Hitler Album of Nazi Looted Art Given to the National Archives

To mark the May 8 anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe in 1945, the National Archives in Washington held a press conference yesterday to unveil the last known leather-bound "Hitler Album" of art works stolen by the Nazis during the war. The Monuments Men Foundation donated this album to the National Archives, which was found at Hitler's home in Berchtesgaden, Germany, in the closing days of the war and has since been in private hands.

Created by the staff of a special Nazi task force, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the so-called "Hitler Albums" document the unprecedented and systematic looting of European art by the Nazis, a story recently brought to the screen by George Clooney in The Monuments Men film. The ERR was the main Nazi agency engaged in art looting in Nazi-occupied countries. As the ERR looted, photographed, and catalogued French collections, they created albums, including the one donated. Each page of the album shows a photograph of one stolen item.

After the war, the U.S. Army discovered 39 of these albums and turned them over to the Monuments Men for use in identifying art work to be restituted. These volumes, in the holdings of the National Archives, served as evidence in the Nuremburg trials to document the massive Nazi art looting operations. Until recently, it was believed that the missing ERR albums had been destroyed. Thanks to the Monuments Men Foundation, four additional albums have been recovered, and the fourth was donated at this event.

Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt at the National Gallery of Art

Edgar Degas's (1834–1917) influence on fellow impressionist Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) is widely known, but her role in shaping his work and introducing him to American audiences is fully examined for the first time in Degas/Cassatt. On view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington—the sole venue worldwide—from May 11 through October 5, 2014, the exhibition includes some 70 works in a variety of media. 

The Gallery is exceptionally rich in holdings by both artists, with one of the finest collections of works by Cassatt in existence, totaling 119, and the third largest collection of works by Degas in the world, totaling 158. Cassatt's Young Woman in Black (Portrait of Madame J) is on view for the first time beside Degas's Fan Mount: Ballet Girls which appears in the background of her painting.

Degas/Cassatt is organized thematically over four galleries with a focus on the height of Degas and Cassatt's artistic alliance—the late 1870s through the mid-1880s. Included are oil paintings, pastels, and works on paper (etchings, lithographs, monotypes, and drawings), with several that were once in the artists' personal collections. Cassatt stated that her first encounter with Degas's art "changed my life," while Degas, upon seeing Cassatt's art for the first time, reputedly remarked, "there is someone who feels as I do."

Young Woman in Black (Portrait of Madame J) | 1883
Mary Cassatt
Oil on Canvas | 31.5 in. x 25 in.
The Peabody Art Collection

Fan Mount: Ballet Girls | 1879
Edgar Degas
Watercolor, Silver, and Gold on Silk
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Whistler at the Freer-Sackler Galleries | Washington, DC

American industrialist Charles Freer met James McNeill Whistler in 1890 when, on his first trip to London, he paid a call at the artist's Chelsea studio and initiated a long and fruitful friendship. With Whistler's encouragement and cooperation, Freer built the most important collection of his works in the world, including the Peacock Room,* which is now a part of the Freer Gallery of Art.** An American in London: Whistler and the Thames will be at the Sackler Gallery of Art,** May 3 - August 17, 2014.

In the Gallery’s first major Whistler exhibition, more than seventy works—paintings of famed London sites in Chelsea and along the Thames River, as well as prints and rarely seen drawings, watercolors, and pastels—present a captivating survey of the artist’s unique depictions of a rapidly changing urban environment. The exhibition culminates with some of Whistler’s stunning, iconic nocturnes, including Blue and Gold—Old Battersea Bridge (1872–77).

The Peacock Room
Freer Gallery of Art | Washington, DC

Blue and Gold—Old Battersea Bridge | (1872–77)
Oil on Canvas | 26 7/8 in. x 20 1/8 in.
Tate Gallery | London

* The Peacock Room is open during museum hours, but once a month it is shown in a whole new light. When the shutters of Whistler’s “harmony in blue and gold” are open, a flood of natural light turns the Peacock Room into a glowing jewel of blue, green, and gold tones. Details, colors, and textures are revealed in the sunlight—and a special filtering film on the windows minimizes fading.

** The Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery form the Smithsonian Institution's national museums of Asian art. The Freer and Sackler galleries house the largest Asian art research library in the United States and contain art from East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Islamic world, the ancient Near East, and ancient Egypt, as well as a significant collection of American art.

Poets and Painters | Frank O'Hara and Grace Hartigan

In 1952, artist Grace Hartigan told her friend and poet, Frank O'Hara, that she wanted to paint "a lot of something." He replied, "How about oranges? I have a dozen." What resulted was a collaboration culminating at a Tibor de Nagy Gallery exhibition that showed the Oranges series. John Bernard Myers printed one hundred copies of O'Hara's poems on which the paintings were based, Hartigan painted covers, in oil, for each copy, and they sold for one dollar.

One of the hand-painted covers for the Oranges Poems publication

Black Crows (Oranges No. 1) | 1952
Oil on Paper | 45 in. x 35 in.
University at Buffalo Art Galleries

Hartigan and O'Hara in her studio

Lincoln Kirstein | A Real Life "Monuments" Man

As the movie, Monuments Men, opened this weekend, you know I had to run to see it. While I thought it to be a good movie, it only made me want to know more about this war effort and the men and women who saved many of the treasures of Europe from destruction. I'm now engrossed in the book on which the movie was based. One of the characters in the movie, Preston Savitz (played by Bob Balaban), is based on the real-life person, Lincoln Kirstein.

Lincoln Kirstein
(Photo by George Platt Lynes)

Kirstein, after enlisting in the Army in 1943, started working on a project gathering and documenting soldier art that would eventually become an exhibit and book, Artists Under Fire. In the spring of 1944 he was sent to London for the U.S. Arts and Monuments Commission, and within weeks he was transferred to the unit in France that came to be known as the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section. Soon after being promoted to Private First Class in January 1945 (in General Patton's Third Army), his unit moved to Germany and he was personally involved with retrieving artworks around Munich and in the salt mines at Altaussee.

In his lifetime, Kirstein was a tireless champion of the arts in America. Working behind the scenes to provide artists with money, space, audiences, and, at times, emotional support. He helped found such landmark cultural institutions as the New York City Ballet, the School of American Ballet, and New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

Kirstein received the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1984); the National Medal of Arts (1985); and with choreographer and co-founder of the New York City Ballet George Balanchine, the National Gold Medal of Merit Award of the National Society of Arts and Letters. A poet, novelist, historian, art collector, and critic, Kirstein died in 1996 at the age of 88.

For more information about this extraordinary piece of art history visit:

Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art

Monuments Men: On the Front Line to Save Europe's Art, 1942–1946 (Archives of American Art)

Monuments Men and the National Gallery of Art: The Inside Story