They were some of the greatest works of western civilization. Paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Botticelli, Titian, Manet, Velazquez. Monuments to human imagination. And they were in as much danger from Hitler’s mania as anything else in Europe.
The Monuments Men, as George Clooney’s 2014 movie revealed, saved thousands of artworks stolen by the Nazis from Jewish families and national museums or otherwise acquired for Hitler’s planned Führermuseum. But that wasn’t the end of the artworks’ adventures. In 1948, Mia was one of 13 museums selected to display nearly a hundred of the rescued paintings in a popular—and populist—touring exhibition that was as patriotic as it was magnificent.
“The Berlin Masterpieces” ran at Mia from just November 2 to 17 then moved on, traveling by train with a mix of military pomp and circus stagecraft. Armored vehicles accompanied the paintings from the old Great Northern Depot in Minneapolis to Mia while a parade headed by a military band swept through downtown. At the museum, waiting crowds spilled out the door and down the sidewalk. It didn’t hurt that Mia’s director and head curator both served as Monuments Men.
It was a kind of coda, a confirmation: If the Allies were fighting for freedom, then here, fresh from the battlefields, were a hundred gorgeous stand-ins for what that means.