed the President’s threats, more than I can catalog here. The Archaeological Institute of America called “upon President Trump and the U.S. Department of Defense to protect civilians and cultural heritage in Iran, and to reaffirm that U.S. military forces will comply only with lawful military orders.”

Brian Daniels and Patty Gerstenblith in a letter to the New York Times argued:

The world community, including the United States, has rightly condemned the intentional destruction of cultural heritage for decades. Hitler’s Germany, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Islamic State and the Assad regime in Syria intentionally destroyed cultural heritage in the absence of any military necessity. If Mr. Trump carries out this threat, the United States will join the ranks of these destroyers of the world’s cultural legacy.

Brett McGurk, the former U.S. special envoy for fighting ISIS tweeted that “American military forces adhere to international law. They don’t attack cultural sites.”

In an OpEd in the LA Times Prof. Sara Bronin argued “A nation that willfully destroys another country’s heritage would be no better than the criminals who have destroyed irreplaceable sites in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in recent years.”

Writing for the Guardian, Simon Jones argued that the “threat to destroy the sites of ancient Persia should send a shiver down the spine of any civilised person.”

Writing in the Art Newspaper, Francesco Bandarin, a former senior official at UNESCO rightly pointed out that “[t]he territory of modern Iran has been home to some of the greatest civilisations of mankind from prehistory to classical antiquity down to modern times. Iran today has 24 sites on the Unesco World Heritage List. A deliberate attack would presumably target historic cities and monuments or archaeological areas.”

On Sunday, John Bellinger III, a legal advisor for the State Department under President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2009 called on Defense Secretary Mark Esper and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Millet to publicly affirm that the United States will still comply with the 1954 Hague Convention. He also argued that the White House should learn the domestic and international law rules that govern the use of military force.

One of those reasons that ignorance is so costly of course is that when a culture is targeted, that makes any mission or conflict existential, and makes an ultimate victory more difficult and costly to achieve. Any thinking leader would appreciate this simple fact.

Litigation seems inevitable in the Gurlitt case

Next week the Kunstmuseum in Bern will announce if it will accept the bequest of 1300 works of art from Cornelius Gurlitt. Gurlitt’s father was art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, operating during World War II. As a consequence a large number of these works will have possibly been stolen or forcibly taken during the Nazi regime. Receiving these works will be a challenge for whoever ultimately gets them. But the likely result no matter what will be litigation. There has never been such a large and contested body of artworks collected in one estate, but even if this were just a mundane estate without Nazi-era art association, large estates often carry with them the likelihood of litigation.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Kunstmuseum is expected to accept the works:

The Kunstmuseum Bern’s legal team has been researching the artworks’ provenance since the museum was informed of the bequest on May 7. Barring a last-minute legal discovery that could scuttle the deal, the museum’s board of directors will accept the gift at its meeting on Saturday, the last of half a dozen deliberations regarding Mr. Gurlitt’s bequest. . . . Much of the delay in accepting the trove has come because the tiny museum needed to secure seven-figure private funding from Swiss donors to be as free as possible of German funding that the museum thought could taint the neutrality of their provenance research, people familiar with the deliberations said.This was a daunting task for the board members. The museum lacks the financial backing of other Swiss museums like Fondation Beyeler. Unlike European and American museum boards filled with wealthy collectors and art world insiders, the Kunstmuseum Bern’s board comprises local government officials and academics.

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Cornelius Gurlitt has died (but leaves a lot of art behind)

The apartment block in Munich where 1500 works were discovered in 2011

Cornelius Gurlitt, the 81-year-old German man who gained prominence in the fall because he was revealed to have a massive amount of artwork has passed away after a heart procedure.

The Financial Times reports:

Several claims have been lodged on behalf of the descendants of people whose works were allegedly stolen under the Nazis. Among them are the heirs of David Friedmann, a German Jewish businessman, who have laid claim to the Max Liebermann painting “Two Riders on the Beach”. August Matteis, the US lawyer in the Friedmann case, said Mr Gurlitt “never had a role in the claim” because the painting clearly belonged to Mr Friedmann’s heirs.His death removed the tax investigation as a cause of delay because any tax owed to the authorities could be covered by the sale of Mr Gurlitt’s other works. “There must be no more paralysis for the sake of delay,” said Mr Matteis.

The NYT reports on the reaction by German officials:

Monika Grütters, who oversees cultural affairs for Germany’s federal government, issued a statement on Tuesday lauding Mr. Gurlitt for allowing the investigation of his collection. “As a private person, he set an example in his commitment to moral responsibility in seeking out fair and just solutions,” the statement said. “For this step, he was rightly accorded recognition and respect.” The German authorities have held the trove at an undisclosed location, citing security reasons for the secrecy. In February, an additional 238 works — some of them said to be top-quality paintings — were removed from Mr. Gurlitt’s second home, in Salzburg, Austria, and relocated also to an unnamed location. Mr. Gurlitt was last known to have sold a painting in December 2011, when the “Lion Tamer” by Beckmann fetched 864,000 euros, or $1.17 million, at an auction in Cologne, Germany. The auction house, Lempertz, said it brokered an agreement for some of the money to go to heirs of Alfred Flechtheim, a Jewish art dealer who was forced to leave Germany and died a poor man in London in 1937. Although reporters from around the world camped outside his Munich apartment for weeks after his art collection was revealed, Mr. Gurlitt gave only one interview, to the news weekly Der Spiegel. In that conversation, he revealed little about his life, saying that the only thing he had loved were his pictures.

The question now is what becomes of Gurlitt’s estate, as reported by the Wall Street Journal:

Although that investigation will lapse now that Mr. Gurlitt is dead, fresh hurdles abound, mainly surrounding a simple question: who has inherited Mr. Gurlitt’s estate? Christopher Marinello, a lawyer for the Rosenberg heirs, says the family will continue pursuing the case, but that “we’ll have to wait for the estate process to run its course.” It is unclear, though, whom Mr. Marinello should even contact or who will be handling the estate process.

Given Mr. Gurlitt’s perpetually frail state of health, a German court appointed Munich-based lawyer Christoph Edel as his legal guardian late last year. But Mr. Edel’s position was “voided as soon as Mr. Gurlitt died,” his spokesman, Stephan Holzinger, told The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Holzinger says he doesn’t even know if Mr. Gurlitt has a will and that his own contract will only continue for “the next few days.”

Melissa Eddy & Alison Smale, Cornelius Gurlitt, Scrutinized Son of Nazi-Era Art Dealer, Is Dead at 81, The New York Times, May 6, 2014.

Mary M. Lane, German Art Collector in Nazi Loot Uproar Dies, Wall Street Journal, May 6, 2014.

Stefan Wagstyl, Cornelius Gurlitt, Son of Nazi Era Art Dealer, Dies, Financial Times, May 6, 2014.

60 minutes tackles the Gurlitt art hoard

The interesting story is how Gurlitt and his father were able to explain and justify the possession of these works for so many years, else keep it so well-hidden. The 30-year German statute of limitations on stolen art claims now also supports his current possession (though if there is any evidence Gurlitt knew these works were stolen would surely be grounds for challenging his possession).

His lawyers claim that with “clear evidence” Mr. Gurlitt will return works to claimants. Gathering that evidence is of course extremely difficult. And how clear is clear:

Continue reading “60 minutes tackles the Gurlitt art hoard”

Repatriation by popular referendum

John Constable's "Dedham from Langham" — John Constable’s “Dedham from Langham”

Doreen Carvajal reports for the New York Times on a novel effort by Alain Monteagle to recover this work of art seized from his family in France during World War II. Monteagle is attempting to gather enough signatures to force a referendum:

So Mr. Monteagle and his relatives have taken to the soapbox. They are using the local Swiss system of popular referendums — which require the signatures of at least 10 percent of registered voters, 2,500 in this case — to bring the issue before elected officials, since the museum is owned by the town. And they are taking the early, tentative steps required to force the local legislature to put an issue to a vote; if the legislature were to approve, more signatures could be gathered for a communitywide vote.

A referendum is it seems the only legal avenue remaining for Monteagle, as the Swiss Museum claims to have acquired the work by donation in 1986:

The Constable painting, “Dedham From Langham,” a 19th-century landscape of the English countryside, was seized in Nice, France, in 1943, along with all the valuables of Mr. Monteagle’s great-aunt, Anna Jaffé, a childless British expatriate and wealthy Jewish art collector who had died a year earlier. Her French heir, a nephew who was Mr. Monteagle’s grandfather, died in Auschwitz.

The pro-Nazi Vichy government of France organized an auction in Nice, unloading everything from silver sugar pots and tapestries to paintings by Turner and Tenier.

Ultimately, the Constable painting passed among three new owners during the war and was purchased by a Geneva gallery, which sold it in 1946 to René Junod. He was an art collector and Swiss businessman who, with his wife, left a collection of 30 paintings to the museum here in 1986, along with money for renovation and expansion.

Whether Mr. Monteagle’s effort will be successful or not remains to be seen. But his cause may certainly receive a boost from the high-profile article.

Doreen Carvajal, Wooing the Public to Recover Art, The New York Times, March 18, 2014.

An Appreciation for The Train

Burt Lancaster as French Resistance fighter Labiche in The Train

As the George Clooney project Monuments Men, based on the work by Robert Edsel, finally nears its release on February 7th, it may be worth revisiting a 1964 masterpiece.

How many men should die to save a work of art? How much money should be devoted to its protection and preservation? The Train forces us to consider our answer. Set in 1944, in the final days of the war, the conflict has all but been decided, and the question raised by the film is not the simple question of whether a Monet or Braque should be worth the sacrifice of human lives, but a more complicated question. Director John Frankenheimer asks the audience to consider how many men and women should die to keep the works in France at the end of a long and deadly struggle. The film weighs the lives against innocents, against enough money to equip “ten panzer divisions”, and against the lives of French resistors. The result is one of the very best anti-war films.

Continue reading “An Appreciation for The Train”

The Monuments Men featured on CBS This Morning

Monuments Man George Stout using a pulley to lift Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna out of a salt mine in Austria