Museums, Modernity and Conflict: Museums and Collections in and of War since the Nineteenth Century 2020028260, 2020028261, 9780367272500, 9780429295782

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Museums, Modernity and Conflict

Museums, Modernity and Conflict examines the history of the relationship between museums, collections and war, revealing how museums have responded to and been shaped by war and conflicts of various sorts. Written by a mixture of museum professionals and academics and ranging across Europe, North America and the Middle East, this book examines the many ways in which museums were affected by major conflicts such as the World Wars, considers how and why they attempted to contribute to the war effort, analyses how wartime collecting shaped the nature of the objects held by a variety of museums and demonstrates how museums of war and of the military came into existence during this period. Closely focused around conflicts which had the most wide-ranging impact on museums, this collection includes reflections on museums such as the Louvre, the Stedelijk in the Netherlands, the Canadian War Museum and the State Art Collections Dresden. Museums, Modernity and Conflict will be of interest to academics and students worldwide, particularly those engaged in the study of museums, war and history. Showing how the past continues to shape contemporary museum work in a variety of different and sometimes unexpected ways, the book will also be of interest to museum practitioners. Kate Hill teaches History at the University of Lincoln. She has written extensively on the history of nineteenth-century British museums; her most recent book is Women and Museums 1850–1914: Modernity and the Gendering of Knowledge (2016). She is Co-Editor of the Museum History Journal.

Routledge Research in Museum Studies

Museum Gallery Interpretation and Material Culture Edited by Juliette Fritsch Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums Edited by Laurajane Smith, Geoff Cubitt, Kalliopi Fouseki, and Ross Wilson Exhibiting Madness in Museums Remembering Psychiatry through Collections and Display Edited by Catherine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon Designing for the Museum Visitor Experience Tiina Roppola Museum Communication and Social Media The Connected Museum Edited by Kirsten Drotner and Kim Christian Schrøder Doing Museology Differently Duncan Grewcock Climate Change and Museum Futures Edited by Fiona R. Cameron and Brett Neilson Animals and Hunters in the Late Middle Ages Evidence from the BnF MS fr. 616 of the Livre de chasse by Gaston Fébus Hannele Klemettilä Museums, Heritage and Indigenous Voice Decolonising Engagement Bryony Onciul For more information about this series, please visit: https://www. routledge.com/Routledge-Research-in-Museum-Studies/book-series/ RRIMS

Museums, Modernity and Conflict Museums and Collections in and of War since the Nineteenth Century Edited by Kate Hill

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Kate Hill; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Kate Hill to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hill, Kate, 1969- editor. Title: Museums, modernity and conflict : museums and collections in and of war since the Nineteenth Century / Kate Hill. Other titles: Museums and collections in and of war since the Nineteenth Century Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge research in museum studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020028260 (print) | LCCN 2020028261 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367272500 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429295782 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Museums--Europe--History--20th century. | Art treasures in war. | War and society. | Historic sites--Conservation and restoration. | Monuments--Conservation and restoration. | Cultural property--Protection. | Cultural property--Destruction and pillage--History--20th century. | Military museums--History--20th century. Classification: LCC AM40 M8758 2020 (print) | LCC AM40 (ebook) | DDC 069.094/09041--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028260 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028261 ISBN: 978-0-367-27250-0 (HB) ISBN: 978-0-429-29578-2 (eB)

Contents

Figures Contributors Introduction: museums and war

vii xi 1

KATE HILL

PART I

Collecting and conflict 1 Salvage and speculation: collecting on the London art market after the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871)

13

15

TOM STAMMERS

2 Treasure, triumph and trespass: the place of conflict in the collecting and display of ‘Priam’s Treasure’

39

ZOE MERCER-GOLDEN

PART II

Keeping going? 3 The evacuation and management of the Louvre Museum’s Near Eastern Antiquities Department during the Second World War

59

61

ZOÉ VANNIER

4 Implementing preventive strategies between World War I and II: the Catalan art museums and the Spanish Civil War EVA MARCH

79

vi  Contents PART III

Propaganda, morale and resistance 5 ‘The present is pretty terrible, the future is unknown, the past is the only stable thing to which we can turn’: Philip Ashcroft, Rufford Village Museum and the preservation of rural life and tradition during the Second World War

103

105

BRIDGET YATES

6 Museums without objects? The Staatliche Sammlungen für Kunst und Wissenschaft in Dresden during the Second World War

129

KARIN MÜLLER-KELWING

7 Exhibiting in wartime. Nazification and resistance in Dutch art exhibitions

149

EVELIEN SCHELTINGA

PART IV

Museums of war and conflict 8 Displaying Ravensbrück concentration camp memorial: from the ‘antifascist fight’ to ‘history and memory of the women’s concentration camp’

169

171

DOREEN PASTOR

9 ‘Flight without feathers is not easy’: John Tanner and the development of the Royal Air Force Museum

191

PETER ELLIOTT

10 ‘We are a social history, not a military history museum’: large objects and the ‘peopling’ of galleries in the Imperial War Museum, London

213

KASIA TOMASIEWICZ

11 War stories: the art and memorials collection at the Canadian War Museum

235

SARAFINA PAGNOTTA

Index

255

Figures



viii  Figures

Figures ix

Contributors Peter Elliott is the RAF Museum’s first Curator Emeritus, having retired from the post of Head of Archives in 2016. He is now studying for a PhD at the University of Hertfordshire, examining the development of aviation museums in the United Kingdom. Kate Hill teaches History at the University of Lincoln (UK) and researches the history of British museums. Her recent publications include Women and Museums 1850–1914: Modernity and the Gendering of Knowledge (2016) and, as editor, Britain and the Narration of Travel in the Nineteenth Century (2016). She is Co-Editor of the Museum History Journal. Eva March is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona). Her field of study is public and private collections in Catalonia during the last years of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. On this topic, she has published various books and articles. Her current research focuses on methodological issues related to the patterns of artistic reception. Zoe Mercer-Golden received her BA from Yale University and her MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art. She was Assistant Curator at Royal Museums Greenwich, London, and is currently helping to build a new museum focused on the counterculture in San Francisco. Karin Müller-Kelwing is a freelance art-historian. Previously she was Research Associate at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (Dresden State Art Collections) and worked on the research project ‘Between art, science and politics: Museums under National Socialism. The Staatliche Sammlungen für Kunst und Wissenschaft in Dresden and their scholarly employees.’ Sarafina Pagnotta  completed her master’s degree in Art History with a concurrent diploma in curatorial studies in 2018. Since then, she has continued her research and has given papers at conferences both nationally and internationally. She presented at the Canterbury 100 conference in Christchurch, New Zealand, as part of the centenary commemorations of the Armistice in November 2018. She is currently working as a research consultant at the Canadian War Museum and will begin her doctoral research at Carleton University in September 2020. Doreen Pastor recently completed her PhD candidate in German Studies at the University of Bristol and is currently working as Teaching Fellow in German Politics and Society at the University of Bath. Her research focusses on the politics of memorialisation of the Nazi past and the

xii  Contributors GDR legacy in contemporary Germany. She is particularly interested in the visitor response to exhibitions and conducted empirical research at the concentration camp memorials Ravensbrück and Flossenbürg, the House of the Wannsee Conference and the former Stasi prison Bautzen II. Evelien Scheltinga is a curator and researcher, with a focus on propaganda and fascism. She took part in the research for the exhibition The Stedelijk in wartime at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2015) and had a curatorial traineeship at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. She worked with Jonas Staal on various projects and exhibitions. Her paper ‘The van Abbemuseum under Fascist influences. Exhibitions and daily life 19401944’ resulted in an exhibition focusing on Eindhoven’s daily life during the occupation and the role of the museum during the Second World War at the Van Abbemuseum, where she currently holds the position of assistant curator; she works on several projects, such as the exhibition series Positions. Tom Stammers is an Associate Professor in Modern European Cultural History at the University of Durham. His book The Purchase of the Past: Collecting Cultures in Post-Revolutionary Paris (2020) explores the politics of collecting, the art market and cultural heritage in nineteenthcentury France. He continues to publish work related to collecting, connoisseurship, museum institutions, the historiography of art and the cultural memory of the French Revolution. He has two new research projects: one related to the Orléans family and nineteenth-century French monarchism, and another related to the theme of Jewish collectors as co-investigator on the major AHRC-funded project ‘Jewish’ Country Houses: Objects, Network, People. Kasia Tomasiewicz is a final year Collaborative Doctoral Partnership PhD researcher at the University of Brighton and the Imperial War Museum. Her research traces the changing landscapes of Second World War memory and commemoration at the Museum’s flagship London site. She uses archival, ethnographic and oral history research methods, and is particularly interested in methodological approaches to museum spaces. Zoé Vannier is a PhD student at the Ecole du Louvre and Paris 1 PanthéonSorbonne, and has a double bachelor in Art History & Archaeology and History (Sorbonne) and a master’s degree from the Ecole du Louvre on museology. Her research focuses on the protection and rehabilitation of the National Museums of Beirut and Kabul in times of crisis. Bridget Yates is a retired museum professional and independent researcher with a particular interest in volunteer run rural museums, especially those established in the 1920s and 1930s. She holds a doctorate from the University of Gloucestershire on the history of volunteer-run museums.

Introduction Museums and war Kate Hill

The impact of conflict on museums is very visible in the twenty-first century.1 Not only have museums been destroyed, their collections looted, and their curators killed in the course of recent conflicts, but older conflicts continue to dog modern museums and to undermine their claims to advance humanity. 2 Equally, though, war and conflict continue to drive the formation of new museums, new exhibitions and new collections. In 2019, the Musée de la Libération de Paris opened; while in 2014 the Imperial War Museum (London) opened its redisplayed First World War galleries, to coincide with the centenary of the outbreak of the war, a centenary which has driven a large quantity of new displays in many museums.3 Legal frameworks, such as the Hague Convention of 1954, and international bodies such as UNESCO, have emerged from conflict to protect cultural property during war.4 Museums are undertaking collecting of contemporary and recent conflicts in Afghanistan and elsewhere.5 Thus museums and their collections are both at great threat from, and substantially created by, modern warfare. Moreover, modern warfare has itself been shaped by museums. They have helped to define the qualities of the nation which was being fought for, and shaped the memory and understanding of conflict in the aftermath. This volume aims to extend the examination of war and museum history into new fields. Some aspects of this history are already quite well-trodden ground; during the recent centenary of the First World War, museum commemoration has been both an action and a focus of study. Attention has been drawn both to the ways in which museums aligned with new state mechanisms for remembering war, through official artists and photographers, for example, and to the ways in which museums adapted and gave some voice to the widespread experience of loss and trauma and to popular expressions of this experience through the collecting and donation of ordinary objects of war. Jay Winter suggests that museums were key ‘vectors of the memory boom.’6 Moreover, museum narratives of the First and then Second World Wars in museums, which innovatively included both official and family memories, drove today’s configuration of museums and public history in general towards the location of ‘family stories in bigger, more

2  Kate Hill universal narratives.’7 It is clear, therefore, that museum representations of war have been critical to our understandings of war, memory and museums themselves. However, the way that war commemoration intersected with other aspects of museums, such as the physical effects of war on them, has rarely been considered, and this volume aims to move beyond a focus on commemoration and engage in new ways with the relationship between and history of museums and military conflict in the modern world. In drawing together a number of studies of conflict and museums over a 150-year period, this volume aims to offer a more wide-ranging examination of that complex and contradictory history and to highlight particularly the different effects war could have on museums, as well as the different roles museums could play in shaping understandings of conflict. Despite this emphasis on diversity and on unexplored aspects of the war-museums relationship, the volume also seeks to suggest that there is a distinctive alignment between modern museums and modern war in two key ways. First, it suggests that although museums and their history are usually seen as part of process of modernisation resting on ‘expanding secularisation, individualisation, peaceful bureaucratisation, multicultural integration, tourism and a growing cultural industry,’ the more violent and disruptive forces of modernity, in particular imperial conquest and the development of ‘total war,’ are at least as important in driving the development of museums during the period of modernity.8 There is, in other words, a productive relationship between museums and war which is part of the modern world. ‘Total war’ has been defined as ‘modern industrial war, involving the mobilisation of society and the erosion of the distinction between military and civilian’ (my emphasis), and is often seen as originating in the nineteenth century (in the US Civil War, the German wars of unification, or the Franco-Prussian War, or occasionally as far back as the Napoleonic Wars) and accelerating through the twentieth centuries with the First and Second World Wars.9 Such an approach to war, however distinct and wherever and whenever it originated, put museums and heritage at the service of military action in ways they had not hitherto been. Museums themselves, it could be argued, while no more exclusive to modernity than war, took on their current ‘modern’ form at the same time as war itself was modernising.10 Sections 2 and 3 of this volume show that total war had enormous implications for museums’ functioning during wartime. Second, the ways in which modern nation states and their populations engaged with both war and museums has produced contradictory results. Museums have a role in the legitimation of power and of violent conflict, and also in the growth of memorialisation and marking of individual loss. Both trends have been visible in museums over the last two centuries; museum memorialisation can be seen in the nineteenth as well as the twentieth century, while power and its legitimation was a key question for museums in the twentieth century, as chapters in this volume on museums in the occupied Netherlands and in Germany during the Second World War

Introduction 3 show. Sections 1 and 4 look at these quite different aspects of museums’ role in relation to shaping the meanings of conflicts.

War, nation states and power In many ways, the French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic Wars in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century mark the start of a certain relationship between museums, especially national ones, and state aggrandisement. Napoleon’s conquests across Europe were accompanied by systematic confiscation of cultural heritage assets as part of a wide-ranging attempt to harness culture to support the creation of an empire. It has been suggested that he was trying to overlay his military network with a cultural network legitimising the new, expansionist French state.11 So significant was this attempt that though it was very short-lived, it stimulated those nations who had been conquered by Napoleon to create their own national museum as soon as they were able to reclaim their art and culture; thus solidifying the principle that military and imperial power, power as a nation, is vested in control of culture and heritage.12 This was a principle asserted between European nations, although not necessarily over European heritage; Britain and France played out a European rivalry through competition for historical treasures from Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, and Mesopotamia. Such scenarios continued in the twentieth century, as Mercer-Golden shows in her chapter, with the dispersal of ‘Priam’s treasure’ around Europe as well as Turkey through forces of nationalism and conflict. This means that even during civil wars, museums and the control of cultural heritage assets have been a critical part of the conflict, because it is the meaning of the nation that is at stake and which is both produced and threatened by conflict. Both March and Vannier explore how fascist regimes of the mid twentieth-century tried to use the circumstances of war to move and display cultural heritage in order to legitimate their visions of nations and empires. Even without such national or state engagement with the appropriation of cultural heritage, though, commercial imperatives also function to put museum objects in motion during conflict. Stammers’ chapter shows clearly how the disruptions and economic hardships of war, in combination with dealers and marketplaces keenly alert to the prospect of bargains, created a flow of art out of France and into (largely) Britain in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. Thus, Section 1 examines the way in which modern international conflicts have created international flows of objects with major effects on the collections of European museums and galleries.

Museums under threat Because of the increasingly obvious power functions of museums, they have become targets in war. Usually sited in city centres, they were acutely

4  Kate Hill vulnerable to bombardment and air attacks; this was noticeable from the period of the Franco-Prussian War when the first evacuation plan for the Louvre was created, but accelerated rapidly and was most prominent in the Second World War. In the United Kingdom, a number of museums suffered direct hits in bombing raids during this conflict, and the damage was extensive: Liverpool Museums, the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, and the Natural History Museum are examples.13 Other combatant and occupied nations had similar stories to tell; in Frankfurt am Main, concentrated bombardment of the historic centre of the city meant nearly all the city’s museums needed housing in new buildings.14 The second section of the volume thus examines the ways in which threats of destruction affected museums and galleries. Such vulnerability in fact led to the growth of partial consensus about the mutual protection of such sites. As Vannier and March demonstrate, the growth of a heritage profession with common standards and international organisation led to the start of a focus on the protection of cultural heritage during war, by attacking and occupying forces as well as by defending or defeated ones.15 Yet such agreement was dependent on heritage professionals having positions of power during conflict, which as Vannier shows was not always the case, and was strongly threatened by the competing impulse not so much to destroy heritage as to appropriate it. In both Paris and Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, works of art were not just at risk of destruction, but also of being co-opted into the schemes of the victorious power which would necessitate moving them from their safe places to which they had been so carefully removed. In the twenty-first century, the undoing of what was only ever a partial consensus on heritage protection in places such as Iraq and Syria shows the limitations of this approach.16 Modern warfare created unprecedented physical risks for museums and their collections and in so doing also drove new methods of collection management which allowed for better, safer packing and evacuation, record-keeping, environmental monitoring and conservation. In the same way that modern warfare stimulated the development of certain branches of medicine, especially surgery, so it impacted on museum practices.17 Vannier demonstrates that the Louvre became increasingly systematic in evacuating its collections, gaining speed and safety from these innovations. While museums in Catalonia had fewer opportunities to practice evacuation, international guidelines were starting to become available to assist museum curators and directors in planning to minimise war damage. Thus, the section reveals the importance of warfare for the development both of the practices and the networks of curatorship and conservation, developing international organisations and a more specific professional set of competences both enhanced the power and prestige of museum work, and acted to protect museums, in the twentieth century.

Introduction 5

Museums and the war effort The requirement that museums contribute to the war effort also developed in this period. Both museum visitors and museum staff were critical in simultaneously embracing and evading the job of winning ‘hearts and minds.’ Museums were more suitable for propagating a general emotional tone rather than any specific propaganda message, but if they were still open to visitors (and this is a significant caveat; as Section 2 shows, most museums increasingly removed as much of their collection as was feasible and sometimes had to shut because of staff absences through mobilisation) they were increasingly seen as important for the morale, and patriotism of the country; under certain circumstances such as occupation and defeat, they could be even more important and contested. The First World War largely saw museums struggling on with decreasing numbers of staff and in some places increasing risk of aerial attack, but there was relatively little thought on how they might actively support the war. During the First and Second World Wars, museum spaces were occasionally commandeered for direct contributions to the war effort; in the United Kingdom, for example, the V&A Museum was used as a canteen for the air force training college, and allotments for growing food were set up in the grounds of the Natural History Museum in London. Part of the Tate Gallery’s basements was used as an air raid shelter, while the Royal Pavilion in Brighton was converted into a hospital during the First World War.18 However, alongside these repurposings of museums, there was an increasing interest in the ways in which, through their museum function, they could contribute to the war effort. Sometimes this was largely informational; in the United States and the United Kingdom, special exhibitions were sometimes produced focused on food and health; topics which were anyway of growing interest to museum curators although given an added impetus with wartime conditions.19 The UK’s Department of Information, a 1917 formation designed to try and create or maintain a ‘pro-war attitude,’ produced a number of exhibitions for provincial museums, of war drawings, paintings and photographs, mainly the creations of official war artists and photographers. However, in 1917 the Department of Information produced an exhibition on ‘Britain’s Efforts and Ideals in the Great War’ which, as the title suggests, aimed to focus not so much on the war itself and its immediate exigencies, as to highlight the nature of ‘our national life,’ and its underlying values such as democracy. This exhibition toured the USA as well as Britain and was said to have a significant impact. 20 Jennifer Wellington has described the general museum contribution during the First World War as being part of a ‘culture for victory,’ aiming, with some success, to encourage ‘emotional, physical, and financial commitment’ to the war across the British Empire. 21

6  Kate Hill The idea that museums might have more than a practical, informational role during war time, but might be useful for inculcating values, improving morale, and encouraging the vision of a certain post-war future, was then developed substantially with the Second World War when a broader range of museums in more combatant nations were drawn into the war effort. By the Second World War, though, and at least across Europe, museums’ relationship with war propaganda became more difficult. It has recently been shown how far museums in the United Kingdom stepped back from the officially mandated circulating exhibitions, which were devastatingly unpopular with visitors and staff. 22 Curators were usually as reluctant as visitors to put forward messages about the war, especially when those messages came from a contested political ideology; unless they themselves owed their curatorial role to that ideology. The role of museums in propagandising for Nazism, in both Germany and the Netherlands under occupation, was substantially determined by the extent to which the slimmed down museum staff had been purged of non-Nazis and was formed of party members, as the analyses of Müller-Kelwing and Scheltinga show in this volume. Moreover, the extent to which exhibitions could be categorised as ‘propaganda’ or ‘resistance’ is complex; the kind of detailed exhibition analysis which Müller-Kelwing and Scheltinga provide shows how contingent such labels can be. Nevertheless, and especially outside capitals, where museums stayed open they were popular and often looked to the past or the future to engage with war issues in a more oblique and less overtly propagandising way. In Spain, the Civil War and aftermath saw an increasing Catalan focus on Catalonian cultural heritage as a means of developing a sense of regional identity. Similarly, as Yates shows in her chapter, during the Second World War in rural Lancashire (UK) the ‘soul’ of the locality through its ordinary past was held up as what was being fought for. The impulse to look to the past for the ingredients to make the future, or to escape from the present, was not universal but nevertheless significant in museums,’ curators’ and collectors’ responses to war. Museums, then, took on a new role in varying ways, entertaining, informing and performing ambiguous acts of ‘propaganda’ for embattled populations.

Remembering and understanding war in museums Modern museums increasingly took on a central role in remembering, interpreting and debating war, and a key part of this development was the creation of war museums. Yet what were these museums, how did they intersect with other types of museum such as those dedicated to military forces, and what did they ‘say’ about war? The Imperial War Museum, in many ways the fons et origo of war museums, was set up in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, exercising a centralising effect on numerous local

Introduction 7 efforts across the United Kingdom to keep and remember objects testifying to the experience of war. 23 Moreover, it was with the First World War that the widespread national apparatuses of war artists and official collecting started to be built in many combatant nations, to commence feeding into national war museums.24 A recent study suggests the United Kingdom has 136 military museums, dating from the 1920s onwards. 25 Of course, military museums are not the same as museums of war, and the category of museums which deal with conflict is both broader and narrower than that of military museums. That there is no clear way of defining museums which interpret and display war is clear in the chapters making up the last section; they show that museums have had a complex journey towards any sense of purpose and narrative when it comes to representing and remembering war. They have found themselves negotiating a difficult narrative: between the national and the individual, between technology and people, and between celebrating, adjudicating and remembering war. From the nineteenth century, but accelerating with the increasing ‘totality’ of war in the twentieth century, museums have been used to help ‘process’ and narrate war, through the collecting of different sorts of object; and to memorialise new sorts of loss and trauma. In the United Kingdom, the Crimean, but more particularly the first and second world wars have led to a focus on the ‘ordinary’ soldier and their families.26 Genocide and war crimes, however, have been hard to fit into existing narratives of war as ‘honourable’ and have meant that while museums of the military emerged from the late nineteenth century onwards, their purpose and narrative have been highly ambiguous.27 The chapters in the fourth section of this volume show how unstable museums’ narration of war has been in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first; this might be because, as Pastor shows so clearly, political changes have repeatedly altered that narrative, or as she also demonstrates, because the range of victims and the range of complicity in atrocities recognised over time has become wider. It is also very clearly the case that museums’ role in a modern ecology of entertainment, and their responses to the changing sensibilities of visitors, has profoundly changed the ways museums frame their coverage of war, and that this change has been ongoing from at least the early twentieth century. Elliott and Tomasiewicz’s chapters show that while museums connected to conflict might aim to function as recruiting tools for the armed forces, or focus on the technology of war through its machines, they might also connect visitors to personal stories and memories, and an inability to understand this dual role has contributed to delays and difficulties in creating museums. Such an interpretation is also suggested by Pagnotta’s final chapter, where alongside the official war art programme bringing a certain narrative of war into Canadian museums, trench art made by ordinary soldiers stressed the intimate, emotional and personal narratives of war, and legitimated such narratives through public display.

8  Kate Hill

Scope and aims Although this volume aims to open up and bring into dialogue aspects of the modern history of war and museums which have not been considered side by side before, it does so in a preliminary and necessarily incomplete way. In a single volume, a mere fraction of the wars and combatant nations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be considered, and we have not even attempted to cover twenty-first century conflicts. The present volume arises from the 2018 conference of the Museums and Galleries History Group, ‘Museums, collections and conflict’ at the National Maritime Museum, UK, which included papers on conflicts from the Napoleonic Wars to Afghanistan. The chapters here represent a more focused chronological approach; the conflicts covered range from the 1870s to the 1940s, although the museum history covered is broader than this, showing how wars intervened in existing collection and museum history, and how wars left a long shadow in museums. The focus is primarily on museums and conflicts in Europe, not because there is no history of museums and war outside that continent, but rather because there is so much to say that it cannot be adequately covered in one volume. The chapters do not generally engage with the history of imperial collecting and conflicts, partly because this history is dealt with elsewhere, though it is nevertheless clear that the collections which were threatened, created and instrumentalised by war were often from extra-European territories, products of colonial expansion and aggression.28 The settler colonies, on the other hand, had particular reasons to engage with modern European museum practices and a chapter on Canada is therefore included.29 Overall, this book aims to lay out the conceptual terrain linking museums and conflict in productive as well as destructive ways. Modern museums tend to see their role as contributing to peace, justice and mutual understanding, but it is important to recognise the extent to which their modern forms are created by and focused on conflict.

Notes 1. A variety of museums and conflicts are considered in this volume, but they can be summarised here in the following ways: museums are institutions which collect and display material traces from the past, including structures, to communicate with a more or less general public, while wars are conflicts typified by violence, destruction and mortality and the involvement of military forces, regular or irregular. Periods of occupation during particularly the Second World War are included, even though the occupied nation itself might not actively be ‘at war’; and conflicts are sometimes followed through active warfare to cold war and even to strong rivalry (the key point here being that once war has dispersed objects, disagreements over those objects can last centuries). 2. On attacks on heritage professionals and heritage sites, particularly in Syria but also in Iraq, see Mark V. Vlasic and Helga Turku, ‘“Blood Antiquities”: Protecting Cultural Heritage Beyond Criminalisation,’ Journal of International Criminal Justice, 14 (2016), pp. 1175–97. An example of a long-past conflict whose echoes continue to be felt in museums today is the Benin

Introduction 9











City Punitive Expedition covered in Annie Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). The continuing impact on museums is the subject of Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (London: Pluto, 2020 forthcoming). 3. Government of France, ‘The new Musée de la Libération de Paris has opened!,’ 25.08.2019, online, available at: https://www.gouvernement.fr/en/ the-new-musee-de-la-liberation-de-paris-has-opened; Heritage Fund, ‘New First World War galleries at IWM London,’ 16.07.2014, online, available at: https://www.heritagefund.org.uk/news/new-first-world-war-galleries-iwmlondon; IWM, ‘New Second World War and Holocaust Gallery plans unveiled,’ 29.08.2019, online, available at: https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/ new-second-world-war-and-holocaust-gallery-plans-unveiled. 4. Michael Pesendorfer, ‘Respecting and Protecting Cultural Heritage in Peace Support Operations – A Pragmatic Approach,’ in Cultural Heritage in the Crosshairs: Protecting Cultural Property During Conflict, ed. by J. Kila and J. A. Zeidler (Leiden: Brill, 2013); Astrid Swenson, ‘The First Heritage International(s): Conceptualising Global Networks before UNESCO,’ Future Anterior: Journal of History Preservation History Theory and Criticism, 13: 1 (2016), pp. 1–15. 5. IWM, ‘Contemporary conflicts,’ n.d., online, available at: https://www.iwm. org.uk/projects-partnerships/contemporary-conflicts-programme. 6. Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 222. 7. Winter, Remembering War, p. 40. 8. Peter Aronsson, ‘Explaining National Museums,’ in National Museums: New Studies from Around the World, ed. by Simon Knell et al (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 31. This of course aligns with competing interpretations and understandings of modernity itself: as the rational product of Enlightenment thought or as an aggressive set of ideologies and practices directed towards establishing European dominance over the rest of the world; on modernity’s links to colonialism see Gurminder Bhambra, ‘Historical Sociology, Modernity and Postcolonial Critique,’ American Historical Review, 116: 3 (2011), pp. 653–62; on the relationship between the Enlightenment and violence as one at least in part derived from the violent nation-building of the French Revolution, see Tadd Fernee, Enlightenment and Violence: Modernity and Nation-Making (New Delhi: SAGE, 2014). 9. Andrew Barros, ‘Strategic bombing and restraint in “total war”, 1915–18,’ The Historical Journal, 52: 2 (2009), 413–31; see also Roger Chickering and Stig Förster, ‘Are we there yet? World War II and the theory of total war,’ in R. Chickering, S. Förster and Bernd Greiner (eds.), A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Roger Chickering, ‘Total war: the use and abuse of a concept,’ in Manfred F. Boemeke, R. Chickering and S. Förster (eds), Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Hew Strachan, ‘On total war and modern war,’ The International History Review, 22: 2 (2000), 341–70, among others. 10. The modern museum, like ‘total war,’ has been seen as coming into existence at a wide variety of dates, but here I follow Tony Bennett in seeing it as a nineteenth-century creation, based on a new kind of public rationality: Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (Abingdon: Routledge, 1995), p. 1.

10  Kate Hill 11. Andrew McClennan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994); Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 176. 12. Napoleon’s Legacy: The Rise of National Museums in Europe 1794–1830, ed. by Debora Meijers, Ellinoor Bergvelt, Lieske Tibbe, Elsa van Wezel (Berlin: G. & H. Verlag, 2009). 13. Pearson, Museums in the Second World War, p. 68; Hunterian Museum, ‘History,’ https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/museums-and-archives/hunterian-museum/about-us/history/; Kerry Lotzof and Josh Davis, ‘The Museum at wartime,’ Natural History Museum 2018, https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/ the-museum-during-wartime.html. 14. Michaela Giebelhausen, ‘Museum architecture: a brief history,’ in A Companion to Museum Studies, ed. by Sharon Macdonald (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), p. 236. 15. See also Krysia Spirydowicz, ‘Rescuing Europe’s Cultural Heritage: The Role of the Allied Monuments Officers in World War II,’ in Archaeology, Cultural Property, and the Military, ed. by Laurie Rush (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2010). 16. See The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Iraq, ed. by Peter Stone and Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2008). 17. On the development of surgery, see for example Panagiotis Stathapoulos, ‘Maxillofacial surgery: the impact of the Great War on both sides of the trenches,’ Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery, 22: 1 (2018), pp. 21–5. 18. Lotzof and Davis, ‘Museum at wartime’; Katrina Royall, ‘The V&A at war: 1939–1945,’ V&A 2005, http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/v-and-a-atwar-1939–45/; anon., ‘Archive journeys: Tate history,’ http://www2.tate.org. uk/archivejourneys/historyhtml/war_uses.htm; Royal Pavilion Brighton, ‘WW1 and the Royal Pavilion,’ https://brightonmuseums.org.uk/royalpavilion/history/ ww1-and-the-royal-pavilion/. 19. Gaynor Kavanagh, Museums and the First World War: A Social History, London: Leicester University Press 1994, p. 65; Julie K. Brown, ‘Connecting health and the museum: an exhibition initiative by the National Health Council at the Smithsonian Institution’s United States National Museum, 1922–1924,’ Museum History Journal, 12: 2 (2020), p. 3. 20. Kavanagh, Museums and the First World War, pp. 68–70. 21. Jennifer Wellington, ‘War Trophies, War Memorabilia, and the Iconography of Victory in the British Empire,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 54: 4 (2019), 737–58, 740. 22. Catherine Pearson, Museums in the Second World War: Curators, Culture and Change, ed. by Suzanne Keene (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), pp. 75–81. 23. Kavanagh, Museums and the First World War, esp. chapter 10. 24. Wellington, ‘War trophies,’ 738. 25. Louise Tythacott, ‘Trophies of War: Representing ‘Summer Palace’ Loot in Military Museums in the UK,’ Museum & Society, 13: 4 (2015), 469–88, 470. 26. Holly Furneaux and Sue Prichard, ‘Contested Objects: Curating Soldier Art,’ Museum & Society, 13: 4 (2015), pp. 447–61. 27. Military arms and armour display predates the nineteenth century by some time; various older and disused items were on public display at the Tower of London from the seventeenth century, for example: Malcolm Mercer, ‘Shaping the Ordnance Office Collections at the Tower of London: The impact of colonial expansion, diplomacy, and donation in the early nineteenth century,’

Introduction 11 Museum History Journal, 9: 2 (2016), pp. 153–67, here p. 154. The Royal United Services Museum was founded in 1831 and went beyond ordnance in its military collections, but as Hartwell shows even in the nineteenth century there was an enduring tension between reluctance to endorse militarism, and desire to valorise military heroes and military successes: Nicole M. Hartwell, ‘A repository of virtue? The United Service Museum, collecting, and the professionalization of the British Armed Forces, 1829–1864,’ Journal of the History of Collections, 31: 1 (2019), pp. 77–91, here p. 77. 28. On imperial/colonial violence and museums, see for example Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum, ed. by Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn (Abingdon: Routledge, 1998); Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience, ed. by Sarah Longair and John McAleer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012); Alice Conklin, In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology and Empire in France 1850–1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). 29. Again see Wellington for Australian museums’ engagement with ‘British’ sentiments on the First World War: ‘War trophies,’ p. 742.

Part I

Collecting and conflict

1

Salvage and speculation Collecting on the London art market after the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) Tom Stammers

Introduction According to Guido Guerzoni in his celebrated overview of the British art market: ‘War was the true mother of the market, with its thefts, robberies, abuses of power and confiscations.’ In a provocative analysis, Guerzoni described how the nineteenth-century artistic economy thrived on the ‘decomposition’ of the social structures in neighbouring states. ‘From time immemorial, traumatic political turmoil (risings, rebellions, coups etc) were accompanied by the arrival of exiles and fugitives in London, a city which welcomed them with the sale of their treasures.’1 This observation was true for the entire age of revolutions, as British collectors had been quick to profit from the periodic crises engulfing the French monarchy, and their acquisitions fed into museum and gallery development. The abolition of corporate institutions and the attack on the nobility and clergy after 1789 threw a huge quantity of artworks onto the open market, with British aristocrats in the vanguard of buying up Boulle cabinets, Sèvres porcelain and rare books (a cross-Channel trade that flourished with the connivance of French dealers and despite the imposition of a wartime blockade).2 Thanks in part to the influx of émigré collections, London emerged from the French Revolution as the undisputed hegemon of the European art market. London’s commanding share of art arose from its commercial dynamism, in marked contrast to coercive methods employed by Napoleonic armies who plundered continental collections for the profit of the Louvre.3 Subsequent revolutions in July 1830 (with the overthrow of the Bourbons) and February 1848 (the fall of the Orléans dynasty) drove the toppled dynasties into exile. For pretenders of all stripes, London became a site of political manoeuvring and financial restructuring. The recently elected Prince-President of the Second Republic, Louis-Napoléon, arranged a sale at Christie’s in 1849 to free up capital for his imperial ambitions; in May 1853 Christie’s witnessed the dispersal of the paintings of Louis-Philippe, including many Spanish masters, three years after the king’s death at Claremont, Surrey.4 The crisis of 1870–1871 was particularly acute, since it witnessed not only the collapse of the monarchical system – embodied in the Second

16  Tom Stammers Empire of Napoleon III – but also military defeat at the hands of Prussia, a painful occupation and siege of the capital, and finally a metropolitan insurgency against the National Government in Versailles. With the data taken from customs receipts and the volume of imports, Guerzoni argued that in 1870–1871 the number of auctions in Paris fell from 383 in 1869 to 268 in 1870 and 80 in 1871, as the political and military crisis brought business to a standstill, whereas in London over these same years the number of sales increased from 196 to 205, and from 223 to 231 by 1872. This can be backed up by considering London’s market share of European sales, which rose from 25% in 1869 to 32% in 1870, 41% in 1871 – the zenith of the crisis – and remained a healthy 31% in 1872.5 Guerzoni’s econometric approach has underlined the central dynamic by which different poles of the art market were periodically paralysed or replenished by the effects of war. Such indirect consequences of conflict on collecting have received far less attention that more overtly coercive processes of transferring and sometimes deliberately destroying works of art, some of which were also visible in 1870–1871. Prussian scholars in 1870 undertook a full inquiry into works of art which had been looted from German galleries by the Napoleonic armies seven decades before, although the reclamation of lost art was not written into the final peace treaty.6 The French press were horrified by the destruction of historic buildings caused by Prussian shelling – such as the burning of the palace of Saint-Cloud, and the loss of the library at Strasbourg – finding in this type of cultural atrocities a barbaric assault on French civilisation.7 Meanwhile within Paris the revolutionary government of the Commune instigated a policy of iconoclasm against the despised symbols of the monarchical past, whether the memorial to Louis XVI, the Chapelle Expiatoire (which was not demolished due to lack of time) or the Vendôme Column topped by a statue of Napoleon I (which was). The enduring intolerance to political signs in France has been recently diagnosed by Emmanuel Fureix via the metaphor of the ‘injured eye’ (l’oeil brisé).8 Confiscation, looting, expropriation, iconoclasm, vandalism: such phenomena have been generated a significant literature, whereas the less volitional and more dispersive aspects of cultural politics, as expressed through the market, demand fuller investigation. Yet it was out of the market that major private and public collections were formed across the century, as individuals and institutions speculated on the opportunities afforded by war to buy and sell, vying to possess (and protect) artworks displaced or imperilled by violence. In this perspective, the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune represent a fascinating chapter in how art collections became enmeshed in the political crisis, a chapter with lasting consequences for the fate of museums across Europe. Artworks were portable, and their trajectories followed the flood of refugees produced by war. As the Second Empire unravelled at astonishing speed in early September 1870, the desperate former Surintendant des

Salvage and speculation 17 Beaux-Arts, the comte de Nieuwerkerke, fled to London to dispose of his collections. Here he found a buyer for his Renaissance objets d’art and superb arms and armour in the shape of Richard Wallace.9 A great philanthropist to the besieged French capital (as commemorated in the city’s drinking fountains), Wallace nonetheless doubted whether Paris could ever be a safe place to house the objects he had inherited from the Hertford estate. In 1872 Wallace displayed his new purchases before a mass public at Bethnal Green and three decades later, his widow would bequeathed the exceptional collection of fine and decorative art built up by succeeding generations of the Hertford family to London.10 In this way, the decisions made by collectors in the heat of the conflict profoundly shaped the contents and creation of a major British museum, one which introduced a thoroughly French collection of art, assembled in Paris, to a new audience. Elsewhere, the events of 1870–1871 pushed collectors in different directions: an ardent Bonapartist, Louis Carrand, could not reconcile himself to the new French Republic and bequeathed his own medieval and Renaissance artefacts to the Barghello in Florence.11 Having narrowly escaped being shot by Communards, the violence in Paris prompted Théodore Duret and Henri Cernuschi to journey to Japan in 1871, a visit which profoundly shaped the development of Asian collections at the Musée Cernuschi, now owned by the City of Paris.12 Conflict and revolution were catalysts for the consolidation, the relocation and the dispersal of collections, although these processes have often been difficult to acknowledge within conventional institutional histories. Nonetheless, period observers could be disarmingly candid about the prospects for buying art in wartime. The paintings acquired by William Tilden Blodgett, and which represent the founding collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, were sourced in Belgium and France in 1871. ‘At any other time their purchase would not have been possible’ according to The New York World.13 This chapter explores the traffic of art out of France during or immediately after the political crisis. The aim is to consider the impact of the war on different kinds of artworks – especially Old Master paintings and the decorative arts – which left French shores and appeared in London auctions. It goes further in insisting that the dislocation and circulation of artworks was not just a side-product of the conflict, but a crucial means through which curious Londoners could experience the drama at one remove. In the spring of 1871, they could already relive the siege of Paris thanks to a special exhibition held on Argyll street in a building branded ‘The Palais-Royal,’ and where they could see maps, models, ‘living photographs’ of captured French and German ‘officers’ and even a mitrailleuse or volley gun used in the battles (see Figure 1.1).14 In a less-sensational vein, the London salerooms were another venue in which the British public could directly encounter the fallout from the conflict, its victims, its ideas and its ruins, just as they had encountered the remnants of earlier French Revolutions.

18  Tom Stammers

Figure 1.1 Exhibition relating to the Siege of Paris, Palais Royal, Argyll Street, 1871 [@ Victoria & Albert Museum, London]

Cross-Channel commerce On 8 September 1870, Paul Durand-Ruel left his family and travelled to London with 35 crates of paintings where he set up business in the unfortunately named ‘German Gallery’ on New Bond Street. In January 1871, Durand-Ruel’s life was changed when he was introduced to the young draft dodger, Claude Monet. As the compelling exhibition at the Tate in 2017 demonstrated, the future Impressionists were among the least commercially successful of the colony of refugee artists in London, since they were rejected from exhibiting at the Royal Academy (unlike Salon favourite

Salvage and speculation 19 Jean-Louis Gérôme), failed to find patrons (unlike the Communard sculptor, Jules Dalou) and failed to attract much attention at the Kensington international exhibition in spring 1871 (unlike Meissonnier). In Camille Pissarro’s gloomy analysis: ‘Here there is no art, it is all a matter of business.’15 Their marginal position in the market is radically different from an artist like Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, the sculptor who organised successful sales of his terracotta through Christie’s in November 1871.16 The focus on a handful of avant-garde painters has prevented reflection for how the so-called année terrible played out on other sections of the art market. One valuable window on this process comes from the stock books of Agnews, a firm originally from Liverpool but with premises on Bond Street and which emerged as leading dealers of reproductive prints, Old Masters and contemporary painting. Intriguingly, Charles Morland Agnew was fascinated by events in Paris and his diary records a trip he and his father William made to the French capital in mid-September 1871, mirroring the delight many British tourists took in the sublimity of the ruins. On this occasion he visited many of the sites reduced to rubble either by Prussian shelling or the terrible fires of la semaine sanglante, the week of street battles fought between the Communards and the Versaillais troops determined to recapture the city. The scars of battle were apparent everywhere (‘marks of firing on several houses’); the Tuileries and the Hôtel-de-Ville lay in ashes, shot marks were visible on Notre-Dame, the outlying palace of Saint-Cloud was a ‘mass of burnt things’ and he inspected ‘the stump of the Vendôme column, which the communists pulled down.’ Agnew also found time to visit studios of artists like William Wyld, see the galleries of the Louvre which were still accessible (‘some of it is burned down’) and examined ‘a very pretty picture in Mr. Petit’s rooms, which W. wanted to buy.’17 The ledgers in London confirm the importance of Agnew’s contacts with European dealers. On 6 August 1872 Paul Durand-Ruel bought from Agnew’s Paul Delaroche’s Christ in the Garden and on 30 June 1873 he sold them a genre scene by Antony Serres, The Widow. Such academic and Romantic canvases were more regular staples of DurandRuel’s dealing than the works of Manet or Monet, which were a minor concern at this juncture. He even took a gamble on the English school: on 12 June 1871 he sold to Thomas Agnew a work by Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais, namely The Bridesmaid, which now hangs in the Fitzwilliam Museum.18 Durand-Ruel was only one of several French dealers in modern painting who were active in London during these busy years. Agnew’s conducted with Georges Petit and Alexandre Bernheim, both of whom would in future play a major role in marketing Impressionism. In 1870–1871, by contrast, they were trading in Barbizon landscapes by artists such as Daubigny, Troyon and Diaz, as well as the fashionable Félix Ziem, all of whom already had a loyal following among British industrialists.19

20  Tom Stammers Moreover, the presence of French dealers was matched if not exceeded by that of Belgian agents. In the bifocal analysis of Guerzoni, centred on the rivalry of London and Paris the role of Brussels is underrated, yet it attracted a significant number of artistic refugees in 1870–1871 (including Eugène Boudin and Carolus-Duran) as well as anxious collectors and dealers like Durand-Ruel. Belgian dealers were also highly influential in London, not just the so-called prince of the Victorian art world, Ernest Gambart, who had pioneered the successful ‘French Gallery’ in the 1860s, but also Prosper-Léopold Everard, who opened a distinct ‘Flemish Gallery’ on Pall Mall in 1871. 20 As the case of Gambart suggests, the war did not represent a sudden breakthrough so much as an acceleration of the international business ties that had been growing across the past two decades. In the famous words of Pamela Fletcher, shoppers could already do a ‘Grand Tour on Bond Street’ taking in European art schools simply by passing by different dealers’ windows. The luxury shopping precinct around St James and the West End was predicated on a certain cosmopolitan spectatorship and continental chic. 21 Already in May 1870, a month before war was declared, Everard had organised a sale of popular Flemish and Dutch artists at Christie’s. 22 These continuities in personnel were crucial for helping refugees assimilate. Durand-Ruel’s chief associate in London, Henry Wallis, had previously succeeded Gambart at the ‘French Gallery.’23 What goods, though, were actually changing hands? In what follows, my analysis will be focused on the evidence from Christie’s, Manson & Woods on King street, who were the chief handlers of the period, although it is important to recognise other relevant sales that were held by rival firms such as Philips and Fosters. 24 Sales labelled as ‘From Paris,’ or ‘Property of a French Nobleman’ punctuated the calendar of Sotheby’s and Foster’s auction houses through the spring and summer of 1871. 25 On closer inspection, this supposed nobleman was often a fictive persona, created to tie together and enhance disparate lots, only some of which might have originated in France. Take the sale of decorative arts objects which took place at Christie’s on 10 July 1871, where the consignment records reveal that the anonymous vendor was Charles-Félix Maillet du Boullay. A student of Charles Percier, this prominent architect had undertaken major restoration work in Rouen, although in the summer of 1871 he listed his home address as Trevor Square in Knightsbridge and the Rue Royale in Brussels, where he had presumably taken refuge. 26 Among his rich collection of porcelain, glass, carved panels and jewellery was a superb 1737 Beauvais tapestry, mounted by the arms of the marquis de Boufflers and one of eight designed and signed by Oudry, who was then director of the factory. It was sold to Moon for £37 6s. 27 By using the consignment books and annotated catalogues, the identities of the sellers and those transporting the lots to and from the premises at Kings Street can be reconstructed, testifying to a web of cross-Channel

Salvage and speculation 21 connections. 28 When considering French aristocratic vendors who used Christie’s in the wake of the Commune, two consecutive sales in June 1871 merit dissecting in some detail. On 3 June 1871, hidden within a larger sale, appeared ‘twenty important pictures, the property of the marquis du Lau.’29 This abbreviation referred to the marquis Alfred du Lau d’Allemans, famously depicted by James Tissot as a lounging gentleman in the golden waistcoat on the far left of his group portrait of the exclusive social club, the cercle royale (Figure 1.2). In the words of one recent historian, he was the ‘paragon of elective sloth,’ deciding due to his unbending monarchist principles to retire from public life.30 The marquis was also a noted collector with an eye for a profit, as recalled in the memoirs of Durand-Ruel. He had sold Durand-Ruel Delacroix’s Convulsionnaires of Tangiers in 1869 at a price of 48,500 francs, having paid only 29,000 francs for it 11 years before.31 Whilst he saw military service during the Franco-Prussian War, it seems he turned to Christie’s as the surest way to generate capital, needed to repair his ancestral home Montardy in the Dordogne whose library had been wrecked by fire in 1870.32 The first lot of his 20 paintings was not delivered by the marquis, according to consignment records, but Charles Haas, his Jewish comrade from the Jockey Club (and one of the models for Swann in Proust’s epic novel) whose address in London was listed as Duke Street.33 It was a Romney portrait of a young lady snapped up by Colnaghi for £186 10s – one of the top prices of the sale. A second lot, this time a Renaissance Madonna by

Figure 1.2  James Tissot, The cercle de la rue royale (1868) [Musée d’Orsay/Google Art Project]

22  Tom Stammers Marco d’Oggione, appears to have been put forward by another French aristocrat, Henri Edmond comte de Lambertye-Tornielle, who was at that time a resident of Piccadilly.34 The 18 remaining lots were eclectic – embracing Spanish and French historical portraits by artists as diverse as Boucher and Coello, as well as Dutch genre scenes and landscapes (many of which had impressive provenances linking back to the cabinets of the ancien régime). At an after-sale, Durand-Ruel acquired a large Cuyp landscape with three cows for 700 guineas, a reminder of his continued activity in dealing Old Masters.35 The highlight, though, was lot 49: a portrait of Thomas Kiligrew, page and poet to Charles I, depicted in his page’s costume and accompanied by a dog wearing his master’s name emblazoned on the collar. Attributed to Van Dyck, it was bought by Graves for £299 5s, and in 1892 was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery.36 In addition to the obvious concessions to English taste – including a supposed portrait of Anne of Denmark, painted by Franz Pourbus – this compact selection of paintings was united by their common pedigree and learned credentials.37 Two days later, on 5 June 1871 occurred the sale of the marquis H de V, subsequently identified by Fritz Lugt as the baron Antoine-Marie Héron de Villefosse.38 The descendant of a scholarly family, with his father an esteemed mineralogist, Héron de Villefosse was an acclaimed archivist and archaeologist of Roman Gaul who in 1869 had been assigned to the department of antiquities in the Louvre. Only weeks before, he had allegedly helped protect the museum collections against the Communards by refusing to step down from his post and demonstrating ‘prodigious quick-thinking and bravery.’39 In his capacity as secretary to the French Society of Numismatics and Archaeology, he thundered against the horrific losses suffered by Parisian libraries and private collectors during the Commune.40 Although only his name appeared on the catalogue, this disguised a composite sale made up from different French sources, notably the dealer Deloris (an exceptionally active supplier of furniture and china to Christie’s, operating from rue Joubert in Paris) and Madame Goguet. The first day was dominated by samples of the decorative arts, including Limoges enamels, snuff boxes, candelabras, furniture and clocks (including a Louis XIII style piece originally from the château of Arenberg). Purchasers included some of the major dealers in European curiosity, including Baker, Benjamin, Pond, Lewis, Jarvis, Aymard, Rhodes, Agnew, Donder and Durlacher.41 The pictures on the second day, however, were the main event, and derived from Villefosse personally. They proved to be of extremely fine quality, a mix of seventeenth-century Dutch and eighteenth-century French genre paintings many boasting eminent provenances.42 However, it is striking that very few of the Rococo works found a home, even if they did attract some considerable bids. One hundred guineas were offered for the Greuze painting of a Bacchante originally in the cabinet of Prince Paul of Wurttemberg, whilst 130 guineas were insufficient to secure Pater’s Plaisir

Salvage and speculation 23 d’été, linked with the eighteenth-century cabinet of Randon de Boisset. In most cases, though, artists like Chardin failed to attract bids of over ten pounds, a fifth of that spent on acquiring a landscape by Wouwermans.43 We might remember that French eighteenth-century painting was still viewed as decadent by mainstream British opinion; whilst the decorative arts of the ancien régime, whether original pieces or artful reproductions, were avidly fought over, eighteenth-century painting was condemned as immoral or trifling.44 The only exception to this rule, importantly, was a set of three panels featuring painted conversation by Le Prince which was sold for £120 and 15 guineas – its far higher price linked not to the identity of the artist, but its utility for interior decoration. French eighteenth-century artists were outperformed by Romantic stars of the Salon such as Horace Vernet, Camille Roqueplan and Gabriel Descamps, of proven market appeal.45 In the final and third section, the lots were listed as the ‘property of a French gentleman’; thanks to the Christie’s consignment books, we can see that these were dispatched by one Villars in Boulougne-sur-Mer, who had dropped off the crates of pictures in early April.46 Of the pictures in this section a few Italian primitives changed hands for small sums, and a supposed Watteau harlequin failed to reach its reserve – but more striking is the large quantity of major paintings listed in the catalogue but inexplicably passed over during the sale, with no bids recorded next to them. This includes a Tiepolo painting of the Virgin and Child, a Carracci Vision of St Jerome, a Tintoretto Descent from the Cross and a Brueghel Landscape with figures. According to the consignment books, these unsold pictures were not sent back to France but to one Szarvady living on Upper Bedford Row – perhaps the sign of a subsequent, private sale, or another instance of cross-Channel coordination.47 The most important painting which did sell in this section was Peter Lely’s portrait of the Duchess of Cleveland and her son, acquired by the dealer Graves for the sum of £25, and now hanging in the National Portrait Gallery (Figure 1.3).48 Aristocratic vendors like the marquis du Lau and Héron de Villefosse were eager to take advantage of the buoyant London market, motivated by fears for the security of their possessions in revolutionary Paris and by hopes of commercial speculation. Their objects were able to enter London thanks to a cosmopolitan network of social and professional intermediaries, whose collaboration often predated the crisis. The logistics of the Villefosse sale hinged on the collaboration between a Paris-based dealer based on the rue Chaussée d’Antin – most probably Émile Barre, a wellknown expert at the Drouot salerooms – and one Steinmitz who lived on Argyll street in London. Together they cooperated in transporting 20 cases of furniture and paintings into Christie’s over six different deliveries between 11 April and 24 May 1871.49 Judging from the bidding, the appeal of historic British portraits far outstripped other European schools, and it is not surprising that such pictures eventually came into the possession of

24  Tom Stammers

Figure 1.3  Peter Lely, The Duchess of Cleveland and Her Son (1664) [@ National Portrait Gallery]

national museums. The fact that numerous other pictures went unsold due to the hefty reserves suggests that vendors like Villefosse were in no rush to make a sale. Rather, they could afford to see if London buyers would take the bait and pay prices in excess of what might be expected in Paris. This willingness to wait-and-see was a luxury that our second group of vendors, the survivors of the imperial regime, could not afford.

Imperial dissolution Due to their speedy and desperate exit from France, the former paladins of the Empire found themselves in significant hardship and quite cramped new surroundings. At Camden Place, Chislehurst, Eugénie confessed to her

Salvage and speculation 25 son’s tutor, the historian Ernest Lavisse, that her court resembled the Raft of the Medusa, whose survivors often thought of eating each other.50 She told her lady-in-waiting of her despair to learn of the destruction of the furniture in her apartments at Saint-Cloud and in the Tuileries.51 Eugénie’s agent Rouher made frequent travels back and forth across the Channel in order to fight for the return of the possessions of the imperial family. It remained a vexed issue what lawfully belonged the Bonapartes as their private property, and what belonged to the state as acquired through the civil list – ongoing battles over rights and restitution would drag on unresolved until Eugénie’s death in 1920.52 Urgently needing funds, the imperial family began to sell off its holdings: the Emperor handed some of his horses and the palais des Césars to the Italian government; the Empress sold her properties in Spain; meanwhile the republican government put the former home of the Princesse Mathilde on the rue de Courcelles up for sale in 1873.53 Upon fleeing from France, Eugénie had managed to hide a portion of her jewels through the help of her friend Pauline von Metternich, who helped transfer them to the Bank of England for safe keeping in the last phases of the war. Nonetheless on 24 June 1872, Eugénie consented to putting these pieces up for sale. Her name was officially omitted from the catalogue at Christie’s, which referred in vague terms to ‘the magnificent jewels, the property of a distinguished personage.’ Nonetheless, word quick went round about the true identity of the vendor – after all, many items were decorated with an ‘E’ monogram – and there was considerable public excitement.54 The catalogue spelled out that she would be selling off jewels not just with illustrious provenances – such as the marquise ring with pink diamond which had been worn by that earlier Empress Joséphine and her daughter Hortense – but also jewels that had been given as diplomatic gifts, including a bracelet of sapphires from the Viceroy of Egypt to commemorate the opening of the Suez Canal, or an emerald-set tiara from the Sultan of Turkey. 55 The sale drew in many of the leading jewellers and wider dealers in London, but also rich foreign buyers including Edmond de Rothschild and the Gaekwad of Baroda (who reputedly bought the so-called Eugénie diamond for £12,000). The 23 lots raised the imposing sum of £45,000 sterling – although as Bertrand Morel has argued, this was perhaps only half of their real market value or cost when commissioned.56 The symbolism of such sales was unmistakeable for audiences who were present at those events, or who read about them in then newspapers. They were witnessing the end of an era, and to attend or take part in such auctions was one way to lay claim to a piece of history. A view by Meissonier of Eugénie at the town hall in Nancy was advertised in one April 1871 sale as even more desirable in light of recent events: ‘A very important work, with portraits of celebrated personages, executed by command of the Emperor Napoleon III. This work, after the recent events on the Continent, will form

26  Tom Stammers an important episode in history.’57 The liquidation of the Second Empire on English shores was matched by dispersal sales happening in parallel across the Channel. In March 1872, the Pereire brothers, the financial wizards of the Second Empire, brought their exceptional collection of Old Master paintings to hotel Drouot auction house.58 ‘Just now the whole town is talking of the Pereire sale,’ enthused The Daily News. ‘The Messrs Pereire are very skilful in giving publicity to their merchandise. They do not act on the proverb which tells us that good wine needs no bush. The sale of their gallery was advertised by the telegraph all over the United States, in Russia and other countries where money bags are recklessly emptied.’ This global publicity machine was necessary to grab the attention of American buyers who were increasingly drawn into the art market, and whose extravagance could help repair the shortfalls occasioned by the war crisis. ‘It was easy to foresee that Messrs Pereire would repair many of their financial losses through the sale of their pictures.’59 The following month, it was the turn of the duc de Persigny, whose death emptied of its treasures the chateau of Chamarande (a one-time gift from the Emperor to his trusted Minister of the Interior).60 At the same time, the republic authorised selling off the remainder of the liste civile to pay off impatient creditors, much to the bemusement of the press: this included Fourdinois furniture from the imperial yacht, Sèvres porcelain services (which attracted healthy interest, especially from foreigners and Americans), tablecloths and tableware (which pulled in just a few domestics and restauranteurs), and 40,000 bottles of wine from the imperial cellars.61 One auction above all others advertised this change of fortunes in the most spectacular way: that of the Emperor’s cousin, Prince NapoléonJérome, known to his intimates as ‘Plon-Plon,’ and to his critics as ‘le Bonaparte Rouge.’ The Prince was the third son of Napoleon I’s youngest brother, Jérome, and had shocked conservatives by standing as the republican deputy for Corsica in 1848. Throughout the Second Empire he was a champion of democratic and anticlerical policies, and after the catastrophe at Sedan, took the lead in machinations to return the Bonapartes to power. His own revenues had been decimated by the fall from favour, and he was forced to sell his beloved chateau at Prangins, Italy, at a substantial loss. Renting an apartment overlooking Hyde Park, he came to dislike London as ‘an expensive, boring town, and impossible to live in all year round.’62 He was a frequent caller on his cousin at the new home in Camden Place, Chislehurst, and was the architect of a hair-brained scheme to launch a coup against the new Republic by gathering loyal veterans and storming back into France from across the Swiss border at Thonon. Having sounded out Bonapartist agents abroad, and even Bismarck, the date set for this replay of the Hundred Days scenario was January 1873 – but for the scheme to work not only would his cousin need to stay healthy, which was far from guaranteed, but substantial sums were needed, not least to keep bribing the British press to run stories predicting a Napoleonic comeback.63

Salvage and speculation 27 The sale through Christie’s from 9 May 1872 was designed to grab maximum publicity. The Prince Napoleon had owned one of the most recognisable properties of the Second Empire, the whimsical Maison Pompéeinne on the avenue Montaigne.64 The luxurious neo-Greek, neo-Roman and neo-Etruscan revivalist art objects commissioned for the villa from leading designers such as the goldsmith Christofle and the bronzier Lérolle, not to mention a special dessert service from Sèvres, made for a colourful début to the threeday sale. London dealers such as McClean, Holloway, Solomon and Agnew competed to own the stylish candelabra and amphorae on offer.65 This buzz of interest continued on the second day thanks to the Prince’s collection of armour, some with historic associations – such as a helmet engraved with the medallion of Pope Julius II – but much more of it was of exotic manufacture. Among the fashionable Oriental items – including a thirteenth-century lamp taken from the tombs of the Caliphs near Cairo in 1863, at the time of the excavations of Auguste Mariette, for which Agnew paid £230 – were many other ethnographic oddities (like the sundry ornaments made of Scandinavian buffalo horns, or the cigar stand fashioned out of crocodile skin). These strange, piquant items were mixed in with more traditional connoisseurial fare, including Urbino earthenware pottery and monumental sixteenth-century bronzes, including a large figure of Bacchus.66 There was an added frisson by the knowledge that this represented only a portion of what had been lost in the fires of the Commune. At the time when war broke out, Plon-Plon had followed his father by living in the ancient seat of the Orléans family, and home of the Conseil d’état, the Palais-Royal. In May 1871, the complex was set alight, and although local residents rushed in to contain the flames, the Valois wing of the Cour de l’horloge and the central floors of the building were wrecked. Prince Napoléon-Jérome estimated that the fire that night cost him 700,000–800,000 francs worth of property, including a finely stocked library (Figure 1.4).67 The preface to the sale catalogue mused on the sad destiny of the Palais-Royal and its contents, so often haunted by the scourge of revolutionary violence, whether in 1791, when the duc d’Orléans sold his inherited masterpieces to fund his unhappy political ambitions, or in February 1848, when the Palais-Royal was sacked by the crowds who brought down the July Monarchy, or now in 1871. This curse seemed appropriate for a building which had previously housed many paintings that Cardinal Mazarin had bought at the Commonwealth sale following the execution of Charles I in 1649. This latest twist of fate was described as a terrible loss not just to the owner, but to ‘all lovers of art,’ as the preface recited the names of artworks which were destroyed by the ‘communists’ the year before.68 After this roll call of incinerated masterpieces, the ordeal of the pieces that survived the inferno only heightened their allure. According to the reporter for the Daily News on 9 May, the public could still discern abundant traces of the damage from when the house on the avenue Montaigne

28  Tom Stammers

Figure 1.4 Wulff le jeune, Palais-Royal in Les Ruines de Paris (1871) [© Bibliothèque nationale de France]

had been ‘sacked and burned during the reign of the Commune’ (in fact, the prince had sold it in 1868, and the abandoned house stood until 1891). A Chinese enamel vase had its surface ‘fused and destroyed,’ a bronze inkstand modelled after the candelabrum at San Marco had been ‘subjected to great heat,’ whereas the glass cup on the cigar stand had been ‘melted down upon the metal.’ The reporter continued: ‘Two marble busts, by Clésigner, of Rachel – one as Tragedy, the other as Comedy – still bear the indelible marks of petroleum, but they were completely black when found in the ruins. A bust of Ponsard, the poet, resembles the bronzes found buried for centuries at Herculaneum.’69 There was an added irony here that fire had transfigured these neo-classical sculptures – including the bust of prince’s old mistress, the actress Rachel – into the semblance of real antiques, which had been rescued from the destruction of Vesuvius. In its ‘luxury, refinement, anti-modernism and Roman references’ the Pompeiian House was an iconic building of the Empire, and many observers wanted to believe it shared the regime’s fate.70 The near-brush with catastrophe made the lots more desirable: ‘Most of these costly articles however have, by some extraordinary chance, escaped, and many must have been rescued.’71 The largest bids were reserved for the third day, and the prince’s remarkable gallery of pictures. Like the duc de Morny and other pillars of the Empire, Plon-Plon had embraced contemporary painting as a type of speculative investment, making big purchases at the Salons. In February 1868, he had sold over one hundred works to Durand-Ruel for a total of 300,000

Salvage and speculation 29 francs, a haul which included some of the most iconic pictures of the entire century by David, Ingres and Meissonnier.72 It was the Old Masters from the Palais Royal, however, which were offered in London, and whilst many had been ‘cleverly restored’ in euphemistic parlance, they included some star pieces. This included a Bronzino portrait of Cosimo de Medici, a Beltraffio portrait of a lady, a version of Christ carrying the Cross by Sebastiano del Piombo, a Botticielli Virgin and Child, as well as other versions of this sacred subject by Cima da Cornegliano and Giovanni Bellini, both signed.73 Lot 321 was identified as ‘a youth in a black dress and cap’ by Francesco Raibolini, the Renaissance painter more commonly known as Francia. Rutley was willing to part with £409 10s for the lively portrait, which has since been identified as the young Federico Gonzaga of Mantua and hangs in the Metropolitan Museum in New York (Figure 1.5).74 This

Figure 1.5  Francesco Francia, Federico Gonzaga (1510) [© Metropolitan Museum of Art]

30  Tom Stammers spectacular sale did not bring down the Third Republic – Napoleon III’s fatal gallstones scotched any hope of a coup paid for by the proceeds – but it did release some significant artworks onto the market for the eventual and lasting benefit of museums on both sides of the Atlantic.

Conclusion The boost to the London art trade was among the indirect consequences of the Franco-Prussian War. If Guerzoni offered a macro-level analysis to show the spike in the total sales held in London, by comparison with Paris, this chapter has zoomed in to uncover the identities of some key players, from aristocrats hunting for quick profits to the rump of the Bonapartist party adjusting to exile. The importance of London’s salerooms as a clearing house and sideshow to the political crisis raging in France conformed to an earlier pattern, by which revolutionary upheaval triggered an exodus of artworks abroad. In the 1790s, the most famous example of this cultural transfer was the Orléans art collection from the Palais-Royal, which was initially bought by a consortium in 1792 and distributed between country estates, but whose finest pieces continue to flow back into institutions like the National Gallery. Eighty years later, part of the contents of the PalaisRoyal was once again for sale in London, a clear sign of the continuity in political calculations and in the dense web of Anglo-French partnerships. There would be clear benefits of extending the existing work on circulations culturelles in times of strife, so far most developed for the period c.1830–1848, far deeper into the nineteenth century.75 In 1870–1871 too at least some British buyers seized on the sudden bonanza: in his memoirs Merton Russell-Coates recalled that one Glaswegian businessman John Anderson amassed no less than £30,000 worth of ‘property, furniture and effects at the Palais Royale in the aftermath of the Commune.’76 Whilst exciting new work has focused on the seizure and dislocation of artefacts provoked by colonial expansion, surprisingly little attention has been paid to date to the relationship between the art market and internal European conflicts and crises, whether the shock of secularising policies and civil wars in Spain and Switzerland in the 1830s and 1840s, or the fallout from the Wars of Unification in Germany or Risorgimento Italy in the 1850s and 1860s, and work is only just beginning to map the transformation of the global art market in the heyday of European imperialism.77 In its own way, the Franco-Prussian War also had lasting consequences for how artworks were categorised and displayed, although this has been easier to demonstrate within a museum environment. The war sharpened the antagonism between the perceived qualities of the French and German schools of painting, an antagonism played out in the collections of the annexed city of Strasbourg, which had been 90% destroyed during the bombardments of the war; these collections were entirely reconstructed

Salvage and speculation 31 on new Germanic principles after 1871 by museum director, Wilhelm von Bode.78 In contrast to the fixity of art in public museums, however, a focus on the market examines the fortunes of art in motion, and its circulation far beyond the territories of the belligerent powers. By discussing speculators in London, Brussels and even New York, this article has demonstrated that the consequences of a war can have resonance for museums and galleries located much further afield. This insight applies to many subsequent conflicts too, whether we think of what American and Portuguese galleries owed to the dismantling of the imperial collections in the Soviet Union, or, tragically, the spoliation of Jewish families permitted by countries nominally neutral during the Second World War, such as the significant quantity of looted art channelled through dealers in Switzerland, raising complex issues of opportunism and complicity.79 Vicissitudes in the art market, and by extension, the rise and demise of collections, serve as a barometer of the cultural fallout from revolutions and military campaigns. In contrast to the eirenic or internalist accounts of their evolution, museums have commonly grown in fits and starts, relying on tactical opportunism or windfalls from unexpected sources. In the brief months before his death in 1873, Louis-Napoléon found time to donate a set of copies after excavated Roman sites by Annibale Angelini to the South Kensington museum.80 This chapter has frequently emphasised the degree of Anglo-French interaction in artistic circles during 1870–1871, and the refugees often forged relationships that would continue to germinate in the years ahead. Having sheltered in Brighton during the siege of Paris, Eugène Dutuit was introduced to the Fine Arts Society, to whose 1877 exhibition he would submit his superb Rembrandt etchings as a corresponding member when back in France.81 But the experience of war could also push collectors apart, in the instance of the Wallace Collection depriving the long-time host country of permanent ownership. From the safety of North-East England, John and Joséphine Bowes avidly followed the twists and turns of 1870–1871, desperate for news from their friends and their housekeeper as to whether the artworks they had purchased and housed in Paris would survive.82 Even within European cities, memories of violence exerted an influence on where collections took root. Eugène Dutuit and his brother Auguste cited the trauma of the war and Commune as one reason why in 1902 they donated their antiquities, bronzes, early paintings and prints to the Ville de Paris, and not to the Louvre, which remained vulnerable to political assault.83 Another consequence of warfare was ideological, injecting a new note of venom into heritage politics. Whilst most British observers had generally seen the downfall of the Second Empire as just desserts for years of foreign aggression and moral delinquency, they were disturbed by the ruthlessness of the Prussian siege and appalled by the Commune, whose ringleaders were treated as pariahs by some of the artistic establishment.84 A. G. Temple, curator of the Guildhall art gallery, had originally approached

32  Tom Stammers the radical journalist Henri Rochefort for the loan of some of his Dutch paintings. Temple had a crisis of conscience on the doorstep in thinking of ‘an individual whose ardent energies had been given up to anarchy and whose hands were stained with the blood of innocent persons.’ He concluded that to ask such an individual to lend his assistance to ‘an ancient and honoured Corporation, which had for centuries been renowned for its upholding of order and authority’ simply ‘would not do.’85 The repudiation of Rochefort was exceeded by the hostility aimed towards the painter Gustave Courbet, who was charged with paying for the costs of rebuilding the demolished Vendôme column. His actual crimes were rumoured to be far worse, from smashing apart statues of classical art or selling the finest paintings from the Cluny Museum to the English. For his part, Courbet refused to have anything to do with Edmond Du Sommerard, the administrator of the Musée de Cluny, accusing him of colluding with Nieuwerkerke in 1871 to stage an exhibition at South Kensington ‘with the Prussians in France.’86 The bitter splits between republicans and royalists, Communards and Versailles, turned repeatedly to how individuals had profited from exile in 1870–1871 and with whom they had associated. In Paris after the Commune, a belligerent discourse had sprung up around historic preservation, seen as a means to defy the unsated iconoclasm unleashed by the recurrent episodes of revolutionary violence.87 Echoes of this militant tone can be found in the writings of British art critic Philip Hamerton, founder of the journal The Portfolio, and who had experienced the conflict first hand from his rural retreat outside Autun.88 In his 1873 work The Intellectual Life, he raged against the brutish hostility to the past perpetrated by the democratic spirit. Before 1870, few would believe that the democratic temper would go so far as to assault museums, monuments and the libraries of France. ‘We know that every beautiful building, every precious manuscript and picture, has to be protected against the noxious swarm of Communards as a sea-jetty against the Pholas and the Teredo.’89 In contrast to the vandalism of the democrats, Hamerton evoked the aristocratic spirit as that which respected the ancestors and fought in the vanguard of heritage conservation. ‘Compare this temper with that of a Marquis of Hertford, a Duke of Devonshire, a Duc de Luynes! True guardians of the means of culture, these men have given splendid hospitality to the great authors and artists of past times, by keeping their works for the future with tender and reverent care. Nor has this function of high stewardship ever been more nobly exercised than it is today by that true knight and gentleman, Richard Wallace. Think of the difference between this greathearted guardian of priceless treasures, keeping them for the people, for civilization, and a base-spirited Communard setting fire to the library of the Louvre.’90 Even in Britain, the calamities of 1870–1871 had underlined that private collecting could be a political, and patriotic act, the antidote to revolutionary excess. The Franco-Prussian War and its turbulent aftermath

Salvage and speculation 33 raised the stakes for the art market, turning auctions into spectacles of regime change, throwing new works into circulation and rebranding investment in art as a tool of physical and moral reconstruction. Upon first glance, it might seem that the Franco-Prussian War has limited implications for European museums. In France, the defeat was a source of intense humiliation: whilst the incoming republican government erected memorials to celebrate the episodes of resistance – such as defence of besieged Belfort – the conflict has occupied a shadowy place in the country’s major museums, partly rectified in 2017 with a landmark show at the Musée de l’Armée.91 Equally, the Paris Commune, which emerged out of the conflict, unleashed an unacknowledged civil war, and its commemoration and mythologisation was adopted only by unreconciled radicals. Yet the seeming absence of these events from public narratives and museums contrasts dramatically with the conflict’s role in unsettling and remaking collections on both sides of the Channel. It is in the realm of private, market activity, extending far beyond the framework of the nation state, that the full impact of the war on heritage can be measured. Consider Lady Charlotte Schreiber who entered Paris on 1 June 1871 and found it a ‘City of the Dead.’ Despite her shock at the burned out buildings on all sides, and stories that some of her contacts had been driven mad or died of fright, nothing could blunt her collecting instinct: ‘Within minutes of arriving in Paris, she went out into the ruins to try to discover what had become of her trusted dealers and whether there were any bargains to be had.’ Among her gleanings were an old maroon set of Chelsea china, which she donated to the South Kensington Museum in 1884.92 The practice of collecting is intimately tied to processes of dislocation, appropriation and reconfiguration, and thereby draws on destructive and creative energies alike. Quite apart from studying the physical traces of conflict, then, the history of collecting can illuminate war’s potency as an engine of cultural change, bringing new opportunities for consumers, middlemen and curators.

Notes 1. Guido Guerzoni, ‘The British Painting Market, 1789-1914’ in Economic History and the Arts, ed. by Michael North (Cologne: Bohlau, 1996), pp. 115–16. 2. Barbara Lasic, ‘Vendu à des anglais: Collecting of Eighteenth-Century French Decorative Arts, 1789-1830’ in Networks of Design: Proceedings of the 2008 Annual Conference of the Design History Society, ed. by Jonathan Glynne and Viv Minton (Boca Raton: Universal, 2009), pp. 183–89; Diana Davis, The Tastemakers: British Dealers and the Anglo-Gallic Interior, 1786–1865 (Los Angeles: Getty Publications 2020). 3. London and the Emergence of a European Art Market, 1780–1830, ed. by Susannah Avery-Quash and Christian Huemer (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2019). 4. According to the ‘Green Book’ in the Christie’s archives [CA], Louis-Napoleon’s furniture sale occurred on 21 May 1849, whereas Louis-Philippe’s pictures were sold on 6 May 1853, with other articles following on 28

34  Tom Stammers











May 1853 and China on 16 June 1857. I am extremely grateful to Lynda MacLeod for her patience and expert assistance when consulting the Christie’s archives. 5. Guerzoni, ‘The British Painting Market’, pp. 116–17. 6. Bénédicte Savoy, Patrimoine annexé: les biens culturels saisis par la France en Allemagne autour de 1800, 2 vols (Paris: Éditions Maison Sciences de l’Homme, 2003), vol. I, pp. 279, 282–85. 7. The idea of a ‘cultural atrocity’ is more often employed by scholars of the First World War, like Christina Kott; see Jo Tollebeek, Eline van Assche (eds.), Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict (Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2004). On the destruction in Strasbourg, see Rachel Chastril, The Siege of Strasbourg (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2014), pp. 94–100. 8. Emmanuel Fureix, L’oeil blessé: politiques de l’iconoclasme après la Révolution française (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2019), pp. 301–26. 9. See the essays in Le comte de Nieuwerkerke: art et pouvoir sous Napoléon III (Compiègne: Musée national du château de Compiègne, 2000). 10. See Barbara Lasic, ‘Splendid Patriotism: Richard Wallace and the Construction of the Wallace Collection’ in Journal of the History of Collections 21: 2 (2009), pp. 173–82; Suzanne Higgott, The Most Fortunate Man of His Day: Connoisseur, Collector and Philanthropist (London: The Wallace Collection, 2018), pp. 274–317. 11. Giovanna Gaeta-Bertelà, ‘La donazione Carrand al Museo Naziolae del Bargello’ in Arti del Medio Evo e del Rinascimento: Omaggio ai Carrand 1889–1989 (Florence: Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1989), pp. 1–38. 12. Ting Chang, ‘Collecting Asia: Théodore Duret’s Voyage en Asie and Henri Cernuschi’s Museum’, Oxford Art Journal, 25: 1 (2002), p. 21. 13. Cited in Katharine Baetjer, ‘Buying Pictures for New York: The Founding Purchase of 1871’, Metropolitan Museum Journal, 39 (2004), p. 163. 14. This poster is from the Gabrielle Enthoven collection at the V&A (S.663-2016). 15. See Impressionists in London: French Artists in Exile 1870-1914, ed. by Caroline Corbeau-Parsons (London: Tate Publishing, 2017); Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, ‘The Lu(c )re of London: French Artists and Art Dealers in the British Capital, 1859–1914’ in Monet’s London: Artists’ Reflections on the Thames, 1859–1914, ed. by John House, Chu, Jennifer Hardin (St Petersburg Florida: Museum of Fine Arts, 2005), pp. 39–54. 16. Edward Morris, French Art in Nineteenth Century Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 248. 17. Charles Morland Agnew, Travel Diary: The Continent, September 16th–18th 1871. NGA27.27.6, National Gallery London. I am very grateful to Alison Clarke for sharing this diary with me. 18. See Agnew’s Stock Book, 1871–1874, no. 6884, 6930, 6527. NGA21.1.1.4, National Gallery London. 19. For references to Petit and Bernheim, see Agnews Stock Books, 1871–1874, nos. 671, 7300, 7392, 8244. NGA21.1.1.4, National Gallery London. For a sense of the type of contemporary art collections formed in exactly this period, see Andrew Watson, ‘An Englishman in Paris: John Waterloo Wilson’s Remarkable Collection of French Nineteenth-Century Art’, Cahiers bruxellois, 48 (2016), pp. 83–104. 20. According to one Christie’s catalogue, Everard offered clients ‘many of its choicest pictures, which have been selected during the last three years with the greatest care and taste from the studios of the most celebrated artists, and from the various continental exhibitions.’ Catalogue of the last and most important portion of modern and continental pictures of Messrs P.L.

Salvage and speculation 35









Everard & Co (18 February 1871). See Jan Dirk Baetjens, ‘The Belgian Brand: Ernest Gambart and the British Market for Modern Belgian Art c.18501870’, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, 92–4 (2014), pp. 1277–1310. 21. Pamela Fletcher, ‘The Grand Tour on Bond Street: Cosmopolitanism and the Commercial Art Gallery in Victorian London’ in Visual Culture in Britain, 12: 2 (2011), pp. 139–53. 22. Prosper Everard was listed at Bedford Square, London and rue des Croisades in Brussels. See Catalogue of an important collection of high-class modern pictures by continental artists, 14 May 1870. 23. Jeremy Maas, Gambart, Prince of the Victorian Art World (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1975), pp. 222–23. 24. Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, ‘Introduction: The State of the Field’ in The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, ed. by Fletcher and Helmreich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), p. 9. 25. A sale at Christie’s on 9–10 March 1871 disposed of ‘the property of a French nobleman who had then sent them to London from Paris before the siege of that latter city’, in ‘Picture Sales’, The Art Journal, 1 May (1871), p. 140. This is Lugt catalogue 32362; see also ‘From Paris’ at Sotheby’s 3-4 April 1871 (32404) and ‘A French Nobleman’ at Christie’s on 20 April 1871 (32433). 26. According to day books (1871–1873) the consigner 764W is identified as Ch. Du Boullay, whose objects appeared in sales held on 23 June, 1 July and 10 July 1871. Christie’s Archives. 27. Catalogue of a valuable assemblage of decorative objects, consisting of old Sèvres and Dresden porcelain, miniatures, cinque-cento jewels, carvings in ivory and marble, venetian glass, arms, fine old French furniture, wood carvings, tapestry & including a small collection received from Paris (10 July 1871), p. 6 (no. 71). 28. For instance, a batch of 93 lots of Oriental bronzes and porcelain sold at Christie’s on 20 April 1871 for ‘Mme Boisthiery’ (Lugt: 32433) refers presumably to Hélène Butler-Fellows, the Dorset-born wife of Charles Alfred, marquis de Boisthiery, a long-serving prefect in multiple localities who owned a chateau near Tours. 29. Catalogue of eighteen capital ancient & modern pictures, the property of a nobleman; twenty important pictures, the property of the marquis du Lau (3 June 1871) (Lugt: 32516). 30. Caroline Weber, Proust’s Duchess: How Three Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2018), p. 181. 31. Paul Durand-Ruel, Memoirs of the First Impressionist Art Dealer (1831– 1922), ed. by Paul-Louis Durand-Ruel, Flavie Durand-Ruel, trans. Deke Dusinberre (Paris: Flammarion, 2014), p. 14, 66. 32. See ‘Nécrologie’ in Bulletin de la Société historique et archéologique du Périgord, 45 (1918), p. 102. 33. Day books (1871–1873) identifies 611W as Charles Haas, who had three pictures delivered to Christie’s on 30 May, of which one (the Romney) was sold in the Du Lau sale. Christie’s Archives. 34. See Day books (1871–1873) and annotated copy of Catalogue of eighteen capital ancient & modern pictures, no. 51. Christie’s Archives. 35. See annotated copy of Catalogue of eighteen capital ancient & modern pictures, no. 54 (735 crossed through and replaced with 700 guineas). Christie’s Archives. 36. See annotated copy of Catalogue of eighteen capital ancient & modern pictures, no. 49. Christie’s Archives. At the National Portrait Gallery the painting, now seen as from the studio of Van Dyck, is NPG 892.

36  Tom Stammers 37. See the annotated copy of Catalogue of eighteen capital ancient & modern pictures, no.49. Christie’s Archives. 38. Catalogue of the choice collection of pictures and decorative objects of the marquis H. de V (5 June 1871) (Lugt: 32517). 39. Émile Beaussire, La guerre étrangère et la guerre civile en 1870 et 1871 (Paris: Germer-Baillière, 1872), p. 220. 40. See Antoine Heron de Villefosse, Rapport à la société française de numismatique et d’archéologie, présenté dans la séance générale du 29 décembre 1871 (Paris: Imprimérie Jules Le Clere, 1872). 41. In the Day Books (1871–1973), Deloris appears frequently as a consigner in the spring and summer of 1871. See also the annotated copy of Catalogue of the choice collection. Christie’s Archives. 42. For the eighteenth-century French portraits by Nattier and, inherited through the Villefosse family, see Paul Eudel, L’hôtel Drouot et la curiosité en 1887– 1888, avec une préface par Edmond Bonnaffé (Paris: Charpentier, 1889), pp. 247–48. 43. A Stag Hunt by Wouwerman was bought by Thomas Maclean for 57 guineas 16. See the annotated copy of Catalogue of the choice collection, nos. 179, 211, 227. Christie’s Archives. 44. On this resistance, see the essays in Delicious Decadence? The Rediscovery of French Eighteenth-Century Painting in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Guillaume Faroult, Monica Preti, Christoph Voghterr (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). 45. See the annotated copy of Catalogue of the choice collection, nos. 212, 238, 243. Christie’s Archives. 46. Villars appears as 332 W in the Day Books (1871–1873), and is recorded s having brought two crates, one containing 33 pictures, the other 20, on 4 April 1871. Christie’s Archives. 47. See the annotated copy of Catalogue of the choice collection, pp. 27–28. Christie’s Archives. 48. Annotated copy of Catalogue of the choice collection, no. 305. Christie’s Archives. 49. Barre and Steinmitz appear as 365 W in the Day Books (1871–1873). Christie’s Archives. 50. Cited in Raphael Dargent, L’imperatrice Eugenie: l’obsession de l’honneur (Paris: Belin, 2017), p. 569. 51. Marie des Garets, L’imperatrice Eugenie en exil: la mort de Napoleon III et du Prince imperial 1870–1880 (Paris: Editions Paleo, 2009), p. 31. 52. Catherine Granger, L’Empereur et les arts. La Liste Civile de Napoléon III (Paris: École des Chartes, 2005), pp. 441–44. On her battle over patrimony, see also Elizabeth McQueen, Empress Eugénie and the Arts: Politics and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 269–317. 53. Granger, L’Empereur, p. 382. 54. Catalogue of a Portion of the Magnificent Jewels, the Property of a Distinguished Personage; also, few fans and parasols (24 June 1872) (Lugt: 33321). 55. See annotated copy of Catalogue of a Portion of the Magnificent Jewels, no.74 (it did not reach its reserve price when bidding closed at 780 guineas). Christie’s Archives. 56. Bertrand Morel, Les joyaux de la couronne de France: les objets du sacrés des rois et des reines suivis de l‘histoire des joyaux de la couronne de Francois Ier à nos jours (Paris: Fonds Mercator/Albin Michel, 1988), p. 354.

Salvage and speculation 37 57. Catalogue of the Magnificent Collection of Ancient & Modern Pictures and Water-colour drawings of Mr Brooks, of the St James Gallery, no.17 Regent Street (29 April 1871), p. 8 (no. 39). 58. Galérie de MM. Pereire: catalogue des tableaux anciens & modernes des diverses écoles dont la vente aura lieu Boulevard des italiens no. 26 (6–8 March 1872). 59. ‘Picture sales in Paris’, Daily News, 13 March 1872. 60. Persigny’s paintings (including a fine Terburg) were sold at Drouot on 4 April, with the objects from Chamarande following on 6–8 May 1872. See the notices in Chronique des arts et de curiosité, 31 mars and 28 avril 1872. 61. Granger, L’Empereur, p. 384. 62. Michele Battesti, Plon-Plon. Le Bonaparte Rouge (Paris: Perrin, 2010), p. 517. 63. Alain Strauss-Schom, The Shadow Emperor: A Biography of Napoleon III (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2018), pp. 4117–18. 64. Marie-Claude Dejean de la Batie, ‘La maison pompéienne du Prince Napoléon, avenue Montaigne’ in Gazette des beaux-arts, 87 (1976), pp. 127–34. 65. See the annotated copy of Catalogue of Works of Art from the Collection of his Imperial Highness the Prince Napoleon: Fine Pictures by Old Masters, Chiefly of the Italian School, Magnificent Cinque-cento Bronze Figures, Majolica, Marbles, Sèvres Vases, Arms and Armour, Saved from the Conflagration of the Palais-Royal (9 May 1872), p. 7–11. Christie’s Archives (Lugt: 33182). 66. The life-size Bacchus and a Faun (c. 1580) was sold to Wareham before passing into the collection of Andrew Mellon and entering the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. (1937.1.1133). See annotated copy of Catalogue of works of art of his imperial highness, nos. 196, 220, 221. Christie’s Archives/ National Art Library. 67. Battesti, Plon-Plon, p. 516. 68. See the remarkable ‘Preface’ in Catalogue of works of art of his imperial highness, p. 3. 69. ‘Picture sales in Paris’, Daily News, 13 March 1872. 70. On the apocalyptic appeal of Vesuvius in the nineteenth century, see Goran Blix, From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), p. 213. 71. ‘Picture sales in Paris’, Daily News, 13 March 1872. 72. These extraordinary paintings included Meissonnier’s 1814, Géricault’s Cuirassier blessé and a version of David’s À Marat. Durand-Ruel, Memoirs, pp. 55–59. 73. William Roberts, Memorials of Christie’s: A record of art sales from 1760 to 1896 2 vols (London: George Bell and Sons, 1897), pp. 222–23. 74. It came into the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1913 via the Benjamin Altman bequest (14.40.638). Catalogue of works of art of his imperial highness, no. 321. 75. See La circulation des œuvres d’art/The circulation of works of art in the revolutionary era 1789-1848, ed. by Preti-Hamard, Roberta Panzanelli (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes/Getty Research Institute, 2007). 76. Merton Russell-Coates, Home and Abroad: An Autobiography of an Octagenarian, 2 vols (Bournemouth, 1921), vol. 1, p. 39. I am grateful to Simon Spier for this reference. 77. On the global dimension, see Acquiring Cultures: Histories of World Art on Western Markets, ed. by Charlotte Guichard, Christine Howald, Bénédicte Savoy (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018).

38  Tom Stammers 78. See the recent exhibition ‘Wilhelm von Bode, une pensée en action’ which ran from September 2017 to February 2018 at the Musée des beaux arts in Strasbourg, with Pascal Griener as scientific advisor. For broader perspectives on this antagonism see Mathilde Arnoux, Les musées français et la peinture allemande, 1871–1981 (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2007). 79. Among the major buyers at the Hermitage sale were Andrew Mellon (donor to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC) and Calouste Gulbenkian (whose collections, through the political accident of the Second World War) are now in Lisbon. See Selling Russia’s Treasures: The Soviet Trade in Nationalized Art, 1917–38, ed. by Natalya Semenova and Nicolas Iljine (New York: Abbeville Press, 2013). On the role of dealers outside of Germany who trafficked in looted art both during and after the war see Jonathan Petropoulos, ‘Art Dealer Networks in the Third Reich and in the Postwar Period’, Journal of Contemporary History 52: 3 (2017), pp. 546–65. 80. These are copies after decorations found at the Palace of Tiberius (6461872/653-1872), and documentation can be found in the archives at Blythe House. 81. Stacey Pierson, Private Collecting, Exhibitions, and the Shaping of Art History in London: The Burlington Fine Arts Club (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 29–30. 82. Caroline Chapman, John & Josephine: The Creation of the Bowes Museum (Barnard Castle: Bowes Museum, 2010), pp. 109–120. For a more detailed discussion of the Bowes reactions in 1870–1871, see the forthcoming PhD by Lindsay Macnaughton (University of Durham). 83. See Jose de los Llanos, ‘La collection Dutuit: deux frères, un musée’ in Choisir Paris: les grandes donations aux musées de la Ville de Paris (‘Actes de colloques’, INHA online]. 84. On British revulsion for democratic excesses, see Mattthew Beaumont, ‘Cacotopianism, the Commune and England’s anti-Communist Imaginary, 1870–1900’, English Literary Review, 73 (2006), pp. 465–87. 85. Jordanna Bailkin, The Culture of Property: The Crisis of Liberalism in Modern Britain (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), p. 183. 86. Courbet to Joute, March 1872; Courbet to Castagnary, 16 January 1873. Letters of Gustave Courbet, ed. by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 455, 472. 87. See Tom Stammers, ‘Catholics, Collectors and the Commune: Heritage and Counter-Revolution, 1860-90’, French Historical Studies, 37: 1 (2014), pp. 58–87. 88. For these experiences, see Philip Gilbert Hamerton, Round My House: Notes on Rural Life in France in Peace and War (New ed.) (London: Seeley and Co, 1908). 89. This is an allusion to shipworm. Hamerton, The Intellectual Life [1873] (London: Macmillan and Co, 1929), pp. 295–96. 90. Hamerton, The Intellectual Life, p. 296. 91. See the exhibition catalogue France-Allemagne(s) 1870–71: la guerre, La Commune, les mémoires, eds. by Sylvie Le Ray-Burimi, Christophe Pommier (Paris: Gallimard, 2017). 92. Jacqueline Yallop, Magpies, Squirrels & Thieves: How the Victorians Collected the World (London: Atlantic Books, 2011), pp. 128–30.

2

Treasure, triumph and trespass The place of conflict in the collecting and display of ‘Priam’s Treasure’ Zoe Mercer-Golden

Introduction It should be a truth universally acknowledged that a great many museum collections contain objects acquired through conflict. While many institutions are increasingly transparent about how, when and why they acquired works in their collections, many others remain reticent to make visible through displays and other educational efforts the often-fraught stories of how they acquired objects. This essay will look at the case of one set of objects that, through different kinds of conflict, has been divided amongst various museums, and will explore the legacies of this collecting through conflict in the museums’ displays and educational materials. Ultimately, how these institutions choose to acknowledge or not the ways in which they acquired the objects raises important issues about how museums create and present historical and cultural narratives. These issues are particularly pressing in the case of narratives about different kinds of conflict, and the consequences of self-serving and selective narratives for the publics that museums serve. No museum, and indeed no museum display, can be truly ‘neutral’ or ‘objective,’ but the case of these objects serves as a powerful reminder of the extent to which many museums tend to fall in line with narratives that justify particular national beliefs – narratives that may go so far as to rationalise the conflict that led to the acquisition of objects in the first place. This essay is an exploration of the narratives presented by four museums about a remarkable set of objects, known problematically as ‘Priam’s Treasure,’ that have been the source of legal, political and curatorial conflict for more than 140 years. The objects were discovered in the nineteenth century by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in the ruins of what he believed was historical Troy in Hissarlik (sometimes spelled Hisarlik), present-day Turkey, then part of the Ottoman Empire. Schliemann smuggled most of these artifacts to Athens, where some of them remain today, thanks to his Greek widow’s generosity to her home nation; in 1881 he gave, with dubious legality, many of the most important Trojan artifacts to the state museums in Berlin, from where many of the works were removed

40  Zoe Mercer-Golden in 1945 by the Soviet army.1 Thus, the objects have arrived in their current locations through two kinds of removal or, to put it more harshly, looting: colonial and military. Both collecting mechanisms are the product of different kinds of conflict while also promoting further conflict, not least of which has been more than a century of political and legal fighting over who owns the objects and where they belong. Today, the most spectacular finds are currently scattered across four nations and four museums: the Istanbul Archaeological Museums (IAM), the Neues Museum in Berlin (NM), the National Archaeological Museum in Athens (NAM) and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow (PSM). The approach that this essay will take to examining the narratives put forward by these museums in their curatorial schemes is forensic: close reading of displays and interpretation materials to indicate what and how these museums attempt to educate their audiences, defend their own histories of collecting through conflict and the extent to which they suffered through someone else’s collecting through conflict. The case discussed here, of ‘Priam’s Treasure,’ referred to throughout this essay as Schliemann’s Trojan treasure, is important in its own right, as any decision – curatorial, legal or political – made about the artifacts would have implications for thousands of objects and many museums. But the case also has larger importance as a case study that sheds light on the ways in which curatorial decisions can be made, and interpretation schemes mobilised, to defend museums’ and nations’ own self-interests and to minimise or efface complex histories of conflict, often to the detriment of the presentation of the objects themselves and the experiences of museum visitors. This essay will take no moral stance on the question of object repatriation, but will seek to contextualise and explore the self-justifying half-truths, convenient fictions and outright falsehoods put forward by the four institutions that hold these artifacts, while also explaining the sources and functions of the interpretive approaches taken by these institutions, to argue for the importance of greater transparency, honesty and self-awareness in the presentation of important works of art and cultural history.

Schliemann’s Trojan treasure The story of Schliemann’s Trojan treasure starts with the telling of one of the most famous wars of all time: the Trojan War as relayed in Homer’s Iliad. It is only too obvious that the objects’ possible connection with one of the greatest conflicts of the ancient world, whether fictional or real, as well as one of the foundational texts of world literature is a key part of what makes them so desirable to the museums that house them. Current scholarship suggests that the Troy of the Iliad existed in the thirteenth or twelfth century BCE, with Homer’s epic verses composed around the eighth century. From at least that time, Troy has lingered in the imagination of the

Treasure, triumph and trespass 41 greater Mediterranean world for many reasons, not least of which is the fabled treasure of Priam. Yet after the time of Constantine, the location of historical Troy was no longer easy to determine. Despite the great appeal of finding the city, archaeologists and classicists remained uncertain about where and how to find Troy until the second half of the nineteenth century. Heinrich Schliemann was one of these nineteenth-century archaeologists who hoped, in addition to proving the historicity of the Iliad and finding the treasure of Troy, to secure fame and status for himself in the larger world. Through a combination of determination and guile, Schliemann amassed a fortune by his 40s, and decided to spend the rest of his life finding the historical sites associated with the mythological places he became obsessed with in childhood. 2 Schliemann appears to have relied on advice from Frank Calvert, a consul and sometime amateur archaeologist in the Dardanelles who owned land at Hissarlik, a large non-natural mound, that the site might be historical Troy. 3 Schliemann began digging at Hissarlik without a firman, an official permit.4 Under the terms of the firman that he eventually received, he was required to give half of his finds to the Ottoman authorities. 5 After disappointing seasons in 1870–1872, Schliemann uncovered the treasures that would make him world famous in 1873, supposedly in May or June, though there is evidence to suggest that he doctored his diaries to improve the story of discovery.6 Schliemann, seemingly eager to promote the story of his wife as his helpmeet, claimed that the two of them hid the artifacts of ‘Priam’s Treasure’ from their Turkish employees in her shawl. While more recent scholarship has indicated that Sophia, his wife, was not present at the dig when the discovery was made, Schliemann was able to hide the discovery of the artifacts from the Ottoman authorities.7 The works he found were spectacular: a gold ‘sauceboat,’ gold diadems, gold rings, silver and bronze vessels, enough to make his name as an archaeologist, and, more importantly for Schliemann, enough for him to feel confident that he had found Priam’s historical Troy and treasure.8 Schliemann had the works removed to a Calvert family property and then to his home in Athens, where he began to advertise their presence to the world.9 The bulk of the treasure went on view in his house in Athens, now the Numismatic Museum, from where he loaned the works to the South Kensington Museum in London for a major exhibition in 1877 as part of his campaign to determine where to donate the works to maximise his self-promotion.10 Depending on whom one consults, Schliemann was either a surprisingly careful archaeologist, given his limited training and the comparatively nascent development of archaeology as a discipline, or a brutal destroyer of historical remains, relentless in his search for gold, and a thief besides.11 Despite Schliemann’s run-ins with the Ottoman authorities, who he eventually paid both for the finds and the right to continue digging, and

42  Zoe Mercer-Golden criticism even then that he worked aggressively and sometimes carelessly, he excavated at Hissarlik until 1890.12 He made important finds until the end, including ceremonial axe heads made of rare minerals, more jewellery, and anthropomorphic statuettes, most of which he donated to the museums in Berlin as a gift to his nation of origin after being rebuffed by museums in Britain.13 Schliemann believed that his finds dated to the period of Priam’s Troy; scholars today believe that they were from more than a thousand years before that, and that Schliemann’s interpretation of the various archaeological layers he unearthed (and perhaps destroyed) was profoundly flawed.14 Ongoing excavation still has not proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, largely because of missing inscriptions, that Hissarlik was Troy, though most museums and archaeologists appear comfortable referring to it as such.15 As a result, this essay will use the terminology ‘Schliemann’s Trojan treasure’ to refer the objects unearthed both in 1873 and after at Hissarlik, as there is ample evidence to suggest that the objects have nothing to do with Priam and were found at the site that is generally considered to be the likeliest location for historical Troy.

Conflict in collecting Schliemann made his Trojan discoveries during a period in which the collecting of valuable artifacts and the founding of museums became closely aligned with nationalism and imperialism, movements that fed and were fed by political and military conflicts. The nineteenth century saw the growth of European colonial empires that relentlessly swept up important objects from territories overseas, bringing the works to be housed in national museums, many of them, like the NAM in Athens (established in 1829) and the Neues Museum (opened in 1855) quite or comparatively newly founded. Artifacts housed in these museums signalled the military might and wealth of the nations that collected them; they also allowed those nations to present narratives of cultural development that presented a vision of civilization progressing from the ancient societies in the Near and Middle East to classical antiquity, culminating in so-called modern societies in places like Britain, Greece and Germany.16 Despite the passage of laws against the removal of archaeological finds, like the one passed by the Ottoman Empire in 1884, artifacts were not necessarily safe from foreign colonial excavators. Partially to compete with the national museums constructed in places like Germany and Greece, the Ottoman Empire founded its own museum of archaeology in 1891.17 In a newly independent Turkey, national coalitions of archaeologists pushed back against the Eurocentric narratives that privileged Greece and Rome by creating a narrative of cultural development in which the story of ancient Troy formed part of the fabric of ancient Anatolian civilizations.18 Even through the 1920s, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey was not seen as fit to care

Treasure, triumph and trespass 43 for its own artifacts, which gave major European powers an assumed permission to hold onto the works they already possessed and to continue presenting the narratives of ‘superior’ classical development they displayed alongside the works.19 Yet, for all that the Trojan works were used to evoke and depict a pre-classical past, they represented a triumph on the part of their German and Greek givers: one that supported the overall cultural and political programs of these museums and encouraged further nationalism, in some cases positioning the home country as inheritors of a glorious ancient past. 20 The IAM made do with the remnants of gold Schliemann left behind, despite what today appears to be a very strong legal and cultural claim to the works.21 In these cases, ideology led to conflict – and to collecting. At the end of the Second World War, many of the most important works from Berlin disappeared into Russia, where they continue to be held as state-sanctioned war booty, framed as just compensation for the German destruction of property and life during the war. 22 Schliemann had donated approximately 9,000 works to the German state museums, mostly from his digs at Troy. 23 When Germany itself came under threat, the artifacts were divided by importance, boxed, and hidden in safe locations. 24 The ‘golden boxes’ which contained the most valuable Trojan works were taken to a flak tower near the Berlin Zoo, where they were removed by the departing Soviet forces at the end of the war. 25 For more than 40 years, the Trojan objects were hidden in Moscow along with thousands of other artifacts and archives. 26 The status of the bulk of the collection remained unknown outside Russia until journalists published articles indicating the survival of the objects. 27 After protracted negotiations and an inspection by an international team of archaeologists, the most important Trojan artifacts finally went on view in 1996. 28 Tellingly, the site chosen for the display of the artifacts was the PSM, which had been imagined since its opening in 1912 as a major museum for European art and archaeology in Russia, but which, since its founding, has been a museum dominated by casts, particularly of ancient art. 29 Schliemann’s Trojan treasure is thus the star of the PSM’s collection of ancient art. Stalin imagined a museum in Moscow on the model of great institutions like the state museums in Berlin; the PSM, despite its works from Hissarlik, is arguably unable to compete in terms of overall collection quality and importance with the other museums discussed in this essay. An agreement from 1943 suggests that Schliemann’s Trojan treasure should be returned to Germany, as do the agreements signed by Germany and Russia in 1990s, though the Russians have since passed a series of laws that nationalise the artifacts, valued at more than a billion dollars, as war reparations. 30 The Russian argument that the Trojan artifacts are necessary recompense has served to enrich their own collections at Germany’s cost. In Russia, as in Germany, Greece and Turkey, the story of how the works arrived to be where they

44  Zoe Mercer-Golden are through conflicts reaching from Homer through Schliemann to the present day has become a critical part of how the works are displayed to and interpreted for museum publics.

Conflict in display The legacy of different kinds of conflict – colonial, military, political and legal – haunts the displays of Schliemann’s Trojan treasure in all four museums.31 Unsurprisingly, the narratives each museum puts forward in its displays fits in with larger political or cultural objectives of the countries where they are located, and presents each museum’s legal claims to the works, present or absent. Turkey’s overall narrative emphasises the unique position of Troy as a meeting point between East and West, the nation’s tragic loss of treasure at the hands of a wily foreign archaeologist, and Troy’s place in the development of Anatolian civilisations. In Germany, the works are presented as the legally purchased property of a German citizen whose lifelong obsession led to careful archaeological excavation and a generous gift to the German people; the loss of many of the most valuable objects to the Russians is framed as illegal theft during war, with only replicas of some works on view in Germany. Greece, emphasising its role as the centre of the ancient Hellenic world, places its Trojan artifacts solidly in the context of their aesthetic and cultural similarities to artifacts from Greek city states, and frames Schliemann and his wife as patriots working on behalf of the Greek people. Russia’s claims rest on three divergent narrative threads: first, Schliemann’s early career in Russia, his first marriage to a Russian, and the existence of his three Russian offspring; second, the similarities amongst Trojan artifacts and the ancient and contemporary costumes and ritual possessions of peoples within the Byzantine and Russian cultural orbit and third, a legal claim to these objects as war repayment.32 These wildly different narratives, which vary considerable in how accurately they reflect historical truths, are consistently put forward in the interpretation materials provided to visitors in the four museums: through the museum plans and room arrangements, in wall panels and labels, handouts and audio guides. Looking at each of these forms of interpretation forensically illuminates the extent to which many of these museums’ displays are shaped by the museums’ or their respective nations’ own agendas, rather than a desire to educate audiences or focus on the objects themselves. Rather than offering up self-reflective narratives that present the possibility of multiple interpretations, these displays maintain a degree of defensiveness that limits audiences’ abilities to learn about the artifacts themselves, the conflicts that led to their current location, and how to think critically inside museums. Despite the differences amongst these museums’ narratives, and how they have chosen to present them in their interpretation materials, each of

Treasure, triumph and trespass 45 the institutions draws upon many of the same themes repeatedly to argue for the ‘truth’ of their version of events. The first, and arguably the most important theme, is historical and aesthetic: the value of these artifacts as unique objects that help illuminate critical moments in history and shed light on an important region of the ancient world. The second reflects the artifacts’ place in a historical continuum that extends from prehistory to the classical era and into the present day, and in some cases, a nation’s self-positioning as an inheritor of parts of that historical legacy. Third is Schliemann’s own presence in the narrative, either as an agent of destruction or discovery, a thief or a hero. A fourth theme that varies from nation to nation but which is nonetheless a shared approach is a patriotic, nationalistic approach that emphasises the museum and nation’s place in the story of the works’ discovery and preservation. The final, entirely predictable, theme is both legal and curatorial: each museum’s self-positioning as a protector of the artifacts from Troy and their legal rights of possession to the works. Despite the variations in how these themes are made manifest in the interpretation materials, their existence – and repetition – in the materials of all four museums attests to how museums construct a sense of legitimate guardianship through displays. Within the context of this discussion, virtually all aspects of these museums’ displays are considered as texts, to be examined and critiqued. These museums, with their divergent narratives and specific claims, are similar in the care and thoroughness with which they present their versions of events. To limit the scope of the discussion, only displays inside each of the museums will be considered, moving from the most general – these museums’ plans and room arrangements – to the most specific – individual object labels and sections of audio guides. Each of these materials, individually and together, amounts to these museums’, and by extension, their home nations’, explanation of how these artifacts arrived to or departed from them, through and despite conflict, and why they are justified in keeping them. Each of these museums uses its plan, though in different ways, to begin to establish a claim to the works. The IAM has placed its Trojan works on the top floor of the ‘New Museum’ building, which contains its Roman and Greek collections as well as galleries devoted to Istanbul’s history. The Trojan collection is arranged on one side of a long hallway devoted to the history of Anatolian cultures, with the Trojan works taking up more than half of the gallery. In Istanbul, the works are placed in conversation with Anatolian works from the same period; in Athens, a similar tactic is used, but the works displayed adjacent to and all around the Trojan artifacts are from Greek islands and prehistoric Greek cultures. In Moscow, the works are shown in Room 3 of the PSM, where they form the centre point of the galleries on the Museum’s far side, a dramatic counterpoint to plaster ceramics and statues from the Ancient Near East, Egypt, Greece and

46  Zoe Mercer-Golden Rome, a point of transition from the ancient to the classical world. The NM in Berlin has also chosen to display its Trojan collection in a dramatically decorated gallery with six domes that also serves as a point of transition from prehistoric to more classical works upstairs. In each of these museums except for the IAM, which has chosen to emphasise the collection’s importance through sheer mass, the Trojan artifacts are a fulcrum, a key moment in these museums’ narratives of historical and cultural development that helps establish their bona fides as significant collections of ancient and classical art. At the PSM and NM, this importance is further emphasised through decorative programs and lighting that reinforce the visual power and historical importance of the artifacts. The arrangement of objects in each of these museums’ displays highlights the significance of Schliemann’s Trojan treasure to their collections. In each room, the most spectacular finds – those associated with the hoards of gold and other precious materials that Schliemann uncovered – tend to be most visible to draw visitors into the room, as Schliemann shared his penchant for gold and other treasure with most of humanity. At the NAM, this means that the gold is literally front and centre in the case, above a label indicating that the artifacts were a gift of Schliemann’s widow. The NM, before the objects were taken, chose to make golden replicas of artifacts now in Moscow that, then as now, indicate in a visually striking fashion what has been lost. The silver vessels are amongst the most important pieces from Schliemann’s Trojan treasure that remain in Berlin, and those are presented in the centre of the room’s main wall, in the middle of most of the room’s interpretation materials, in what functions as the central display position in the room. Even though the IAM has a vast quantity of objects from Hissarlik, only a very small number of these finds are made of precious metal. These are carefully displayed at the very beginning of the Troy display, adjacent to the main interpretation materials, where they take pride of place. Unsurprisingly, given the quantity of rare objects from Troy at its disposal, the PSM is spoiled for choice about what to put where. The works placed in the centre of the room – the ceremonial axe heads made of lapis and jadeite and the gold ‘sauceboat’ – and on the far side of the room – the gold diadems – are perhaps the most iconic objects discovered by Schliemann, and illustrate the extraordinary nature of the artifacts in Russia. Each of these museums has made the most of the most obviously treasure-like works in their collections, not necessarily because these works are the most historically or culturally important – indeed, much of the gold on display looks relatively similar – but arguably because humans are simply more attracted to gold.33 The museums fall, to a lesser extent, into the same trap that Schliemann did, privileging works of precious metal over objects that may be able to teach as much or more. The placement of interpretation materials within each room structures each museum’s narrative of how the objects came to or were taken from

Treasure, triumph and trespass 47 them through conflict and why, laying out each of their claims to the objects. In both Berlin and Istanbul, wall texts are arranged largely against one wall, and are clearly designed to be amongst the first aspects of the display to be digested. Both the IAM and the NM tackle the subject of the Homeric myths, the symbolic importance of Troy, Schliemann’s role in the discovery of these works, and the later archaeological digs that have taken place at the site, though not in the same order and with very different interpretations of the same subjects. Both museums also place additional interpretation materials on or near each case of artifacts to offer more room to discuss individual objects or moments in Trojan history, again to different ends. In Athens and Moscow, there is less interpretation: fewer wall panels, fewer labels. The NAM offers a discussion of Schliemann and the Homeric myths at length in its Mycenaean displays, and so contextualises the Trojan artifacts within the cultural, maritime and trade networks of ancient Greece. Three of the museums make a point of having virtually all of their materials available in both the local language and English; not so in Russia, where the two primary wall panels and other interpretation materials are either exclusively or primarily in Russian.34 From almost the moment of walking into the gallery devoted to Schliemann’s Trojan treasure in Moscow, it becomes clear that the display is designed for Russian, rather than international audiences, which becomes even more obvious when the highly political panels are translated.35 In all cases, interpretation materials are designed to play an important role in the display of the objects and an even more important role in helping audiences understand the artifacts’ meaning and significance and each museum’s case as to why Schliemann’s Trojan treasure should be returned to them or remain in their custody. In each of these museum displays, the text and images featured on wall panels is critical to each museum’s presentation of its right to the objects, beginning with a discussion of Homer’s Troy and myths about it. In Athens, the Homeric epics are sometimes used as a framing device, as collection highlights were spotlighted through a 2017 temporary exhibition called ‘Odysseys,’ which quoted from Homer and other Greek literary figures to suggest connections amongst the objects within the collection. The PSM introduces its Trojan collection by referring to the writing of Homer’s verses in the eighth century in one of the two primary wall panels, and then returns to the theme later in the same wall panel to explain how the collection has been dated over time. Homer’s Troy, and the war depicted in the Iliad, becomes a necessary point of reference for the artifacts in the collection. In both Berlin and Istanbul, the discussion of Homer and mythological Troy covers several wall panels, though these discussions vary considerably.36 At the IAM, three panels (two that are partially or wholly in English) discuss the plot of the Iliad and go on to present the ways in which Troy, as symbolic source of legitimacy, was used by political leaders on both sides of Western and Eastern political and military conflicts,

48  Zoe Mercer-Golden perhaps most importantly for Turkey by Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror, who, according to the wall text (itself deriving from Montaigne), is supposed to have claimed that his conquering of Constantinople amounted to Hector’s revenge against the Greeks. The wall panels in Berlin, as in Istanbul, begin by explaining who Homer was and the importance of his poems, then transition to a discussion of Schliemann’s search for and dating of the ruins what he believed to be historical Troy. A final panel (the sixth of six in Berlin) poses the question of whether Troy was in fact a real place, a question that, while relevant, serves to undercut much of the interpretation presented earlier in which the objects’ link to a period in historical Troy seems to be an almost foregone conclusion. As each of these museums present, sometimes in detail, information about the mythical Trojan War, Homer’s poetry, and the ongoing symbolic importance of both, it is worth considering whether these panels offer too much interpretation on a city and poem that, thus far, has not conclusively been proved to have anything to do with the artifacts on display.37 Indeed, the final panel in the NM almost seems to answer its own question about to what extent a discussion of Homer’s Troy and the ongoing appeal of the Trojan war should guide a reading of these works. Schliemann is a towering figure on these major wall panels, and how he is depicted – as a forward-thinking archaeologist or looting colonialist – as well as the parts of his biography that are emphasised support each museum’s version of how and why they acquired or lost the works. The NAM presents Schliemann repeatedly as the father of Greek archaeological discovery, both in the wall panels devoted to his Mycenaean discoveries as well as in a small semi-permanent display in the main hall of the Museum about him and his wife Sophia. In the display, Schliemann’s interest in finding historical Troy is aligned with his interest in finding his own ‘Penelope,’ whom he discovered in Sophia, a young Greek woman who was a fellow lover of Homer and who became his co-excavator. While the actual story is quite a bit more complicated than the panel suggests, both Schliemann and Sophia appear as philhellenes who generously (and legally) gave the artifacts they uncovered to the nation.38 The NM chooses, unsurprisingly, to emphasise Schliemann’s German heritage. In contrast, the Schliemann who appears in the PSM seems almost Russian: a lengthy paragraph details his relationship to the nation through his marriage, business interests and children, neglecting to mention that Schliemann abandoned this Russian life before excavating at Troy. Here, Schliemann is presented as an ‘amateur’ who relied on the expertise of Calvert to determine where to dig. Like the IAM, the PSM is quick to point out that Schliemann initially dug illegally, which is quite different from the version of events presented by the NM and NAM, in which Schliemann negated this behaviour through his generous eventual payment for the works. The PSM materials offer a portrait of a Russophile whose success was at least partially due to luck; at the IAM, Schliemann is presented as a reckless early archaeologist from abroad who did irreparable

Treasure, triumph and trespass 49 damage to the artifacts he found and to the sites he excavated while also ignoring contemporary laws about exporting objects, actions that led to the dispersal of Trojan objects in such a way as to make it difficult to study them. It is impossible to ignore the extent to which these interpretations, both through omission and the arguments presented, reflect the political and curatorial interests of each institution and the nations in which they are based, as well as the extent to which each nation benefited from or lost out to colonial and military removal. None of these interpretations is wholly without merit, but all are profoundly self-serving. Virtually all these wall panels include a discussion of these museums’ legal and political claims to the objects as derived from their positioning themselves relative to the question of colonial and military removal of the objects. These texts often occupy as much – or more – space as a discussion of the artifacts’ cultural and historical importance. The NM swiftly transitions from a brief discussion of the hoard of treasure Schliemann unearthed to a statement about Schliemann’s generous overpayment to the Ottoman Empire after he removed the works, which ‘meant that the finds became legally his property.’ From there, the museum calls out Russia for holding ‘to this day in breach of international law’ the artifacts it took as ‘booty’ and ‘spoils of war’. Unsurprisingly, the NM does not dwell on Germany’s role as the primary instigator of said war. The PSM, of course, offers a totally different narrative: ‘the Trojan treasures, together with other valuables, were taken to USSR as a partial compensation for the damage caused by the fascists,’ suggesting that Russia’s actions were both legal and justifiable.39 The NAM follows a similar line of reasoning to the NM – that Schliemann appropriately compensated the Ottoman authorities, and thus he and his wife had a right to give their finds away – while the IAM makes very clear that Schliemann’s removal of the objects amounted to little more than surreptitious colonial looting. Indeed, only a miniscule mention is made in the IAM of the money that Schliemann supposedly handed over to the Ottoman authorities, money that theoretically funded the predecessor of the IAM itself.40 Each of these narratives is, to a greater or lesser extent, arguable, but each ignores critical points, and offers an interpretation that allows the museums to advocate their own legitimate ownership of the works. Yet if a visitor only saw one of these interpretations, it would only be too easy for him or her to imagine that what they read was the whole story, and so leave with a partial, inaccurate view of the conflicts that facilitated the gain or loss of these artefacts and who claims these works and why. In most of these museums, the archaeological, historical and cultural importance of the artifacts gets comparatively short shrift on wall panels. In Athens, the discussion of the functions of the Trojan objects is perhaps the most involved, as the works are discussed in the context of the development of Bronze Age styles and trade routes in the Aegean. The PSM, which has perhaps the weakest legal claim to the artifacts because

50  Zoe Mercer-Golden of the international agreements indicating the works should be returned to Germany if not Turkey, also offers a sizeable amount of information about the value and importance of the artifacts using an entire wall panel to discuss the most spectacular of Schliemann’s finds. The NM only briefly touches on the value and importance of the objects from Troy, referring to ‘Priam’s Treasure’ and the other objects in the major golden hoards in the context of Germany’s legal arguments for repatriation, only discussing one specific group of objects on a wall panel: the silver vessels, which are among the small number of metallic, treasure-like objects from Schliemann’s donation still in Berlin. None of the five wall panels that frame the IAM Trojan collection present any real information about specific objects on display. If the PSM’s approach represents one end of the spectrum – devoting approximately half of its most visible wall text to a discussion of specific artifacts – the IAM strategy is the other extreme, deferring a discussion of the artifacts to other parts of the gallery. Each museum seems to have its own relationship to how best to acknowledge the value and importance of these works, with the PSM, arguably in possession of the most important and eye-catching Trojan collection and the most dubious claim to it, strategically shifting focus from the conflict over legal arguments even as the other museums compensate for their lack of ‘treasure’ with more interpretation. Individual object labels more accurately describe the value and importance of specific artifacts, though these vary in quantity and quality across the museums, and rarely reflect the same degree of care as given to the wall panels. The NAM merely numbers and lists the works on display, with a brief mention of the objects’ functions and an acknowledgement of who donated them; the PSM offers explanations of the artifacts on bilingual object labels, which vary considerably in how thorough and thoroughly proofread they are. Collection highlights, like the ritual axe heads, get longer labels with a geographical and cultural context for understanding how, when and where they were made and what functions they served. Other, apparently less important works are either simply named and numbered or get one sentence of interpretation. While none of this is unreasonable – indeed, museums usually limit the quantity of text in their galleries – the labels appear to be the same as those used in the 1996 exhibition in which the works were first re-displayed, and thus the research that some of these labels draw upon is at least 20 years out of date.41 In the IAM, the only objects in the Trojan collection that get more than a cursory label identifying what the object is are the Schliemann finds made of gold and precious metal. Ceramic, stone and metallic works made of less valuable materials are all framed by large wall texts that offer a description of the layer of the city from which they were excavated; individual objects get little to no discussion. None of the interpretation materials appear to have been updated since the artifacts in Moscow were finally acknowledged in the early 1990s, suggesting that these displays are probably at least 25 years old, and thus

Treasure, triumph and trespass 51 have not benefited from decades of research and discovery.42 The NM takes a relatively similar approach to the IAM, providing limited historical and cultural framing for the objects in each case along with identifying information for individual works, though these texts appear to be more up to date than the IAM’s or the PSM’s. While these museums may have good reasons for limiting the amount of interpretation they offer on individual objects or case displays – museum fatigue is a well-documented syndrome, and these museums are large – it is necessary to acknowledge the extent to which these museums’ main wall interpretive panels overshadow individual object labels and case displays, particularly given the emphasis of those panels on mythical Troy, Homer, Schliemann and their own legal claims to the work because of or despite different kinds of conflict. In addition to the various forms of text on walls and display cases, two of the museums also offer supplemental interpretation materials in the form of a guide to the collection and an in-room handout, materials that extend the discussion of the artifacts’ place within their collections. The NM offers a double-sided handout that repeats the information available on four of the seven wall panels about Troy, the archaeology of the site, and Schliemann, though without much in the way of politicking. In Athens, the NAM sells a guide to the Prehistoric Collection in its gift shop, which contains a onepage description of the Trojan collection that echoes without elaborating the interpretation in the galleries. As is the case with the handout in Berlin, the guide is not available for free. Perhaps most interestingly, these guides appear to be the only signed and dated interpretation materials available in any of the four museums’ Trojan collections. The dates suggest how long it likely has been since the displays were updated – 2010, in Berlin; in Athens, 2009 – while implicitly reminding visitors that the narratives presented by these museums were constructed by individuals with their own agendas. Arguably some of the most powerful and overtly self-interested interpretations that these museums offer is in the audio guides produced by three of the museums, which, like the wall panels, often emphasise the objects’ connections to Homer and Schliemann. The IAM audio guide only has two clips associated with its Trojan collection: one that briefly outlines the collection’s importance to understanding ancient Anatolia and another that, despite theoretically being focused on objects from a particular archaeological layer, actually discusses Trojan geography, Homer, and Schliemann. Of the four primary audio recordings available at the NM, three of the four deal exclusively with Schliemann, Homer, and mythical Troy, repeating with additional commentary the narratives put forward in the wall panels: the quality of Schliemann’s work as an archaeologist, the story of the Iliad, and a discussion of whether Hissarlik was indeed the site of the Trojan War. In Russia, by contrast, the ratio is flipped: only one of the six recordings focuses on Schliemann, Troy, and Homer, with the other five extended recordings exploring in detail the archaeological,

52  Zoe Mercer-Golden cultural, aesthetic and historical importance of the objects in the collection. As before, Schliemann appears in these recordings as a gifted amateur who had ‘good fortune’ but who excavated recklessly. Both the NM and PSM recordings are quite lengthy and add details to the stories presented on the walls; however, in several cases these narratives have been challenged by contemporary scholars, and in most cases, the narrative details provided take audiences intellectually and visually further away from the works in front of them. These audio guides also present discussions of individual objects and the cultural and historical value of these artifacts, though these are sometimes capped or overshadowed by political or legal commentary on each institution’s right of ownership due to or despite different kinds of conflict. One of the NM’s audio recordings presents the fullest account of ‘Priam’s Treasure’ in the Museum, outlining the contents of the hoard, where it was found, Schliemann’s smuggling it out of Hissarlik, his compensating the government for the collection, the Soviet removal of the works, and finally, the artifacts’ rediscovery. Poignantly, the recording ends with the sentence ‘only replicas can be seen in Berlin,’ which directs visitor attention to the replicas serving as aspirational placeholders for the works in Moscow. The replicas, which once served as visual illustrations of artifacts assumed lost, now fulfil a different symbolic function: they stand for the loss as well as the hope of return.43 Yet, when one listens to the PSM recording for Room 3, these museums’ respective positions are thrown into sharp relief, as that recording concludes with the dubious claim that the works were given by the Germans to the Soviets, and insinuates that because the Russians lost ‘40 million people’ in the Second World War, the works are owed to Russia. The other audio recordings reinforce other aspects of the Russian narrative – that the Trojan objects are similar to costumes, weapons and other objects found in areas aligned with Russia historically and culturally – but it is this statement, that equates the loss of human life with an entitlement to these artifacts, that seems most obviously self-serving. Listening to both sets of recordings serves as a reminder of the extent to which each museum’s, and by extension each nation’s, narrative of events has shaped its interpretation scheme and curatorial decisions. Audiences without a working knowledge of the historical, political and legal conflicts that encircle these objects and displays would not be able to fact check or critique these self-justifying narratives. Given the problematic nature of much of what these museums present, audiences likely emerge from these displays with a one-sided, profoundly biased view of where and to whom these Trojan artifacts belong.

Conclusion As is clear in the case of the objects that make up Schliemann’s Trojan treasure, different kinds of conflict often leave a profound legacy in both the collecting and display of objects in museums. A forensic reading of

Treasure, triumph and trespass 53 displays across these four institutions is evidence of the ways in which the consequences of these conflicts can be felt not only in how objects themselves are studied and presented, but also in how audiences understand them. While this case study makes clear the extent to which museum displays must be understood as stemming from the curatorial and national agendas of institutions and countries seeking to hold onto or repatriate objects, it also makes clear how easy it is for institutions to create alternative histories that without context or counterargument can give audiences radically different and problematic ideas about the aftermath of conflict and nature of historical events. As discussed earlier in this essay, all four of these institutions use Homer’s epics as a key aspect of how they introduce these objects. Regardless of whether Hissarlik is the site of historical Troy, it may be that these epics can provide a path forward for these museums as they consider how to present less overtly self-serving and potentially misleading narratives for their audiences. The Iliad and Odyssey are, at their core, tales about human behaviour and societal conflict: how people grapple with their own worst instincts towards violence, theft and trickery; how societies promote justice and exact punishment. Homer’s verses, his characters, have lasted because they still help humans make sense of the world around them. The story of Schliemann’s Trojan treasure touches on many of the major conflicts of the last century and a half: world wars, colonialism, the collapse of major empires, the rise of independent nation states, moments that saw the kind of political and military strife that also fills the poems of Homer. Homer does not shy away from nuanced accounts of difficult and wrong-minded decision-making on both sides of conflicts, and neither should these museums. The best stories, like Homer’s, are complicated, honest, inspiring ones, with a rich cast of characters, uncertain outcomes, high drama and large quantities of treasure. The best news of all for these institutions is that they already have stories to tell that contain all these ingredients, as well as beautiful objects that have, against all odds, survived to shine against the darkness. The challenge, now, is for them to tell these stories unflinchingly, for the sake of future generations, who can trust that they will negotiate conflict between peoples and over objects better by studying the complex and unvarnished truth of what happened in the past.

Notes 1. Schliemann apparently smuggled the artifacts from Hissarlik to Athens in order to avoid having the Ottoman authorities take the half of the finds that they were entitled to under his permit; see David A. Traill, ‘How Heinrich Schliemann Smuggled “Priam’s Treasure” from the Troad to Athens,’ Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 57: 3 (July–September 1988), pp. 273–277. The artifacts arrived at what is now the state museums in Berlin, where they remained on view, though in various museum sites, until 1945:D. F. Easton, ‘Priam’s Gold: The Full Story’,

54  Zoe Mercer-Golden











Anatolian Studies 44 (1994), pp. 221-243. Sophia Schliemann donated a small number of Trojan artifacts to her home nation in 1892. See Dora Konsola, ‘The Trojan Collection in the National Archaeological Museum,’ in Troy, Mycenae, Tiryns, Orchomenos: Heinrich Schliemann: The 100th Anniversary of His Death, ed. by Alexandra Doumas, trans. William W. Phelps (Athens: Ministry of Culture of Greece, Greek Committee ICOM, State Museums of Berlin, 1990), pp. 79–86. The Soviet army removed the Trojan artifacts in 1945, though the artifacts were hidden in Russia, their presence unacknowledged publicly, until the early 1990s. See Klaus Goldmann, ‘The Trojan Treasures in Berlin. The Disappearance and Search for the Objects After World War II,’ in The Spoils of War, ed. by Elizabeth Simpson (New York: Harry N. Abrams with Bard Graduate Center, 1997), pp. 200–203. 2. There is a great and growing body of scholarship on Schliemann’s life and work of which D. F. Easton and David A. Traill are arguably two of the most important contemporary scholars. 3. Long-neglected by scholars, Frank Calvert was the person who encouraged Schliemann to dig at Hissarlik, a frequent co-excavator with Schliemann, the owner of half of the Hissarlik mound, and in the eyes of Susan Heuck Allen, as responsible for the discoveries at Troy as Schliemann. In the last two decades, considerable research has been done to correct Schliemann’s erasure of Calvert from his stories of discovery. See Allen’s Finding the Walls of Troy: Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann at Hisarlik (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1999). 4. The story of Schliemann’s digging without a firman is well trodden, and has become part of Turkey’s rationale for why the artifacts should revert to them. For representative discussions of the lack of a firman, see David A. Traill, Schliemann of Troy: Treasure and Deceit (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), pp. 74–101, which takes a critical contemporary stance on Schliemann’s behaviour, and Carl Schuchardt, Schliemann’s Discoveries of the Ancient World, trans. Eugenie Sellers (New York: Avenel, [1891] 1979), pp. 6–7, which in nineteenth-century fashion glosses over the illegal digging. 5. For more on Schliemann’s relationship with the Ottoman authorities and the firman he received in 1871 that demanded he turn over half of his finds for the Imperial Museum (now the IAM), see Gunay Uslu, ‘Schliemann and the Ottoman Turks,’ in Troy City, Homer and Turkey, ed. by Jorrit Kelder, Gunay Uslu, and Omer Faruk Serifoglu (Zwolle: WBOOKS, 2012), pp. 133–137. 6. According to Moorehead, Easton and Traill, no one knows exactly when Hoard A [Treasure A], known as ‘Priam’s Treasure’, was found. Traill and Easton have gone back and forth over the extent to which Schliemann’s errors in archaeological reporting were deliberately deceitful; ultimately, no conclusion seems possible. See Easton, ‘Priam’s Gold: The Full Story,’ D. F. Easton, ‘Priam’s Treasure,’ Anatolian Studies, 34 (1984), pp. 141–169; David A. Traill, ‘Schliemann’s Discovery of “Priam’s Treasure”: A Re-Examination of the Evidence,’ The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 104 (1984), pp. 96–115; David A. Traill, ‘Schliemann’s Mendacity: A Question of Methodology,’ Anatolian Studies, 36 (1986), pp. 91–98; Caroline Moorehead, Priam’s Gold: Schliemann and the Lost Treasures of Troy (London and New York: Taurus Park Paperbacks, [1994] 2016), pp. 129–131. 7. Easton and Traill both confirm that Sophia was absent from Hissarlik at the time of the discovery of ‘Priam’s Treasure.’ Traill, ‘Schliemann’s Discovery,’ pp. 96–115. Schliemann apparently told his workers to take a break and hid

Treasure, triumph and trespass 55















the artifacts from them. Moorehead, Priam’s Gold, p. 130. On the advice of a friend, Schliemann had the artifacts removed soon after their discovery. See Traill, Schliemann of Troy, pp. 102–124. 8. According to Christoph Bachhuber, it is ‘well known’ that Schliemann used the finding of ‘Priam’s Treasure’ to suggest that he had found historical Troy. See ‘The treasure deposits of Troy: rethinking crisis and agency on the Early Bronze Age citadel,’ Anatolian Studies, 59 (2009), pp. 1–18. 9. Susan Heuck Allen, ‘“Finding the Walls of Troy”: Frank Calvert, Excavator,’ American Journal of Archaeology, 99: 3 (July 1995), p. 399. 10. The artifacts were displayed in the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) from late 1877 to 1880, when staff and trustees asked for the artifacts to be removed. Schliemann vacillated for years about where to give his Trojan collection, but was finally convinced by a friend, Rudolf Virchow, to give his Trojan treasure to the museums in Berlin. Traill, Schliemann of Troy, pp. 165–76; Moorehead, Priam’s Gold, pp. 176, 198–9. 11. Easton has become one of the staunchest defenders of Schliemann as an archaeologist. Traill, on the other hand, while acknowledging Schliemann’s significance to the history of archaeology, has levelled many criticisms at him. 12. Though the NM indicates that the cost of the fine was 10,000 francs, and that Schliemann eventually paid triple that, the true cost appears to have been more like 50,000 francs. See Moorehead, Priam’s Gold, p. 146; Easton, ‘Priam’s Gold: The Full Story,’ pp. 229, 239 13. Schliemann continued to make donations to Germany almost until his death, some of which were likely made illegally. These later finds have become wrapped up in ‘Priam’s Treasure’, which is part of the reason why the term has become so problematic. See Donald Fyfe Easton, ‘The Excavation of the Trojan Treasures, and Their History up to the Death of Schliemann in 1890,’ in The Spoils of War, pp. 194–199. 14. ‘Priam’s Treasure’ probably dates to the layer of Troy II, approximately a thousand years before the layer and period that historians have associated with the Trojan War. See Rustem Aslan and Ali Sonmez, ‘The Discovery and Smuggling of Priam’s Treasure,’ in Troy City, Homer and Turkey, p. 140. 15. See Casey Due, ‘Learning Lessons from the Trojan War: Briseis and the Theme of Force,’ College Literature, 34: 2 (Spring 2007), p. 248. Due admits that there are no inscriptions at the site of Hissarlik (Troy) that authoritatively link the site with Homer’s Troy. Others feel strongly that Hissarlik is indeed Troy (for instance, J. V. Luce in his Celebrating Homer’s Landscapes: Troy and Ithaca Revisited (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 81, in which he states that it can be ‘taken as certain’ that Hissarlik is Homer’s Troy. No final conclusions are possible at this date, though the desire to associate Hissarlik with Homer’s Troy is undeniable. 16. James J. Sheehan has described the evolution of the approach within German museums to structuring displays and object interpretation progressively, which was highly influential in other European countries, in Museums in the German Art World: From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). The notion of how ‘civilised’ European countries and collectors were has shaped long and problematic histories of object acquisition. See, for instance, Erin L. Thompson, Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016), pp. 30–31, 162–67, which discusses the ways in which collectors justified taking objects from Turkey because of the supposedly ‘barbarous’ nature of the Turks. What Francis Henry Taylor calls the ‘cult of classicism’ has profoundly shaped museum

56  Zoe Mercer-Golden













displays and collecting practices, including in the case of Schliemann. See Francis Henry Taylor, The Taste of Angels: A History of Art Collecting from Rameses to Napoleon (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1948), p. 592. 17. The IAM is the descendent of the earlier Imperial Museum, which was the descendent of an even earlier Ottoman treasure repository. See Uslu, ‘Schliemann and the Ottoman Turks,’ p. 134. 18. On the development of Turkish archaeology, and the critical role that it played in nation-building, see Tugba Tanyeri-Erdemir, ‘Archaeology as a Source of National Pride in the Early Years of the Turkish Republic,’ Journal of Field Archaeology, 31: 4 (2006), pp. 381–93. On the emergence of and major moments in Anatolian archaeology, see Ronald L. Gorny, ‘An Overview of Anatolian Archaeology,’ in Across the Anatolian Plateau: Readings in the Archaeology of Ancient Turkey, ed. David C. Hopkins (Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2002), pp. 1–4. 19. See Ana Filipa Vrdoljak, International Law, Museums and the Return of Cultural Objects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 85–86. 20. Both the British and the Germans have, at different moments, framed themselves as inheritors of a glorious, ancient past. See Clemency Coggins, ‘Latin America, Native America, and the Politics of Culture,’ in Claiming the Stones, Naming the Bones: Cultural Property and the Negotiation of National and Ethnic Identity, ed. by Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2002), p. 112. Can Bilsel has traced how the German preoccupation with creating connections to an authentic classical past has been made manifest through museum displays in institutions like the NM in Antiquity on Display: Regimes of the Authentic in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 21. Allen characterises the remnants of ‘treasure’ left behind in the IAM on page 252 of Finding the Walls of Troy, describing the small quantity of artifacts that were seized from workmen who had stolen them as well as the few artifacts left behind in Turkey. The treasures excavated in 1882 and 1890 were smuggled illegally to Berlin, where they became part of the collection currently known as ‘Priam’s Treasure’. 22. Over the last two decades, the Russian argument for the legal rights to the artifacts has evolved from compensation for the ‘innumerable sufferings to millions of people’ that the war brought, to the artifacts themselves being nationalised as rightful war reparations. Yet Russia has also signed multiple treaties with Germany that suggest that the artifacts should be returned to Germany, probably as part of ongoing bilateral agreements to return stolen or damaged artifacts on both sides. See Stephen K. Urice, ‘Claims to Ownership of the Trojan Treasures,’ in The Spoils of War, pp. 204–06. 23. Many of these artifacts were golden beads or rings. See Moorehead, Priam’s Gold, p. 5, 198–9. 24. Moorehead tells the story of where the artifacts were hidden and how they were removed from Berlin in Priam’s Gold, pp. 257–88. Preparations to protect important artifacts like Schliemann’s Trojan treasure started early in the war. 25. Goldmann summarises the major events in ‘The Trojan Treasures in Berlin,’ pp. 200–03, questioning the version of events often presented by Russia in which a Berlin museum director handed over the artifacts. 26. Other essays in The Spoils of War document artifacts removed from Germany during the War, especially paintings and drawings, and Patricia Kennedy Grimsted has done extensive research on the vast number of archives still in Russia.

Treasure, triumph and trespass 57 27. Konstantin Akinsha and Grigorii Kozlov published a series of articles, starting in 1991, about the secret Soviet stores of looted objects from Germany. See Konstantin Akinsha and Grigorii Kozlov, ‘Spoils of War: The Soviet Union’s Hidden Art Treasures,’ ARTnews, April 1991, reprinted in ‘Top Ten ARTnews Stories: Tracking the Trophy Brigade,’ ARTnews, 1 November 2007, https://www.artnews. com/artnews/news/top-ten-artnews-stories-tracking-the-trophy-brigade-186/. 28. The PSM version of events tends to de-emphasise the extended period that the artifacts were hidden and off view; the subject continues to be a sore one for archaeologists and art historians, who are adamant that the nearly 50-year gap in their display limited research. See Manfred Korfmann, ‘The Value of the Finds to the Scientific Community,’ in The Spoils of War, pp. 207–11. The works were eventually inspected by an international team of experts who reported on the condition of the artifacts. See Vladimir Tolstikov, ‘Some Aspects of the Preparation of the Catalogue for the Exhibition “The Treasure of Troy: Heinrich Schliemann’s Excavations” at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts,’ in The Spoils of War, pp. 212–13. 29. The history of Russian museums has been understudied, particularly given the body of scholarship on other European museums. See Vitaly Ananiev, ‘Who Do You Think They Are?: Museum Visitor Studies in Russia with a Historical Perspective,’ in Visiting the Visitor: An Enquiry into the Visitor Business in Museums, ed. by Ann Davis and Kersten Smeds (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2016), pp. 171–72. Alma S. Wittlin has produced some of the limited scholarship on the history of Russian museums. See Alma S. Wittlin, Museums: In Search of a Usable Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970). 30. Moorehead, Priam’s Gold, p. 11. 31. Research into these displays was conducted at all four museums in the spring and summer of 2017. While descriptions of displays are written in the present tense, it is possible that changes to interpretation materials may have taken place between then and the publication of this essay. 32. Schliemann made a significant proportion of his fortune in Russia, and married a Russian woman, eventually having three children with her (two of whom survived him). See Moorehead, Priam’s Gold, pp. 26–32, 42–51; Traill, Schliemann of Troy, pp. 22–25. The marriage was not a happy one, and it ended in divorce. 33. Indeed, pottery sherds have played a critical role in helping to establish the chronology of Troy, while less glamorous tools, ceramics and housing materials have taught archaeologists as much or more about the way that people lived at Troy as the metallic treasures. Like Schliemann, humans are susceptible to the appeal of gold, even though these rare metallic objects only offer one part of the story of people’s lives. 34. Object labels were bilingual, but no translation of the main interpretation wall panels was available. 35. Translations of PSM wall panel texts were done by Jevgenija Ravcova. 36. Both museums have two full, nearly life-sized wall panels with English translations on them (the first IAM panel is exclusively in Turkish) that are devoted to these topics. Unsurprisingly, the IAM panels reflect the fact that the myths were a touchstone for the Ottomans and Turks; the NM emphasises Schliemann’s relationship to the epics. 37. See Footnote 15.

58  Zoe Mercer-Golden 38. The NAM glosses over the unromantic aspects of the Schliemanns’ marriage – that Sophia was a teenager who was a sort of mail-order bride for her much-older husband. The Schliemanns’ marriage has been romanticised, as with Lynn and Gray Poole, One Passion, Two Loves: the Schliemanns of Troy, as well as problematised, as with Traill’s Schliemann of Troy. 39. See Footnote 35. 40. To settle the court case in Athens, Schliemann paid the Imperial Museum, which became the IAM, approximately 10,000 francs. See Moorehead, Priam’s Gold, p. 146. 41. It may be that the labels are different from those used in the 1996 exhibition, but the fact that the catalogue numbers are still listed is suggestive. The numbers are indeed consistent with the exhibition catalogue from 1996, Tolstikov and Treister, The Gold of Troy: Searching for Homer’s Fabled City, ed. Donald F. Easton, trans. Sever and Bonnichensen (New York, London and Moscow: Harry N. Abrams, Thames & Hudson, and the Pushkin State Museum of Arts, 1996). 42. The last major archaeological excavations discussed in the exhibition appear to be the late 1980s. As the artifacts were ‘discovered’ in Moscow in the early 1990s, and made available to the public in 1996, it seems likely that the displays predate these developments. 43. As mentioned previously, the replicas were made before the artifacts were taken to Russia. Easton has discovered that the Berlin museums also made ‘identical copies’ of the artifacts before the First World War, and had a complete set presented to the PSM. See Easton, ‘Priam’s Gold: The Full Story,’ p. 237. This gift, no doubt generous at the time, has become a rather painful irony.

Part II

Keeping going? Museums during war

3

The evacuation and management of the Louvre Museum’s Near Eastern Antiquities Department during the Second World War Zoé Vannier1

Introduction On 14 June 1940, German troops entered in Paris and discovered the Louvre Museum almost empty. Like all European national museums, its collections were evacuated in anticipation of the conflict. The Louvre administration succeeded in protecting the collections far from Paris throughout the war, since the artifacts did not return to the museum until 1945. The achievement of this evacuation marks a turning point in the history of the protection of the Louvre’s collections. The majority of the works outlived the war in a good state of conservation, despite the fact that they had never been outside the museum for such a long period, and that they had spent the war confined in crates. How this emergency plan was prepared? How successful was the French administration in preserving the Louvre collection during the war? What consequences did the occupation have on the protection of the Louvre’s collections after June 1940? What relations did the curators of the Louvre have with the German authorities? The aim of this chapter is to determine the factors that led to the preservation of these archaeological collections during the Second World War, taking as case study the evacuation of the Near Eastern Antiquities Department of the Louvre Museum. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Rose Valland, assistant curator at the Musée du Jeu de Paume, and many agents from the Louvre museum such as Lucie Mazauric, archives curator, Germain Bazin, assistant curator at the Italian Paintings Department, and Magdeleine Hours, project manager, shared their experience of the war within the Louvre administration. 2 However, the life of museums during the Second World War has long remained in the shadows of the art market historiography. 3 In the 1990s, the official recognition by President Jacques Chirac of the involvement of the French government in the deportation of Jews sparked off a large historiographic movement on art trafficking during the Second World War.4 2007, though, marked a change within this historiographic tradition with the publication of two books exploring the roles of museums and/ or the evacuation of collections during the Second World War. 5 André

62  Zoé Vannier Gob, while remaining close to art market history, highlighted that museums were not only victims of conflicts but also real actors that could take advantage of the situation to expand their collections. In the same year, Michel Rayssac published his research on the evacuation and the exodus of national museums. His book gave a first overview of the emergency plan of the major national museums including their successes and losses. With regards to this emerging historiography and the anniversary of France’s declaration of war to Germany, in 2009 the Louvre Museum mounted its exhibition Le Louvre pendant la guerre.6 This study tries to inscribe itself into this historiography by attempting to examine the disposition taken by the Louvre Museum for the protection of its collection during the Second World War. The aim was to look at the management of a specific department of the Louvre during the conflict in order to see how conflict impacted on museum management and procedures in more detail. Thus the case study was more limited. The objective was to determine the logic of the emergency plan drawn up by the Louvre administration through the evaluation of the inventories established at that period. The museum staff wrote inventory and reports after each transfer of the collection. Thus, for each evacuation two inventory campaigns were carried out: one when the collections left the museum and another when they were repatriated at the Louvre. This system was perfected in 1939. Indeed, each crate had four copies of its inventory.7 The first copy was in the crate, the second was given to the curator in charge of the objects, the third to the driver, who had the duty to transmit it to the curator present at the deposit and the last was sent to the National Museum Direction. This study has benefited from the relocation in 2015 of the national museum archives to the national archives and the consultation of the inventories of the Louvre Museum made before, during and after the evacuation. The choice was made of the Department of Near Eastern Antiquities (DAO) since, even today, it is the second largest department at the Louvre, in terms of number of works inscribed on the inventory, after the Department of Graphic Arts. Hence, the logic applied on the evacuation of this department reveals the logic of the overall museum. Also, the reasonable number of artifacts listed in the inventory, compared to the Graphic Arts Department, allowed the creation of a table, based on the archives, comparing the various inventories made before, during and after the evacuation. This made it possible to cross-reference and complete the information. Some inventories concentrated on the contents of the crates while others focused on the location of the works before they were evacuated or the convoy number. The table was composed of the following entries: number of the box, name of the object(s) or description, registration number (if indicated), initial room, date of packing, date of departure, location and date of return. From this table and after having consulted the administrative correspondence, the minutes of the curator committee and of the National museum board, it

Evacuation and management of Louvre Museum 63 has been possible to assess whether the Louvre administration respected its initial emergency plan. It appears that while the preparation of a massive emergency plan – designed well in advance in 1932 – played a major role in the preservation of the Louvre’s collections during the Second World War, the action of the administration, and in particular that of Jacques Jaujard, Director of the Louvre Museum, and Count Franz Wolff-Metternich, head of the Kunstschutz in France, was decisive. Thanks to their tacit alliance against any attempt to alienate these collections, Jacques Jaujard and Franz WolffMetternich preserved the Louvre collections. The political consensus between these two art lovers permitted the safeguarding of the Louvre’s collection. Together, the French administration and the German Kunstschutz collaborated during the whole Occupation period to implement as much as possible the emergency plan settled before the war. However, and despite all their efforts, the exchange of artefacts between the Vichy government and Spain (see also a chapter by March in this book) reveals all the more that the collections were not protected so much by emergency plans as by the will of a few agents who shared the same heritage practices regardless the colours of their flags.

The evacuation of the Louvre museum: ‘A show set like a ballet’8 Contrary to the common belief, the Louvre Museum was emptied methodically and without major damages. Its evacuation plan was well prepared in advance in order to overcome the obstacles encountered during the Great War, but also in anticipation of a future possible conflict. Moreover, the organisation of such a plan developed in 1932 testified the anxiogenic climate between the two world wars. During the inter-war period, in reaction to the Great War, the French administration wanted to improve the protection of its cultural heritage. In 1914, only 250 paintings of the Louvre were sent by train to Toulouse.9 A second phase of evacuation had been scheduled but it included mainly paintings. From the Antique department, only the Venus de Milo left Paris. On 27 May 1918, the French government ordered the evacuation of as many artifacts as possible.10 The late evacuation of the Near Eastern Antiquities attested to decisions made on a day-to-day basis, in emergency, without a well-prepared evacuation plan. As a result, the works were kept in poor conservation conditions. Paul Jamot, Assistant Curator of the Near Eastern Antiquities Department and Head of the Toulouse depot, reported that the transport of the works had significantly weakened them, and deplored the alleged ‘perfection’ of the packaging, which had only been satisfactory for a temporary period.11

64  Zoé Vannier In 1932, to address these deficiencies, the prefect of the Seine department, on behalf of the fine arts and museums director, drew the attention of Paul Léon, Deputy-Secretary of State for Fine Arts, to the issue of protecting public collections.12 Consequently, Henri Verne, then Louvre director, asked the curators to prepare lists of works of art to be evacuated in case of war.13 They had to take into consideration the ‘artistic importance’ and the ‘scientific value’ of the object to be evacuated. At that time, the principles of the emergency plan were similar to the previous one. It followed a logic of selection where only ‘masterpieces’ were transferred in safe places. In consequence, a limited part of the collection would be far from Paris. This request was made less than a month after Germany left the Geneva Conference and illustrated the slow degradation of Franco-German relations.14 Curators were instructed to prepare three lists. The first list contained ‘particularly important works which must be immediately evacuated’; the second ‘those whose protection is in less immediate necessity, but which may nevertheless be subsequently evacuated’; and the last one those ‘whose evacuation would be difficult to achieve but whose protection could be ensured in situ.’ In this emergency plan, only few objects would be evacuated and most of them would remain in the Louvre. The selection was focused on the lightest masterpieces. In 1933, Henri Verne sent a report to the Minister of National Education in which he outlined the first measures planned for the evacuation of the works: transport, staff, equipment and the refuges.15 Following this report, roads were preferred to railways, which were automatically requisitioned by the army in wartime. The frictions caused by rail transport had also weakened works during the First World War. From 1936, agreements were made with transport companies and the army in order to prepare the evacuation to the Chambord castle. The castle, located in the Loire region, was selected in anticipation of an attack from the East. Chambord had proven over the century to be a strategic choice considering its inclusion in every evacuation plan developed by the government since 1814. This castle offered large storage since its rooms were empty. It was also far enough from Paris to protect artefacts from the fighting while being relatively close to limit transportation time. Thanks to its location far from urban areas and industrial centres, Chambord would not have been considered a military target. At the same time, Chambord is easily accessible by roads and it is near a lake in case of fire. The aim was to keep the repository away from the population to avoid malicious acts, and also to ensure a fast conveyance and a relative security for the collections. The evacuation program was prepared during the development of the Verne plan and took advantage of it. In 1934, Henri Verne presented a plan for the systematic extension and consolidation of the Louvre Museum’s collections.16 This plan included a reorganisation of the Louvre collection

Evacuation and management of Louvre Museum 65 and its presentation in the exhibition rooms. From 1937, the collections of Near Eastern Antiquities on the first floor moved to the ground floor, where the department extended from the Sully pavilion to the pavilion of Saint Germain l’Auxerrois. Thanks to the credits allocated to the Louvre for this move, 225 crates were created in time of peace and were ready to be used for the emergency plan.17 During this work, the architect Albert Ferran designed onsite bomb shelters assigned to the Near Eastern Antiquities. They were located in the Marengo crypt, the Asian staircase and the Susiane room. These provisions were combined in 1938 with training exercises for the museum staff. This approach incorporated a nation-wide policy since the law on the general organisation of the nation during wartime had just been approved.18 In 1938, diplomatic pressures reached their climax. After the legalisation of the Anschluss, Hitler decreed on 12 August, the general mobilisation of the German troops. But it was only on 24 September, after a vehement speech by Hitler, that France ordered a partial mobilisation of its army and the evacuation of all the national museums’ collections.19 Just three days after the alert, a first convoy left the Louvre for Chambord. 20 Each convoy was supervised by a curator. The museum administration ensured that the convoys transported crates from several departments. The aim was to avoid the loss of an entire school or department with a convoy. However, this evacuation did not last. The day after the Munich agreements, the Fine Arts Administration ordered the return of the collections. 21 This first evacuation exposed the shortcomings of the emergency plan. In his report of 3 February 1939, Henri Verne insisted on the importance of reducing the time between the trigger of the plan and its implementation. In addition, it underlined the lack of specialised staff and resources to carry out the packaging of the objects. All the departments needed more staff because the emergency plan was launched simultaneously with the army mobilisation. In this regard, the museum director requested in his report a suspension of mobilisation for the technicians of the museum until the end of the evacuation. 22 This alert had the advantage of being a full-scale rehearsal of the evacuation but it had the disadvantage of revealing its secrets. The evacuation plan of September 1938 had been widely relayed in the French and international press. This aspect compromised the safety of the collections. Considering this difficulty, the national museums’ director decided to integrate a new phase in the emergency program. The convoys would go to Chambord serving as a hub before being sent out again to a secondary safe place. 23 On 5 August 1939, Jacques Jaujard, recently appointed director of the Louvre Museum, presented to the Minister of Education a final report about the protection of collections in wartime. 24 Just 20 days after, considering the signing of the non-aggression pact between Russia and the Third Reich, museums closed their doors and began to pack the objects. 25 The inventory

66  Zoé Vannier of each crate was prepared in four copies. Thanks to these inventories currently preserved at the Louvre and at the French national archives, it was possible to determine the content of each crate. Contrary to the emergency plan executed during the Great War, the evacuation was immediate and extensive. All the collections were sheltered in less than two months. At the time of the declaration of war against the Third Reich on 3 September 1939, the administration had already placed over 75% of the Louvre collections in the new storage areas for safe keeping (see Figure 3.1). 26 Between 28 August and 12 October, the Near Eastern Antiquities sent 348 crates over 18 convoys. The Near Eastern Antiquities sheltered 359 boxes, containing about 8,650 artefacts. Eighteen percent of all the boxes conveyed by the Louvre Museum came from the Near Eastern Antiquities Department and were conserved in Cheverny castle. 27 With the boxes, the administration sent the inventories of the Department. That way, the Louvre kept the irrefutable proof that the artifacts belong to the public domain far away from the battles. Nevertheless, the department was not completely evacuated. Heavy and/or too voluminous or fragile objects remained in some rooms of the Louvre Museum. They were protected as much as possible with sandbags. Thirty-one crates, approximately 647 pieces, were also stored in bomb shelters located in the basement of the Louvre.

Figure 3.1  Photograph of crates 310 and 511, 3–6 September 1939, unknown author © Archives of the Near Eastern Antiquities Department of the Louvre Museum

Evacuation and management of Louvre Museum 67 The French administration decided to protect a maximum of works by dispersing them away from Paris and protecting a limited selection in situ. The logic was no longer to protect small samples of objects as was the case during the Great War but to save everything, even the departmental documentation. Thus, Jacques Jaujard decided to extend the list of artifacts to be displaced during the evacuation. Magdeleine Hours reported in her memoirs that ‘Georges Salles, spokesman for J. Jaujard, in a horizon blue uniform, appeared. He specified that all important works must have left the palace before the night.’28 By ‘important works’ Salles meant masterpieces not provided for in the evacuation plan because of their fragility or weight. For the Department of Oriental Antiquities, these major items are grouped under the ‘large monuments’ list. These were boxes numbered between 500 and 521 (although boxes 512–514 were empty). A total of 19 crates were added to the initial evacuation plan. If they had been planned from the beginning, these crates would have gone first and been included in the first list of important objects. These are exclusively masterpieces, the most famous of which is the Hammurabi code (box 500). This famous basalt sculpture, nearly 2 m high, 79 cm wide and 47 cm thick dating from the 2nd millennium BC, had been packed and conveyed at the end of the evacuation. This sculpture is extremely impressive in its volume and weight. Georges Contenau in his report of 1949 discussed the difficulty of transporting this crate: ‘A crate, however, which reached nearly 4m in height, which had to be transported standing up and contained Hammurabi’s code, could not enter Cheverny castle because of the lack of a high enough door. (…) It was transported to the Valençay depot where it easily entered into the Remise and took its place alongside the Victory of Samothrace.’29 The fact that they were sent with the last convoy, on 12 October 1939,30 corroborates the facts reported by Magdeleine Hours. Even after the start of active combat, 11 crates that mainly composed of objects from recent excavation were sent. The scope of this operation marked a turning point in comparison to the previous emergency plans. Never before had the Louvre sent so many works to shelter in such a short period of time. Jacques Jaujard decided to transfer as many artifacts as possible away from Paris and therefore away from potential fighting. The addition of the heaviest works of art illustrated this willingness. He consciously extended the scope of the emergency plan prepared in 1932, at the last minute. This evolution could probably result from the assessment of the evacuation executed during the Great War, the consideration of the evolution of armament and the intelligence of the arts management and cultural policies of the enemy. The Great War revealed the destructive potential of the new armament. Thereafter, the partial destruction of some major museums during the Spanish civil war, like the Prado, encouraged the Louvre administrators to better protect their collections.31 When the museum itself is targeted, evacuation of the collection

68  Zoé Vannier appears to be the most appropriate protection. In 1933, the firemen of Paris summoned the Louvre director to attend experiments on the effectiveness of German incendiary bombs.32 In the same year, the Third Reich organised burnings to destroy ‘non German spirit’ artworks. On 19 July 1937, the ‘degenerate art’ exhibition in Munich was inaugurated. 33 It displayed works of art from more than 40 German museums. The sale or destruction of some of these works of art, even though they were from public collections, represented a significant threat to consider in the preparation of the Louvre’s emergency plan. The review of the cultural policies and heritage practices of the possible enemy is crucial to designing an emergency plan. The modifications made from 1932 to 1939 demonstrate that an emergency plan is not fixed. It always needs to be adapted according to the threats and politico-military situation. That is what Jacques Jaujard did after 21 June 1940, date of the signing of the armistice.

The organisation of the Louvre under the Vichy regime From this date, the French administrators had to deal with the Vichy government and the German Kunstschutz officers. Kunstschutz refers to the principle of preserving the artistic heritage of the enemy in times of armed conflict.34 A service with the same name was created during the Great War. It depended directly on the military administration and could benefit from the support of the armies, while the spoliation services were the responsibility of the Foreign Affairs Office. However, Foreign Affairs Office had a pre-eminence over the Kunstschutz unit. Being under the authority of the high command of the armies, the Kunstschutz had a real authority and a wide freedom of action. Its agents were not soldiers, but civil servants of the military administration recruited from among German curators. In 1940, Count Franz Wolff-Metternich was in charge of the Kunstschutz in France. Doctor of philosophy and a specialist in medieval architecture, when he was appointed director of the Kunstschutz, Count Franz WolffMetternich was the curator of the province of Rhineland. He became an atypical German senior civil servant because he was not a member of the Nazi party. During his first meeting with Franz Wolff-Metternich on 16 August 1940, Jacques Jaujard handed over the inventories of the evacuated collections with their location.35 The two men shared the same definition of heritage and the common desire to preserve French public collections, and quickly formed an alliance against any attempt to alienate these collections. Thanks to this consensus, Franz Wolff-Metternich guaranteed that the castle-deposits would not be requisitioned by the German army. He gave permissions to museum staff to travel in France but also fuel for the cars. Thus, communication was maintained between the regions and Paris. Thanks to Wolff-Metternich, restorers were able to carry out interventions.

Evacuation and management of Louvre Museum 69 However, in 1940, both Wolff-Metternich and Jaujard were opposed to Otto Abetz, German ambassador in Paris, who ardently wished the return of the works to the Louvre palace with a view to possibly sending on to Germany. This idea was not new. Before the war, the Director of the Berlin Museum was mandated to draw up lists of works representative of Germanic culture to be repatriated to Germany. The list focused exclusively on works preserved in the Louvre. On 17 July 1940, Otto Abetz informed the head of the German military administration, Dr. Turner, Count Metternich’s superior, that a special commando unit led by Baron Von Kunsberg, commander of Geheinfeldpolizei GFP36 and legation secretary of the Ministry, was now the only one authorised to carry out Otto Abetz’s orders. However, Count Metternich alerted his superior, General Streccius, 37 military commander in France, who immediately intervened with the Generalfeldmarschall Walther von Brauchitsch, 38 the latter being the Commander-in-Chief of the Army. This is the highest rank in the military hierarchy, after Reichsmarschall, a position held by Hermann Göring. From the very first weeks of the occupation, the question of the management of works of art was raised at the highest levels of German power. At the end of this process, Count Metternich obtained a guarantee from his superiors that the Foreign Affairs Department, and therefore the diplomatic sector under Otto Abetz, had only a right to study the collections. To justify the withdrawal of Otto Abetz’s service, Feldmarschall Walther von Brauchitsch referred to Hitler’s order of 15 July 1940. It notified that ‘mobile works of art will not be removed from their current location or modified in any way without the written authorisation of a senior command of the Militärverwaltung [German military administration] in France’ until the peace negotiations.39 Also, on 29 July 1940, the German Armistice Commission decided that it was not necessary to return the collections to museums. The combined actions of Jaujard and Wolff-Metternich enabled the Louvre’s collections to remain in the French depots during the war and protected them from Abetz, who wanted to send them to Germany. The two public administrators avoided the return of the artifacts by recalling the risk of having the works travel and/or by making use of Article 56 of the Hague Convention of 1907: Wolff-Metternich recalled on each occasion the importance of preserving French public collections. In his speech to the highest German dignitaries, including Abetz and Streccius, WolffMetternich clearly defined his position: ‘it is a great opportunity to publicly proclaim the principles and aims of [the] Commission for the Protection of the Arts, to draw the public’s attention to the immense human values embodied in the masterpieces on display, and to conclude with a vibrant appeal to the conscience of all those responsible for their protection.’40 Despite the ally that Jaujard found inside the German administration to protect the works from the occupier, he struggled with his own government. On 12 October 1940, representatives from the Spanish government

70  Zoé Vannier claimed objects from the Louvre.41 Among the objects demanded by Franco’s government, there was the famous Dame d’Elche42 preserved in the Near Eastern Department. In 1940, this work was to the Near Eastern Antiquities Department what Mona Lisa was to the Department of Paintings. As Franco’s government pointed out in its request the Lady of Elche: ‘constitutes one of the oldest testimonies of pre-Roman Iberian art […] a work of absolutely exceptional historical and sentimental value.’43 That is why this bust was inscribed on the first list for an immediate evacuation.44 If it was initially intended to be a strict restitution, the negotiations succeeded in transforming it into an exchange. According to Germain Bazin, former curator of the Louvre’s Paintings and Drawings Department, the exchange seems to have been largely due to René Huyghe, then Chief Curator of the same department.45 In December 1940, the bust and two other objects of the department were extracted from their crates in Cheverny. The agreement concerning the exchange of works was signed on 21 December in Paris by Louis Hautecoeur, Director of Fine Arts, and Francisco Iniguez, Head of the Service for the Defence of Spanish National Artistic Heritage.46 The official presentation of the masterpieces took place on 13 February 1941 during the meeting of Maréchal Pétain and Caudillo in Montpellier.47 The French artifacts were returned to Spain, which refused to proceed with the exchange until it had all the Simancas archives in its possession. The works of the Department of Near Eastern Antiquities crossed through the Pyrenees and definitively left the French public collections while Spain had not honoured its part of the exchange48 and French legislation had not yet downgraded the works sent. This exchange was ratified only on 19 July 1941 by decree. France received in return Spanish paintings, including a Velasquez, but this exchange was contested until the 1960s.49 Thus, the negotiations between France and Spain show that evacuation alone cannot guarantee the safety of the Louvre public collections that are by definition inalienable. This exchange attests that political will can undo the protection mechanisms of public collections. The measures taken by the museum administration are only effective if the higher authorities ensure their functioning. In spite of the principle of the collection’s inalienability, diplomatic stakes break the measures taken in wartime. It is likely that France accepted these negotiations to ensure good relations with Spain, which acted as a mediator between the Vichy government and the Third Reich. Paul Baudouin, Minister of Foreign Affairs, addressed the French Embassy in Madrid in a letter dated of 3 July 1940 on the policy to be pursued towards Spain: ‘We would like the Spanish Government, guided by its political sense, to help us with its influence in Rome and Berlin to moderate the demands of Germany and Italy.’50 German authorities attempted for the last time to repatriate the Louvre collections to Paris in 1944. On 14 January 1943, Hitler declared total war in reaction to the successive defeats of the Third Reich. In the same year,

Evacuation and management of Louvre Museum 71 Germany fell back on all fronts. On 22 May 1943, the Battle of the Atlantic ended with the Allied victory. In the south, Allied forces deployed to North Africa and then to Italy on 10 July 1943. On 14 September 1943, contingents of the free French forces landed in Corsica and fought the German authorities on the spot until the entire occupying forces left the island. The increasing number of air strikes and the advancement of free French forces in the south of the country worried German administration about the safety of the collections. In that context, they prepared a large repatriation plan.51 They seemed not to know that the Allied forces already knew the locations of the various depots of the Réunion des Musées Nationaux. In 1943, Jaujard had transmitted to them, via a Resistance post, all the necessary information to avoid the bombardment of the French collections under cover. He went through the Resistance movement, because since its first request on 12 November 1942, the Vichy government refused to transmit the location of the collections to the Allies. 52 Negotiations were initiated between Jaujard, Louis Hautecoeur and the Kunstschutz department to prevent the repatriation of the crates to Paris. On 3 February 1944, an agreement was concluded with Dr. Von Tieschowitz, Head of the Kunstschutz in Paris.53 The works remained in the regional depots and security was enhanced. The consolidation of the defence of depots went hand in hand with the growing threat of new armed conflicts in France. On 10 March 1944, the French administration published the General Instructions on the duties of administrators and public services in the event of military operations. The staff of the Louvre were concerned by these instructions whether they were at the museum itself or in the depots. The first obligation was to ‘follow the fate of the collections entrusted to him [the person in charge of the deposit] and be moved only with them. He may under no circumstances be forced to abandon them.’54 These instructions indicated that in the event of conflict, expertise and decisions concerning the repositories no longer depended on the competent authorities of the National Museums Directorate, but on the prefects or the German authorities. Prefects would have been kept informed at all times of the exact location of crates and depots. If the security of the depot were threatened, the person in charge could request the authority of the prefecture to obtain a backup from the police forces. If circumstances so required, the decision to transfer the collections would be taken in agreement with the prefect. In return, the German authorities assured the Direction of the National Museums that no accommodation or refuge would be installed in the depots. These instructions indicated that the deposits appeared to be out of danger. The French, German and allied authorities knew their location and ensured their neutrality in the event of armed conflicts. As a precautionary measure, depot staff wrote large ‘Musée du Louvre’ bales of straw or cardboard in the gardens or in the courtyard of the castles to indicate the presence of a works of art depot to the pilots. At the same time, the guard towers were reinforced.55

72  Zoé Vannier In Paris, in anticipation of fighting, Jaujard sent an estimate for protection materials (sand bags, wood, etc) on 18 February 1944 for the safeguarding of the Louvre as part of the passive defence of the Kunstschutz. The materials ordered were for the protection of the collections left on site. Sandbags were placed around the works. The wood was probably used to redo or reinforce the packaging of the works and to reinforce the windows and doors of the palace. The Louvre’s greatest threat came from its proximity to the Meurice Hotel on Rue de Rivoli, where the German General Staff was based. As a result, the museum might be the victim of collateral damages if the hotel were to be stormed or bombed. On 26 May 1944, Doctor von Tieschowitz responded favourably to the request and works began immediately. Then, following the advance of Allied troops after the launch of Operation Overlord on 6 June 1944, a patriotic militia was formed at the Louvre on the initiative of sculptor George Saupique and Jacques Jaujard to ‘ensure the protection of France’s artistic treasures.’56 This militia, with a hundred or so agents, including André Parrot and Dr. Georges Contenau, reinforced the protection of the museum. It was formed in parallel with the beginning of the Paris uprising on 18 August 1944. Watchtowers were multiplied to prevent intrusions into the museum. On a rotating basis, the militia were present night and day. This organisation was all the more active during the liberation of Paris as tank fighting took place in the very heart of Rue de Rivoli. During this period, the Louvre ensured its neutrality, and therefore its preservation, by improving the initial emergency plan thanks to the participation of the members of the Louvre and the alliance with the Kunstschutz. On 25 August 1944, Paris was liberated and no artifact from the Department of Near Eastern Antiquities had been damaged in either Paris or Cheverny. The French provisional government, presided over by General de Gaulle, quickly wished to reopen the museums to mark the end of the war and the return to a ‘normal life.’ It was also a question of denying rumours that some of the Louvre’s works had been transported to Germany. That is why on 5 October 1944 the reopening of the Assyrian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman sculpture rooms was announced. However, they were only slightly fuller than during the occupation. The administration could only consider a return of the crates to Paris once the fighting had ended. The surrender signed on 7 May 1945 allowed the return of the objects from the basements of the Louvre and the repatriation of the evacuated crates. The return of the crates then depended on two conditions: finding the necessary trucks and solving heating problems at the Louvre.57 The museum had to negotiate with the War Department and the American authorities to obtain trucks. The Louvre was, additionally, still a building site since Henri Verne’s modernisation plan, begun in 1937, was still not completed. As a result, the heating issue necessary for the proper conservation of the works was raised. The Department of Near Eastern Antiquities faced additional difficulties

Evacuation and management of Louvre Museum 73 due to the presence of the Rothschild collections in the former ground floor rooms requisitioned by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR).58 Georges Contenau asked that this room be evacuated as soon as possible to ensure the repatriation of the department’s crates. The code of Hammurabi was the first work of the Department to return (see Figure 3.2). The repatriation of the Cheverny deposit took place between October 1945 and April 1946. André Parrot, Georges Contenau’s successor, finished Verne’s modernisation plans. On 27 June 1947, the

Figure 3.2  Photograph of immortalising the return of the code of Hammurabi, 27 June 1945, unknown author, © Archives of the Near Eastern Antiquities Department of the Louvre Museum

74  Zoé Vannier opening of the whole Near Eastern Department in a new museographic display marked the end of the return of the works to the Louvre.

Conclusion The good state of conservation of the collections on their return reflects the success of the emergency plan developed by the Louvre Museum. The evacuation of the collections marked a turning point in history because it was planned ahead in a time of peace. In 1932, the Louvre administration drafted the plan of protection for the collection in case of armed conflict. It also reflected the commitment of the administration and the government to the protection of the national collections. Built on the failures of the previous conflicts and of its first implementation on 1938, this plan was continuously adapted and reassessed from a solid foundation. So, in August 1939, the staff of the Louvre was prepared and well trained to implement the emergency plan of the museum. This time, the Louvre administration decided to orchestrate an immediate and extensive evacuation. Knowing the cultural policies of the Third Reich and the force of its armaments, the French administration knew that the national collection could no longer be protected in situ. Jaujard gave the order to evacuate as many objects as possible from Paris before the declaration of war. The launch of the evacuation before the start of active combat guaranteed the good implementation of the plan. The emergency plan included only one wave of evacuation. All the works of the Near Eastern Antiquities Department on the evacuation lists left the Louvre in the same period between 25 August and 12 October 1939. A total of 5,450 crates were transferred by the Louvre Museum and 359 came from the Near Eastern Antiquities Department, i.e., approximately 8,650 artifacts. Thank to this preparation, the Louvre had enough equipment, workers and time to assure the protection of the collection away from Paris. Thus the initial plan focused on protecting the objects from active warfare, especially from shelling or aerial bombardments. The Occupation of France in 1940 had not been considered by the French administrators who thought they would win the war; hence, the initial plan did not seem to include a third phase. However, faced with the German advance, Jaujard decided to reassess the emergency plan. He took the decision to evacuate those depots which could be emptied quickly in May–June 1940. 59 Cheverny and Valençay, where the Near Eastern Antiquities Department were stored, remained as depots due to their location while other works were relocated to Loc-Dieu Abbey in the Aveyron region. This process was repeated each time German forces threated a depot. Thus the Mona Lisa was evacuated six times. For the depots located in the occupied zone, Jaujard decided to collaborate with Wolff-Metternich.

Evacuation and management of Louvre Museum 75 In addition to the preparation and implementation of the emergency plan, the evacuation owed its success to the tacit alliance formed between Jaujard, director of the Louvre Museum, and Wolff-Metternich, head of the Kunstschutz in France. The two men shared the same heritage practices, definition of heritage and the desire to safeguard collections from all forms of threats. This tacit agreement made possible to mitigate the potential dangers to the collection during the war. Moreover, the consensus between Jaujard and Metternich, and the exchange with Spain, demonstrated that collections were not protected by protection plans but by the agents who governed them. Therefore, it can be said that, during an armed conflict, the provisions made by the museum’s administration are only effective if its highest authorities share the same heritage practices and supervise their proper implementation. However, the case of the Louvre Museum does not illustrate the fate of all European collections, whether public or private. The liberation of Germany and Austria by Allied forces uncovered huge Nazi deposits of works of art. These works came from museums, private collections of Nazi high-ranking representatives and the Führermuseum project in Linz, where Hitler wanted to inaugurate the largest art centre in the world. These various deposits were the result of purchases, more or less forced donations and spoliations. The works obtained by the ERR service have been repatriated to their country of origin. Upon their return to France, these works were either returned to the owners, upon presentation of supporting documents, or entrusted to the National Museums pending a claim by the decree of 30 September 1949. In the face of the horrors of the Second World War, the United Nations was created, which took over from the League of Nations. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) then placed the preservation of cultural heritage at the heart of its mandate. In order to create better cooperation between States in the preservation of cultural heritage, in 1950 UNESCO launched a survey on ‘the organization of the defence of monuments and the defence of all properties of cultural value, in particular those held in museums, libraries and archives against the foreseeable dangers of armed conflict.’60 This initiative illustrated a genuine feeling in favour of the protection of cultural property during the aftermath of the Second World War. It also showed the need to better prepare museums for a crisis situation and to spread consensus on heritage at an international level. However, the lack of communication between museums about their emergency plans, given the secret nature of this program, prevented the rapid creation of a cooperation between States in the preservation of cultural heritage in time of armed conflict. Unfortunately, since the Second World War the nature of armed conflicts has changed, making it more difficult to protect cultural heritage. During the second half of the twentieth century, international conflicts gave way

76  Zoé Vannier to more and more civil conflicts. Characterised by battles over identity, these conflicts have taken a toll on heritage, including museums. Looting and destruction of cultural heritage are not new facts but have become almost systematic and large scale since the 1990s. In the face of the evolution of armed conflicts and their relationship to heritage, the preparation and updating of national emergency plans in peacetime is essential in order to guarantee the preservation of museum collections. Waiting for parties to respect the neutrality of cultural heritage during armed conflicts supposes a strong commitment from the administration and the government, as it was the case for the Louvre Museum during the Second World War.

Notes 1. This article presents the results of my master’s thesis and I would like to take this opportunity to thank my director, Ariane Thomas, curator of the Mesopotamian collections at the Louvre Museum, for her support during this research. 2. R. Valland, Le Front de l’Art: Defence des Collections Francaises 1939-1945 (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1961); L. Mazauric, Le Louvre en Voyage: ou Ma vie au château (Paris: Plon, 1967); G. Bazin, Souvenirs de l’Exode du Louvre: 1940-1945 (Paris: Somogy, 1991); M. Hours, Une vie au Louvre (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 1987). 3. L. Bertrand Dorléac, L’art de la Défaite: 1940-1944 (Paris: Seuil, 1993); L.-H. Nicholas, Le pillage de l’Europe: les œuvres d’art volées par les nazis (Paris: Seuil, 1995); Pillages et restitutions: le destin des œuvres d’art sorties de France pendant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, ed. by Françoise Cachin (Paris: A. Biro, 1997). 4. E. Polack, Le marché de l’Art sous l’Occupation (Paris: Tallandier, 2019). 5. A. Gob, Des musées au-dessus de tout soupçon (Paris: Armand Collin, 2007); M.Rayssac, L’Exode des musées: Histoire des œuvres d’art sous l’Occupation (Paris: Payot, 2007). 6. Musée du Louvre, ‘Le Louvre pendant la guerre. Regards photographiques 1938-1947,’ from 7 May to 31 August 2009. 7. AMN 2014 47 92/5: report of 5 August 1939 of Jacques Jaujard. 8. L. Mazauric quoted by S. le Creff, Conservation et restauration des tableaux du Louvre de 1939 à 1946, ed. by N. Volle (Paris: Ecole du Louvre, 2001), p. 37. 9. AMN Z2 Administration, 1792–1964, all departments, 1914–1918, Protection of the works of art, 28 August 1914, letter of Albert Dalimier to Henry Marcel. 10. C. Granger, ‘La protection des collections des musées nationaux durant la Première Guerre Mondiale,’ in Guerre et patrimoine à l’époque contemporaine, ed. by P. Nivet (Amiens: Encrage, 2013), p. 254. 11. AMN, 2015 00 44/28. Report of Paul Jamot, curator at the Near Eastern Antiquities, to Henry Marcel. 12. AMN, 2015 00 44/28. Letter of 10 February 1932, copy for comment to d’Henri Verne, Director of the National Museums, of a letter of the deputy secretary of state of Fine Arts to the Préfet of the Seine, direction of Fine Arts and museums of Paris. 13. AMN, 2014 47 92/1. Letter of 4 October 1932 of Henri Verne to René Dussaud, chief curator of the Near Eastern Department.

Evacuation and management of Louvre Museum 77 14. AMN, 2015 00 44/28. Letter of 15 October 1938 from Georges Contenau to Jacques Jaujard. 15. AMN, 2014 47 92/1. Letter of 13 July 1933 of Henri Verne to Anatole de Monzie, minister of Education. 16. H. Verne, ‘Le Plan d’extension et de regroupement méthodique des collections du Musée du Louvre,’ Bulletin des Musées de France 1 (1934). 17. AMN, 2014 47 92/124. Inventory without date of the deposit of Cheverny. This inventory indicated when the crates were created. 18. AMN, F/21/3976: Fine Arts administration, protection of works of art, official journal of 11 July 1938. 19. Rayssac, L’Exode des musées, p. 26. 20. AMN, 2014 47 92/36: Evacuation of the collection, including inventory of the evacuated works of art. 21. Rayssac, L’Exode des musées, p. 69. 22. AMN, 2015 00 44/28: Report of 3 February 1939 of Henri Verne on the Louvre evacuation of 1938 to Paul Landowski, director of the Fine Arts. 23. Ibid. 24. AMN, 2014 47 92/55-57: Emergency plan of the National museums, report of 5 May 1940 of André Chamson, deputy curator of the Versailles museum and Trianons in charge of the deposits of Chambord, Loc-Dieu, Montauban, Loubéjac and Latreyne. The part regarding the Louvre museum was signed by Jacques Jaujard. 25. Ibid. 26. Calculated on the basis of the inventories made during the evacuation (AMN, 2014 47 92/55-57. Report of 5 May 1940 of André Chamson), Z. Vannier, ‘L’évacuation du département des Antiquités orientales du Louvre pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale’ (Master’s thesis, Ecole du Louvre, 2017), p. 22. 27. Between November 1939 and 20 May 1940, 11 crates, including 6 containing Mari tablets, were evacuated. 28. Hours, Une vie au Louvre, p. 60. 29. AMN, 2014 47 92/20-22. Report of 15 March 1949 of Georges Contenau to Georges Salles. 30. 20144792/55-57: Evacuation reports. 31. On 16 November 1936, Madrid was bombed by Franco’s forces, hospitals, telephone exchanges and museums were targeted, Rayssac, L’Exode des musées, p. 127. 32. AMN, 2015 00 44/28. Letter of 21 December 1933 from Henri Verne to Colonel Islert, commander of the Paris City Fire Brigade. 33. Degenerate art was the term used by the Third Reich to define what they considered to be ‘impure’ art, as opposed to what would be the purified racial expression of true German art. Some artistic productions were so named, and persecuted accordingly, through a cultural policy of systematic control, forced exile, deportations, burning, confiscation, ‘degenerate art exhibitions’. See E. Lenda, ‘L’art ‘dégénéré’ et le projet culturel nazi: finitude et quête de l’éternité’ in Le Coq-Héron, 2 (2004), p. 161–165. 34. See C. Kott, Préserver l’art de l’ennemi?: le patrimoine artistique en Belgique et en France occupées, 1914-1918 (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2006); C. Kott, ‘Le Kunstschutz en 1939-1945, une pierre dans la façade de l’Allemagne nationalsocialiste?’ in Guerre et patrimoine à l’époque contemporaine, p. 329–342; Rayssac, L’Exode des musées. 35. Mazauric, Ma vie au château, p. 93–94. 36. Geheinfeldpolizei GFP was the secret military police of the German Wehrmacht until the end of the Second World War.

78  Zoé Vannier 37. Commanders of the military administration in France. 38. The rank of Generalfeldmarschall remained the highest military rank until July 1940, when Hermann Göring was promoted to the newly created higher rank of Reichsmarschall. 39. AMN, 2014 47 92/23. Official journal of 15 July 1940. 40. Rayssac, L’Exode des musées, p. 181. 41. Ibid, p. 192. 42. Discovered in 1897 in Spain, the Lady of Elche is a limestone bust of 56 cm. Banker Noël Bardac acquired it before donating it to the Louvre Museum. Thus, the Louvre obtained the work legally. It was presented for the first time at the Louvre museum in the Apadana room on 27 September 1897. 43. AMAE, R-2175, 68: verbal Statement of 14 October 1940 of Perez Bueno and Marcelino Maccaron to Jacques Chevalier, Minister of public Instruction in France. 44. AMN 2014 47 92/1: évacuation lists. 45. Bazin, Souvenirs de l’exode du Louvre 1940–1945, 1992, p. 104. 46. Servicio de Defensa del Patrimonio Artístico Nacional: SDPAN. 47. C. Gruat and L.Martinez, L’échange: Les dessous d’une négociation artistique entre la France et l’Espagne, 1940–1941 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011), p. 35. 48. AMN 2015 00 44/28: Letter of 27 May 1941 from Jacques Jaujard to Louis Hautecoeur. 49. AMN 2015 00 44/8: Minutes of the Conservative Committee meetings. 50. AMAE, 10 GMII 247. Letter of 3 July 1940 from Paul Baudouin, minister of Foreign Affairs, to François Piétri, French ambassador in Madrid. 51. E. Campbell Karlsgodt, Defending National Treasures, French art and heritage under Vichy (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 69. 52. A. Bertinet, Modèles et modalités de la transmission culturelle, Cahiers du CAP n°2 (Paris: Sorbonne, 2015), p. 27. 53. In June 1942, the count Franz Wolff-Metternich was transferred to Germany and was replaced by his assistant, doctor Von Tieschowitz. 54. MN, 2014 47 92/123. General instructions of 10 March 1944 on the duties of public administrators and public services in the event of military operations. 55. AMN, 2014 47 92/123. Letter of 1 September 1944 from Bernard Dorival to Jacques Jaujard. 56. AMN, 2015 44 00/29. List dated of 18 August 1944 of the members of the patriotic militia of the National Museums. 57. AMN, 2015 00 44/7: Minutes of the meeting of the Committee of Curators of the Louvre Museum held on 31 May 1945. 58. The ERR, headed by Alfred Rosenberg, was the primary German organisation charged with seizing Jewish and other cultural properties from in occupied countries during the Second World War. In France, the result of this large politic of spoliation was stored at the Jeu de Paume and the Louvre museum. 59. Bertinet, Modèles et modalités de la transmission culturelle, p. 9–40. 60. 069/7A/218/CL/431/CL506: protection museums armed conflict, letter of 9 October 1950 from Jaime Torres Bodet, General Director, to all the Culture ministers.

4

Implementing preventive strategies between World War I and II The Catalan Art museums and the Spanish Civil War Eva March

Introduction The Spanish Civil War began with an uprising by part of the Spanish army against the government of the Republic. In Barcelona, as in Valencia, Madrid and other regions, the coup failed conspicuously; but as result, Spain was split into two camps, which fought one another ferociously for almost three years. On the Republican side, the chaos was prolonged by the outbreak of a revolution, led paradoxically by those who had helped defeat the military uprising. In the days following 19 July 1936, the revolution spread through the towns and cities of Catalonia, carrying with it a wave of indiscriminate destruction. Once the rebel army had been crushed, the architects of the proletarian revolution (Anarcho-syndicalists and communists, in particular) railed against those they held responsible for all their ills: the Church and the bourgeoisie. The savagery of the attacks against the clergy, places of worship and the private homes of the wealthy is beyond doubt. So began the worst episode of destruction of cultural heritage in Catalonia’s history. So also began a huge rescue effort by the Catalan government, which amid the chaos and with very little power to act, adopted a series of measures that were to prove decisive for the survival of Catalonia’s cultural heritage. At the beginning of the war, under a decree issued previously, in 1933, by the government of the Republic, Catalonia had devolved responsibility for the protection of its cultural heritage.1 Under this legal framework, amid the general upheaval, disorder and breakdown of communication, the Catalan government (Generalitat) acted as if it were the government of a sovereign state, issuing its own decrees to protect and safeguard Catalonia’s cultural assets, 2 and continued to do so throughout the early months of the Civil War. In what follows we will discuss the decisive initial actions and how a specifically revolutionary conflict affected and reshaped museums. We will also explain how new ways of thinking about national identity developed in a war context and how these discourses impacted on artistic heritage. Lastly, we will try to answer the following question: to what extent can national conflicts contribute to international initiatives on heritage protection?

80  Eva March

War and cultural heritage One of the many remarkable first-hand accounts of the events and the situation that prevailed in Barcelona in the first few hours of the revolution that erupted after the failure of the military coup is that of the art historian and architect Josep Gudiol, who was to play an important part in salvaging artistic goods over the following months.3 In the introduction to his narrative, Gudiol explains: According to the news that travelled from town to town, not even the great historical and artistic treasures had escaped the flames. It was reported that the famous churches of El Belén, El Pino and Santa Maria del Mar, Santa Ana, and many other marvels of old Barcelona were burning, and that almost all the churches in our country were suffering the same fate. We climbed to the top of a nearby hill […] and countless columns of black smoke confirmed the news.4 The first few hours after the start of the revolution were decisive for the safeguarding of Catalonia’s artistic, historical, bibliographic and documentary heritage. The heads of the five sections into which the Catalan government’s Artistic Heritage Department was divided (Libraries, Archives, Museums, Monuments and Excavations) worked tirelessly, under the orders of the Culture Minister, Ventura Gassol, who did his best to coordinate the rescue work practically single-handed, as he had no staff, no police force and no resources. He ordered the few armed guards at his disposal to protect some of the most emblematic religious buildings, including Barcelona Cathedral, the Monastery of Montserrat, the Bishop’s Palace and the Pedralbes Monastery, which were thus saved from destruction. The bulk of the rescue work, however, namely the saving of religious artworks (the revolutionaries’ main target) from the flames, was done by groups of volunteers who risked their lives to protect these goods. 5 These groups scoured the city of Barcelona, collecting artworks and taking them to the government building, the Generalitat Palace, which became a makeshift storehouse. After the first few days of utter disarray, the Catalan government began to issue decrees which, though lacking the force they would have had in less troubled times, were designed to deter the revolutionaries from misappropriation and wanton destruction.6 Not only works of art (public or private) but also churches and convents were confiscated. In some cases the seizures were more ambitious and after the buildings had changed hands, they were put to new uses, partly to accommodate the increased number of artworks in the possession of the Catalan government. One example was the Pedralbes monastery, which was turned into a museum housing ‘collections that have become the heritage of the people.’7 Yet the anarchists continued to issue proclamations calling for the destruction of heritage, not

Implementing preventive strategies 81 so much for what it was as for what it symbolised, namely the tyranny of the privileged classes.8 Though issued in a context remote in time from the French Revolution, these messages make the comparison almost unavoidable. The general flow of events in respect of heritage was similar in both cases, with initial iconoclasm and animosity towards the Church giving way to the view that the heritage now belonged to the people and so should be protected by the State. In particular, the abovementioned strategy of relocating confiscated artworks to the new-found museums so as to objectify their change of status had already been implemented during the French Revolution. Back then, too, museums became the alternative to destruction and a means of halting the devastation.9 As regards asset seizures (in this case seizures of private collections), from 27 July the Generalitat issued various decrees confiscating property, often at the owners’ request, to protect them from any vandalism they might suffer in the course of the house searches conducted by violent gangs.10 Once the legal apparatus was in place, the procedure was as follows, as described by the person responsible: First thing in the morning I gave each volunteer […] instructions for one or more visits to be made, following the order of the countless complaints and reports we received through all channels. They would spend a few hours classifying the objects brought to the Generalitat, which were then properly packed and transported to the Museu d’Art de Catalunya, where they were handed over against a receipt with the accompanying inventory […] Each collection was inventoried and packed by specialised museum staff, led in each case by some of the group volunteers.11

The museum as storeroom The Museu d’Art de Catalunya was thus no longer solely a conservation and exhibition space but also a storehouse for the artworks requisitioned by the Generalitat, both from private collections and from religious buildings.12 Like all the other museums in Barcelona, it had remained closed since the day after the military uprising.13 From the correspondence generated by the museum’s administration, we know that special care was taken to publicise this state of affairs. Several letters were sent by the Commissariat-General of Museums to the editors of the main Barcelona newspapers to correct published reports that some of the museums or their libraries were still open. Letters sent to individuals who had asked to visit the museum stated that such requests could not be met, as the collections, under the protection of the Generalitat’s police force and the fire service, were not in a condition to be visited. Although even in peacetime the museum had armed guards and a permanent fire brigade,14 the situation at that time was different. On one occasion, in its response denying access, the museum even appealed to

82  Eva March the patriotism of the applicant, who, it was suggested, would appreciate the desirability of ‘keeping the measures taken in the utmost confidence.’15 In other words, it was best not to let it be known that the museum housed such a great hoard of artworks and was specially protected precisely for that reason. The articles the director of the Museu d’Art de Catalunya, Folch i Torres, published in La Vanguardia newspaper between 7 August and 2 September 1936 therefore made no reference to those measures. Continuing his long-standing collaboration with the newspaper (since 1934), in these articles the director explained how the conservation work was being carried out and was particularly careful to emphasise the role played by workers’ organisations, which had shown ‘exemplary zeal’ in bringing any objects of worship that fell into their hands to the museum for safekeeping.16 Apart from the newspaper reports, the measures taken by the Catalan government were also reported, from the very start, in the Barcelona art museums journal, Butlletí dels museus d’art de Barcelona. In a long article published in October, which was also published in the monthly supplement to Mouseion, the journal of the International Museums Office (IMO) (Office international des musées) – which we will come back to later – what we might call the ‘official voice’ of the Commissariat-General of Museums recounted the events to date in the field of heritage protection.17 In one of its most significant sections, the article explained how the materials received at the museum were classified in three groups: artworks of museum quality; artworks not of museum quality but made of precious materials (capable of being melted down and converted into economic resources); and items of no interest containing no precious materials, which were destroyed. It may be that this official procedure, issued by the body in charge of Catalan museums since July 1936, the Commissariat-General of Museums – which took steps to ensure it was widely publicised in the press –18 masked a risky strategy: destroy a few worthless items in order to assuage the fury of the masses, who accused the authorities of saving artworks in museums in order to return them to their owners.19 It should be noted in this regard that during the French Revolution, too, not all the assets that became the property of the nation were preserved, for a variety of reasons, including strict practicality: in some cases the cost (in time and money) of keeping them was simply too high. 20 The last part of the abovementioned article in the Butlletí dels museus d’art de Barcelona is the most interesting, as it provides previously unpublished information. It gives a list of the private collections that had been ‘accepted’ into the museum, together with a description of their contents. What prompted the decision to publish this list? Until the last paragraph, the fact that the article is accompanied by numerous photographs of the confiscated artworks, appropriately identified, suggests that the current situation might be considered transitory and likely to be reversed – an

Implementing preventive strategies 83 interpretation reinforced by the repeated omission of the term ‘confiscation.’ However, the fact that an abbreviated version of this same information had also been published in the much more widely read weekly Mirador, 21 that the list includes a collection that had not been confiscated but donated in a will22 and, above all, the final words of the article permit a different reading, namely, that quite simply there was nothing to hide. Whether the collections had been seized or donated was almost irrelevant; the only thing that mattered was that ‘the situation regarding Catalonia’s publicly owned artistic heritage is now truly exceptional.’23 The revolutionary circumstances entitled the Generalitat to take the measures it had taken. The result to date, in terms of works saved, was excellent: ‘in view of this fact,’ the article concluded, ‘the general public should be fully aware of what this is and means for Catalonia.’24 What emerged, therefore, in October 1936, after the initial months of the revolution and once the Catalan government (a Catalanist Republican government, let’s not forget) had started to gain a degree of control over the situation, was the issue of national identity, as also reflected in the official decrees published since the end of September. The revolutionary dialectic and references to the people (i.e., the working class militias and committees) continued, as did the emphasis on the desacralisation of art and the need not to attack the artworks, because they were vital pieces of art history. But now there was the added factor of Catalan identity: the heritage had to be saved because it was a testimony to the ‘life and history of the nation.’25

The concept of heritage The government of the Generalitat, drawn from the bourgeoisie, thus combined heritage protection with the defence of a Catalonia with a distinct identity. This combination was not new, nor were those who led the rescue missions, starting with Ventura Gassol himself, Culture Minister in the Catalan government since 1932. In fact, Gassol was the driving force behind the creation of the Culture Ministry and helped design the entire legislative apparatus for heritage protection during the pre-war years. Although this is not the place for an in-depth discussion of this subject, it is worth pointing out that the concept of heritage reflected in the first of the new laws passed by the Parliament of Catalonia after the devolution of powers by the government of the Republic26 reveals the care the Catalan government devoted to heritage in peacetime, producing a law that has been considered remarkably modern, especially by comparison to the National Artistic Heritage Act promulgated by the government of the Republic a few months earlier.27 This is not to say that prior to 1934, no steps had been taken in Catalonia to protect heritage; on the contrary, some provisions of the 1934 law implemented measures first put forward 20 years earlier. In 1914, Catalonia had

84  Eva March as yet no autonomous government and therefore no parliament, but it was in that year that the first institution of Catalan self-government (the first, that is, since 1714), the Mancomunitat, was created.28 The creation of the Mancomunitat led to the institutionalisation of culture in Catalonia, building in a framework within which the various cultural bodies and departments (archives, museums, libraries, excavations, preservation of monuments, etc.) converged. These bodies and departments were headed by highly qualified specialists, who continued to hold their posts throughout the years of the Second Republic and also the Civil War. Their opinions, backed by their proven capability, were the ones that prevailed at the difficult moments when risky but effective decisions had to be taken. A consensus can thus be said to have grown up among ‘cultural professionals’ as to what heritage was, what it signified and how it should be protected. Of the five men that the Minister of Culture, Ventura Gassol, placed in charge of ‘his’ Heritage Department29 in July 1936, two deserve closer attention in this respect: Jeroni Martorell, head of the Monuments section and Joaquim Folch i Torres, head of the Museums section. Before winning the competition that made him head of the Mancomunitat’s Monument Conservation Department (1914),30 Martorell travelled throughout Europe, attended architectural and heritage conferences, studied the legislation of other countries and tried to implement various measures to advance the protection of artistic heritage not only in Catalonia but throughout Spain.31 In 1919, with uncanny foresight, Martorell argued that ‘historical buildings and works of art belonging to organisations of any kind – the Church, corporations, guilds, municipalities or any official body – should be declared national property.’32 This was precisely what the revolutionaries had accused the State of failing to do at the time of the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic (1931), namely, nationalise the assets of the Church. And it was precisely what happened during the Civil War, albeit for different reasons. If this action had been taken earlier, when Martorell first suggested it, the destruction of artistic heritage by the revolutionaries would probably have been infinitely less. Folch i Torres was the most veteran of all the heads of the Generalitat’s Heritage Department. Linked to Barcelona’s art museums since 1912, Folch was a respected public figure and an authority. He had given numerous lectures in Barcelona’s leading artistic and cultural institutions and had published dozens of articles in the press. He actively supported the Barcelona Museums Board’s acquisitions policy and was on the same political wavelength as its members, whom he encouraged to row in the same direction. Folch was also one of the proponents of the nationalist discourse of what gradually became the Catalan art museum. For that reason, at the opening of the Museu d’Art de Catalunya, the president of the Museums Board, Pere Coromines, 33 stated that the event had been 30 years in the making.34 In fact, we may need to go back even further to understand what happened in Catalonia after 1902 (which is the date Coromines was referring

Implementing preventive strategies 85 to), back to the mid-nineteenth century, when the Renaixença cultural movement, which ran parallel to the Romantic movement in Europe, gave free rein to the remembrance of identity. First came a revival of the language, then of the history (of laws, institutions, etc.). Historical studies laid claim to a specifically Catalan civil law that was distinct from Spanish law, just as they also laid claim to specifically Catalan political institutions. Thanks to patriotism and the awakening of national sentiment, revealing a love of country, the first steps were taken to recover and re-evaluate the artistic and monumental heritage. The monuments were visited and admired and ‘the collective soul conceived a desire to work to save them.’35 This process, which briefly sketches the creation of the Monument Conservation Department, was not only specific to Catalonia, but is paralleled by similar experiences in other countries. The protection and safeguarding of monuments […] which are of interest for the memories and the history of all civilised nations, is imperative to the thought of whoever knows, loves and respects the traditions or glories of his fatherland.36 These words, which were part of the rationale for holding the First International Congress for the Protection of Works of Art and Monuments (1899), state the more general principle. That congress could be said to be the inaugural congress, insofar as it was the first of a series of international meetings on monuments and heritage, held in Europe, that became one of various channels for sharing common concerns.37 Because the different national models could be discussed in transnational forums, they could also be transferred and, albeit with some delay, were eventually implemented in Catalonia. At the beginning of the twentieth century, literary, historical and theoretical Catalanism showed renewed vigour, as it spread to the sphere of politics and became embedded in the institutions of government, specifically Barcelona City Council. It was ‘when the local bourgeoisie came to political power that all these reformulated traditions were elevated to the status of national culture.’38 That was the turning point to which Coromines alluded. It was in 1902 that efforts were set in motion to systematically recover Catalan heritage. The starting point was the Exhibition of Ancient Art, held in Barcelona in 1902, which brought together and inventoried the main body of Catalonia’s artistic heritage, in particular the works of the so-called ‘Primitives,’ raising awareness in Catalan society of the need to protect this heritage. This circumstance, among others, put the Barcelona initiative in line with other nationalist exhibitions held in Europe at that time, the most paradigmatic example being the Flemish Primitives exhibition held in Bruges in 1902. The efforts to assemble a rich collection of Catalan art intensified as Catalonia’s self-government grew stronger through the first quarter of the

86  Eva March twentieth century. It was no secret that the men who governed Barcelona’s art museums at that time wanted also to ensure that the Catalan heritage had an impact in Europe and that the specific character of the local tradition had its significance in the history of European art. Neither more nor less than the museums of other peripheral European countries with which Catalonia shared, moreover, the fact of being stateless nations pursued. We refer in particular to Norway. Almost half a century earlier than the Catalan museum, Norway’s National Gallery defined what it wanted to become: a museum that exhibited Norwegian national art to the world, not a museum that exhibited international art to Norwegians.39 Later, private museums as the Norwegian Folk Museum reinforced this notion, so that by the end of the nineteenth century Norwegian museums made it their mission to exhibit ‘the specific value and authenticity of Norwegian cultural life as well as Norwegian arts and crafts in comparison with those of other European nation-states, thus seeking to put Norway’s artistic achievements on a par with those of existing European nation-states.’40 The nation-building process of the Catalan art museum – lagging behind the Norwegian model to some extent – culminated in 1934 with the opening of the Museu d’Art de Catalunya. However, the new museum had no catalogue of its collections. Certainly, in July 1936, when the Civil War broke out, there was still no compendium of Catalan art; that is to say, there was no History of Catalan Art, no Art History of Catalonia, thus revealing a stark anomaly, namely, that ‘the construction of the historical memory of Catalan art as a whole was late and slow.’41 Coromines admitted as much, between the lines, in the speech quoted earlier. The Museu d’Art de Catalunya, he said, was ‘a coherent synthesis of what Catalan art had been and was’; it was an ‘archive of the national period.’42 Catalan art had been collected, preserved and exhibited, and fragmentary approaches to Catalan art had been written; but as yet there was no overview: the concept of Catalan art had not yet been represented in writing. The visual documents were there in what, following Coromines’s taxonomy, we might call the museum archive, but the history of Catalan art was yet to be written. This was yet another reason (and a compelling one) why the art had to be saved. The significance of this for Catalonia is shown by the closure of the Museum when the military uprising began. Although the revolutionary destruction was probably more severe in Barcelona than in Madrid, the Spanish capital was threatened almost from the outset by the advance of Franco’s troops. Yet the Prado Museum did not close until 30 August. Various reasons could be given for the different behaviour of the authorities of Spain’s two most important museums. The fears of a calamity may not have been felt equally strongly. If the Prado Museum were to suffer any harm, the President of the Spanish Republic, Manuel Azaña, told Prime Minister Juan Negrín, ‘it would be a major embarrassment.’ ‘You would have to shoot yourself. […] The Prado Museum is more important to Spain

Implementing preventive strategies 87 than the Republic and the Monarchy combined.’43 No doubt Azaña was right, but the solid foundations of the Spanish nation would not be shaken however many Prado artworks perished, whereas if Catalan art were lost, a great deal more would disappear. As Ventura Gassol said in May 1936, ‘The museum is the purest testimony of the Catalan homeland.’44 In 1937, in the middle of the Civil War, Gassol’s successor at the Culture Ministry stated: The Generalitat de Catalunya has always considered it an essential duty to preserve our artistic, historical, bibliographic and scientific heritage. That heritage is the foundation of our national culture […] The Catalan people have always loved this spiritual heritage as something their own. The love with which they have safeguarded it is a manifestation of their national consciousness. […] True to this purpose, we will not allow our cultural heritage to be torn to shreds nor our works of art—which belong to the people as a whole, to the Nation—to be auctioned off as commodities.45

The transfer of heritage and the International Museums Office On 12 and 13 October 1936, 90 days after the start of the Spanish Civil War, the IMO management met in Paris to discuss measures that could be taken to minimise the impact of the war on Spain’s artistic heritage. The meeting was fully justified; ten years after it had been founded, the IMO, which was linked to the League of Nations Institute for Intellectual Cooperation, had become a genuinely effective body: it stimulated collaboration between museums, issued guidelines on the methodologies and strategies museums should adopt in order to modernise themselves and discussed every aspect of the conservation of artistic assets. It would be fair to say, therefore, that by the mid-1930s the IMO was a meta-heritage institution. It had first-hand information on the course of events in Spain. As IMO secretary-general Euripide Foundoukidis explained, on the one hand it had the information provided by Javier Sánchez Cantón, a Spanish member of the IMO Steering Committee and deputy director of the Prado Museum, who had informed his colleagues about the measures being taken to protect the paintings stored in the Madrid gallery. On the other, it had news of what was happening in other parts of Spain, as staff working there had sent Foundoukidis their reports.46 Among those reports was undoubtedly the one submitted by Folch i Torres, describing the steps taken by the Catalan government since the beginning of the Civil War, which was published in the next issue of the monthly supplement to the IMO journal, Mouseion.47 At the Paris meeting, after commissioning a report by the international law expert Charles de Visscher,48 IMO management concluded that the

88  Eva March existing guidelines for the protection of heritage in times of war, based on the requirements of the 1907 Hague Convention, were obsolete. Despite this conclusion and the fact that the IMO could not intervene directly in the Spanish conflict, it was decided that a report should be published in Mouseion setting out guidelines for the protection of historical and artistic heritage in the event of armed conflict. Aside from recommendations on historical buildings and monuments, the report set out the following principles for the protection of artworks: Construction of shelters—similar to those built to keep the civilian population safe from aerial bombardment—inside museums, so that easily transportable works can be brought to safety. […] Construction of shelters and depots outside urban areas, in places that could not be mistaken for military or strategic targets, to which movable works in need of protection can be transported where possible […] designation of a strictly neutral place as a last refuge under the laws of humanity.49 Moving the main works of art kept in the Museu d’Art de Catalunya out of Barcelona – specifically to Olot, a town close to the Pyrenees – was the personal project of Folch i Torres. He considered it vital to protect the 70% of all Catalan artistic heritage held in the museum he directed, so that none of it should perish. To that end he urged the Catalan political authorities to approve his strategic plan. The Generalitat authorised the transfer to Olot at the end of October 1936, without fanfare (doubtless so as not to give anything away), 50 although the operation had been in preparation for almost a month. In fact, Folch i Torres had already completed the task of depositing the artworks in the Barcelona museum on 30 September, as he indicated in an article published in La Vanguardia.51 The main purpose of the article was to reassure the foreign friends who had expressed concern about the fate of Catalonia’s artistic heritage. Not surprisingly, the news published in the European and North American press had caused alarm.52 We know the reasons that prompted Folch i Torres to propose the unprecedented step of transferring the artworks to Olot. We also know how his plan was conceived and put into effect. He himself gave a brief explanation, in July 1937, in a long note addressed to his immediate superior, Pere Coromines, which lends the information he provides an indisputable air of credibility.53 Apart from bringing them closer to the French border in case the situation deteriorated, the forced evacuation of the artworks served a dual purpose: First, to get the collections out of Barcelona into a relatively calmer political and social environment. Second, to move them away from centres of population where military action was more likely.54

Implementing preventive strategies 89 The director of the Museu d’Art de Catalunya thus appears to have adapted the second and third points of the IMO guidelines in drawing up his rescue project. Although the guidelines were published in October 1936, they had been drafted in 1934 (as stated in the text of the report). Very likely, Folch i Torres was aware of the existence of these recommendations or had written to the IMO secretary-general at the start of the war for advice. This was something he had done throughout his career, looking to other countries, always seeking out the most advanced practices. Moreover, he had known Foundoukidis personally for some time, at least since the spring of 1933. At the beginning of that year, Folch i Torres had been invited to join the committee of 12 experts appointed by the IMO, which met in Paris with a view to preparing a manual setting out rules on the scientific methods to be applied to the conservation and restoration of works of art.55 Much later, in July 1937, in view of the advance of Franco’s troops towards Barcelona, Folch i Torres, who at that time was in Paris, suggested that the artworks be moved yet again, this time from Olot to the French capital. Once again he wrote to the Commissioner-General of Museums, as the person directly responsible.56 He channelled the request through Foundoukidis, which, as noted, was a way of applying pressure to get his new plan accepted.57 In other words, the connection between Foundoukidis and Folch i Torres, at least during the first year of the war, was more than a sporadic contact. However, the idea of evacuating the artworks from Barcelona was not well received either by the Commissioner-General for Museums or by the Culture Minister – at least not at first. Other possibilities were considered, such as that of building ‘reinforced underground storerooms with the appropriate atmospheric conditions.’ This option was rejected in view of the characteristics of the Barcelona subsoil, which is especially wet, and the risk that the storerooms would be unusable once built. Nor was it feasible for the works to remain at the museum, which was too close to Montjuïc Castle (unquestionably a military target) and had weak foundations (it was built as a temporary structure for the 1929 International Exhibition), making it difficult to defend. 58 Although the bombardment of Barcelona did not begin until March 1937, the night-time illumination of the museum was suspended in November59 and the city’s first anti-aircraft shelters started to be built in December, clearly indicating a recognition that the threat was real.60 In the end, it was decided that the artworks should be moved to Olot, a small town with a strong artistic tradition that would be receptive to the plan. Much more importantly, Olot was chosen because the military authorities considered it ideal on account of its position and topography. The works would be stored inside the Church of Sant Esteve, which, like so many others, had been a target of the revolutionaries’ iconoclastic fury a few weeks earlier. Once the building had been repaired and refurbished,

90  Eva March shelving and racking had been put in place and 12 fire hydrants had been installed, the transfers began. From 31 October 1936, a total of five lorries travelled the 150 km between Barcelona and Olot, back and forth, for two months.61 The Commissariat-General of Museums and the staff of the Museu d’Art de Catalunya (with the exception of three officials who stayed behind in Barcelona) also moved to Olot to oversee the operation; most of them stayed in Olot practically until the end of the war. The task of inventorying and cataloguing the artworks, especially those from religious institutions and private collections, continued. A unit of firefighters and armed police was assigned to protect the deposited artworks. Nothing happened to them in Olot.

The ‘L’Art Catalan’ exhibition in Paris Or perhaps something did happen to them, depending on how one looks at it. More than 100 works, the most outstanding examples of medieval Catalan art – including some of the Romanesque frescoes that soon after were to be admired the world over – were moved yet again. In February 1937, they were taken to Paris to be displayed in the exhibition ‘L’Art Catalan. Du Xe siècle au XVe siècle,’ organised by the Musée du Jeu de Paume (see Figure 4.1).62 Preparations for what is undoubtedly the most important exhibition of Catalan art ever held outside Catalonia had begun months earlier, at the end of October 1936, when, as we have seen, the government of the Generalitat began to recover its nationalist discourse. In Paris were Ventura Gassol and a high-powered international delegation of the Catalan government’s Propaganda Commissariat. The exhibition would, of course, be of works that had been saved from ‘barbarism’ and – as living proof that an image is worth a thousand words – was partly intended to convince the world that the Catalan artistic heritage had indeed been saved. Yet that was not the only objective. As the exhibition’s subtitle indicates, the period covered by the works shown in Paris between March and April 1937 was the six centuries of Catalonia’s history as a nation, a fact stated in the opening lines of the exhibition catalogue. The assumption behind the exhibition discourse, therefore, was that Catalonia’s highest art was achieved only at times of its national plenitude. The exhibition’s political significance thus transcended the merely artistic level, all the more so in 1937, when a war of uncertain outcome was being waged that could jeopardise the Catalan identity. Indeed, the decree authorising the exhibition explicitly stated that the Paris event would display the works that had escaped the horrors of war but would also reaffirm Catalonia’s national character. Thus, ‘L’Art Catalan’ showed 123 works, illustrating the magnificence achieved by Romanesque and Gothic art in Catalonia. But apart from displaying Romanesque frescoes (then little-known in Europe), large and elaborate Gothic altarpieces,

Implementing preventive strategies 91

Figure 4.1  Place de la Concorde, Paris. Exhibition Poster of the exhibition ‘L’Art Catalan. Du Xe siècle au Xe siècle’, held at the Musée du Jeu de Paume from 20 March to 20 April 1937. ©Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya (ANC1-1-T-7596)

the best work of medieval goldsmiths, the most sumptuous sculptures and the most exceptional embroidery, above all this the exhibition stressed an ideological discourse aimed, as we said earlier, at highlighting the genealogy and specificity of Catalan art (see Figure 4.2). This same idea was emphasised in the catalogue, which included several introductory texts by the Catalan and French authorities responsible for the exhibition.63 The originator of the discourse exhibited on the walls of the Paris museum – the person responsible, therefore, for selecting and installing the artworks – was Folch i Torres. The Catalan curator of the exhibition acted in unison with the director of the Jeu de Paume, André Dezarrois, whom the National Education Ministry of the French Republic (the Catalan government’s dialogue partner) had assigned to that role. The Catalan art exhibition was an unprecedented success. The Generalitat and its Propaganda Commissariat supervised every detail of all the works

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Figure 4.2 Exhibition ‘L’Art Catalan. Du Xe siècle au Xe siècle’, Musée du Jeu de Paume, Paris, 1937, room V. ©Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya (ANC1-1-T-7596)

that were published about the exhibition. The director of the Jeu de Paume also produced a study of Catalan art of the Middle Ages64 and the prestigious French publisher and critic Christian Zervos published L’Art de la Catalogne de la seconde moitié du neuvième siècle à la fin du quinzième siècle, a work that was also published in German and English, bringing the exhibition to a much wider audience.65 Although the reception of the exhibition is beyond the scope of this paper, it must be said that the amount of attention the exhibition received was truly extraordinary, extending far beyond specialised French publications or the usual news stories about the opening.66 In view of the success with critics and audiences alike, the French authorities decide to extend the exhibition and transfer it to the Maisons-Laffitte chateau, with the addition of 40 more pieces to be brought from Olot (see Figure 4.3). And there they remained until the end of the Civil War, partly at the wish of the director

Implementing preventive strategies 93

Figure 4.3 Exhibition ‘L’Art Catalan. Du Xe siècle au Xe siècle’, Château du Maisons-Laffitte, Paris, 1937, room III. ©Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya (ANC1-1-T-7597)

of the Museu d’Art de Catalunya, who repeatedly defended the transfer of Catalan artistic heritage to France. The circumstances in which the exhibition took place were absolutely exceptional in all regards, perhaps most of all the fact that the French president, Leon Blum, intervened to obtain the consent of the Spanish government to allow the Catalan artworks to leave Spanish territory, which was the main obstacle the Catalan government had to overcome in carrying out its plans. In addition, judging from the impact it had in the Catalan press, the exhibition also served to boost morale in the Republican rear, showing that Catalan art was still being exhibited, in spite of everything and everyone – it was a kind of museum in exile. Although by no means the main purpose, the Catalan authorities thus achieved what had seemed impossible: that the museum should continue to perform one of its core functions, namely, to exhibit its artworks, even in times of war.

Conclusion In 1939, the IMO published La Protection des Monuments et Oeuvres d’Art en Temps de Guerre.67 The title was the same as that used for the 1934 memorandum, but the advice had changed. Given the ‘increasingly devastating effects of the weapons of destruction used in war’ (a clear allusion

94  Eva March to the use of explosive and incendiary bombs in the Spanish Civil War), ‘we must not delude ourselves as to the strength of our protective materials and devices.’ Therefore, ‘as far as possible, efforts should be aimed at removing valuable items of artistic and historical heritage from the reach of war.’68 Following this principle, stated in the preamble, the IMO advised, in contrast to the position it had adopted in 1934, that the first step was to evacuate artworks from museums. The following criteria should be taken into account in choosing a place to keep them: The building must be protected from foreseeable military operations, distant from any military target, distant from the main supply routes and far removed from major industrial and demographic centres. In addition to these somewhat strategic considerations, attention should also be given to the hygienic conditions of the available facilities, bearing in mind the nature of the objects to be stored.69 This description echoes the criteria the Catalan authorities had used in choosing Olot. With the Second World War around the corner, there can be no doubt that the measures implemented by the Catalan government to protect artistic heritage were extremely useful. So too were the measures adopted by the government of the Republic, which, having decided to evacuate Spanish heritage, especially the Prado’s collections, first moved the works to Valencia70 and later to various Catalan towns. In February 1939, at a time when the Civil War was already lost for the Republicans, the Spanish government finally acceded to a proposal it had been resisting throughout the conflict, namely, that the League of Nations intervene to transfer the artworks, including those the Catalan government had been safeguarding since the beginning of the war, out of Spain. What the Catalan government questioned, therefore, was not the decision to move the works to Geneva but that the decision was taken hastily, increasing the risk of destruction.71 As has often been pointed out, forcing artistic heritage to leave the country when the roads were occupied by thousands of Republicans fleeing to France was reckless.72 Be that as it may, an international committee ensured that the transfer to Switzerland was carried out in a proper manner. The Spanish government was represented by Minister of State Álvarez del Vayo; the International Committee, by the director of the French national museums, Jacques Jaujard. Six months after the evacuation of Spanish heritage out of the country, the Louvre’s artworks started to be moved to different castles in the Loire Valley, a step which, we might add, was taken with sufficient foresight.73 Overseeing this operation was none other than Jacques Jaujard. Preparations to protect France’s heritage from the threat of a world war had been started much earlier, however, as is evidenced by the Law on the General Organisation of the Nation in Time of War (11 July 1938). This law adopted the Spanish solutions developed during the Civil War, especially those relating to the evacuation of

Implementing preventive strategies 95 museums (see Chapter 3 for further details on the evacuation and storage of the contents of the Louvre).74 Returning to the IMO and its mouthpiece, in 1940, as soon as the Second World War began, Mouseion provided timely information about how different countries had adapted to the new war context.75 It also made references to Spain (a ‘painful field of experience’ that had served as a lesson for other states in establishing their own safeguards) and to the foresight shown by the IMO in publishing the treatise La Protection des Monuments et oeuvres d’Art en Temps de Guerre several months earlier. The title was well chosen: in the event of war, the distinction between civil and international conflict was irrelevant, as the measures to be taken were the same in both cases. Just as the Spanish Civil War is often said to have been a rehearsal for the Second World War, Spain was also a test bench for heritage protection.

Notes 1. Decree by which Catalonia’s Fine Arts, Conservation, Archives and Monuments Departments were transferred to the Generalitat. Decree of 30 November 1933 (published in the Gaceta de Madrid on 1 December 1933). 2. M. Joseph i Mayol, El salvament del patrimoni artistic català durant la Guerra Civil (Barcelona: Pórtico, 1971), p. 56. Joseph i Mayol witnessed the events of that time and was actively involved in safeguarding heritage. The fundamental work on this subject is F. Gracia and G. Munilla, Salvem l’Art! La protecció del patrimoni cultural català durant la Guerra Civil (1936-1939) (Barcelona: La Magrana, 2011). One of the most noteworthy recent publications on the topic is J. Nadal i Farreras, ‘La salvaguarda del patrimoni històric, artístic i científic de Catalunya (1936-1939),’ in A 80 anys del cop d’estat de Franco. La Generalitat de Catalunya i la Guerra Civil, (1936-1939), ed. by J. Sobrequés (Barcelona: Memorial Democràtic- Centre d’Història Contemporània, 2017), pp. 239–280. The book by R. Saavedra Arias, Destruir y proteger. El patrimonio histórico artístico durante la Guerra Civil (1936-1939) (Santander: Ediciones de la Universidad de Cantabria, 2016), puts the rescue action carried out in Catalonia in the Spanish context. Another overview is to be found in Patrimonio, Guerra Civil y Posguerra, ed. by A. Colorado Castellary (Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2010). 3. During the Civil War, Gudiol served the Catalan government as head of the protection service for Barcelona’s private collections and the artistic goods of the churches of Catalonia and the Catalan-speaking areas of Aragón (‘La Franja’). 4. Josep Gudiol, ‘En su defensa: la intervención de Josep Gudiol en el salvamento del patrimonio artístico durante la Guerra Civil,’ in Tres escritos de Josep Maria Gudiol i Ricart, ed. by M. Barbié and A. Ramón (Barcelona: Editorial Opera Minora 1998), p. 89. 5. This was recognised from the outset. On 23 July 1936, after the rescue action carried out the previous day by a group of volunteers led by the sculptor Frederic Marés, the Catalan government thanked him for his work in a personal letter. It contains the following words: ‘The government of the Generalitat de Catalunya will not forget the selfless efforts of those citizens who, at the most critical hour, risked their lives to save Catalonia’s artistic, cultural and historical heritage.’ Published in F. Marés, El mundo fascinante del coleccionismo y de las antigüedades. Memorias de la vida de un coleccionista (Barcelona: Gráfica Bachs, 1977), p. 424.

96  Eva March 6. The first article of one of the first decrees stated: ‘The Generalitat de Catalunya shall confiscate all materials and objects of educational, scientific, artistic, historical, archaeological, bibliographic or documentary interest located in the buildings or facilities of public institutions in Catalonia that are affected by current events or that in the judgement of the commissioners of the Generalitat, mayors and other authorities may be so affected.’ Published in the Butlletí Oficial de la Generalitat de Catalunya, 24 July 1936, p. 674. 7. Decree of the Generalitat, 1 August 1936. For an exhaustive account of the Generalitat’s legislative activity during the Civil War, see J. Massó i Carballido, Patrimoni en perill. Notes sobre la salvaguarda dels béns culturals durant la guerra civil i la postguerra (1936-1948) (Reus: Edicions del Centre de Lectura, 2004), pp. 21–26. 8. ‘Corolarios de la Revolución,’ Solidaridad Obrera, 25 July 1936. 9. As evidenced by the law of October 1793 against vandalism. In this regard, see A. McClellan, Inventing the Louvre. Art, Politics and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 113–114. 10. Joseph i Mayol, El Salvament, p. 47. On the confiscations, see in particular: S. M. Mateos Rusillo, ‘De las llamas revolucionarias a la oscuridad de los almacenes. El salvamento del patrimonio artístico catalán,’ in Patrimonio, Guerra Civil y Posguerra, ed. by Colorado Castellary, pp. 61–85; J. Alvarez Lopera, ‘La organización de la defensa de bienes culturales en Cataluña durante la Guerra Civil. I. El periodo revolucionario (julio 1936-junio1937),’ Cuadernos de Arte de la Universidad de Granada, xvi (1984), pp. 557–562; Y. Pérez Carrasco, Patrimonio Confiscado (Barcelona: Base, 2018), pp. 51–76; Gracia and Munilla, Salvem l’Art!, pp. 42–117. 11. ‘En su defensa: la intervención de Josep Gudiol en el salvamento del patrimonio artístico durante la Guerra Civil,’ p. 94. 12. Marés, El mundo fascinante, pp. 113–115. 13. Barcelona’s art museums journal (Butlletí dels museus d’art de Barcelona) regularly reported on school visits to museums. Such visits were discontinued on 19 July 1936. 14. ‘Conversa sobre la vida privada dels museus (III i darrer),’ Butlletí dels museus d’art de Barcelona, (November 1936), pp. 321–333. 15. Memorandum sent by the General Commissariat of Museums to Salvador Roca i Roca, President of the Permanent Section of CADCI, 9 November 1936. Kept in the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya (ANC), ANC1-715/Junta de Museus de Catalunya, ‘Correspondència rebuda i emesa-Any 1936’. 16. J. Folch i Torres, ‘La Generalidad de Cataluña defiende el Patrimonio Artístico,’ 7 August 1936; ‘La defensa del Patrimonio artístico de Cataluña,’ 18 August 1936; ‘El patrimonio artístico de Cataluña está salvado,’ 2 September 1936. 17. ‘La revolució de juliol i els nostres museus d’Art,’ Butlletí dels museus d’art de Barcelona, (October 1936), pp. 301–318. 18. ‘El gobierno de Cataluña sigue entregado a una eficaz labor de organización’, Las Notícias, 20 August 1936. 19. Gracia and Munilla, Salvem l’Art!, p. 120. 20. For an analysis of the official destruction of artworks during the French Revolution, see N. El Mecky, ‘Dangerous Art. Towards a Theory of Organised Legal Attacks on European Art,’ (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, Department of History of Art, 2012), pp. 145–150. 21. E.F.G, ‘El patrimoni artistic a Catalunya,’ Mirador, 20 August 1936.

Implementing preventive strategies 97 22. A. Maseres, ‘Martí Estany i la seva col.lecció de rellotges,’ Butlletí dels museus d’art de Barcelona, November 1937, pp. 321–333; Maseres, ‘La collecció d’arquetes de Martí Estany,’ Butlletí dels museus d’art de Barcelona, December 1937, pp. 357–367. 23. ‘La revolució de juliol i els nostres museus d’art,’ p. 318. 24. Ibid. 25. Diari Oficial de la Generalitat de Catalunya, 17 October 1936, p. 230. 26. Law on the Conservation of the Historical, Artistic and Scientific Heritage of Catalonia, passed on 26 June 1934 and promulgated on 3 July 1934 (Butlletí Oficial de la Generalitat de Catalunya, 5 July 1934). First of all, this law delimited and defined the assets included in heritage, which were: movable assets and buildings of artistic, historical, scientific and archaeological interest. Buildings included archaeological sites, parks, gardens and urban areas. See E. March, ‘La Generalitat republicana: algunes precisions sobre la seva actuació en matèria de museus i patrimony,’ Rubrica Contemporanea, 3: 5 (2014), pp. 109–131. 27. The Spanish heritage act (Law of 13 May 1933 on National Artistic Heritage) required that artistic assets be at least a century old to qualify as national artistic heritage, whereas the Catalan law set the threshold at 50 years, thus expanding the range of artistic assets eligible for inclusion in the category of national heritage. The Catalan act (see previous note) also defined movable assets to include documents and bibliographic heritage and broadened the scope of intervention to allow for the protection of special city plans and the expropriation of buildings to improve the visibility or accessibility of historic buildings and monuments. J. García Fernández, ‘La regulación y la gestión del Patrimonio Histórico-Artístico durante la Segunda República (1931-1939),’ e-rph. Revista electrónica de patrimonio histórico, 1, 2007, p. 19, and J. Termes and Ll. Duran, ‘Cultura (1931-1939),’ in Generalitat de Catalunya. Obra de govern 1931-1939, ed. by F. Bonamusa ( Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament de Vicepresidència, 2009), II, p. 170. 28. The Mancomunitat de Catalunya, or Commonwealth of Catalonia (1914–1925) was an institution of self-government in which Catalonia’s four ‘diputaciones’ or provincial councils (Tarragona, Barcelona, Lérida and Gerona) were combined in a single body. This regional body served purely administrative purposes. 29. Agustí Duran i Sanpere, head of the Archives section and Barcelona municipal archivist from 1917, created the Historical Archive of the City of Barcelona; Jeroni Martorell, head of the Monuments section, had been in charge of conservation of historical buildings in Catalonia since 1914; Joaquim Folch i Torres, head of the Museums section, had started working on what was to become the Museu d’Art de Catalunya in 1912; Pere Bosch Gimpera, head of the Excavations section, had been director of the Archaeological Research Department of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans since 1916; and Jordi Rubió i Balaguer, head of the Libraries section, had been director of the Library of Catalonia since 1914. 30. The department was created in the same year as the Mancomunitat, indicating just how important heritage was for what was, at that time, the highest institution of Catalan self-government. R. Lacuesta, Restauració monumental a Catalunya (segles XIX i XX). Les aportacions de la Diputació de Barcelona (Barcelona: Diputació de Barcelona, 2000), p. 85. 31. In 1919 he warned, for example, of the need to extend the requirement for development consent to land adjacent to historical monuments if necessary for access, visibility or safeguarding. Practically the same requirement is reflected

98  Eva March











in the 1934 Catalan Heritage Act (see Footnote 27). J. Martorell, ‘El patrimonio artístico nacional,’ Arquitectura. Organo oficial de la Sociedad Central de Arquitectos, 14, (1919), p. 161. 32. Ibid. 33. Coromines was a member of the left-wing Republican party Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (as were the Minister of Culture, Ventura Gassol, and the president of the Generalitat, Lluís Companys) and had had a long career as a politician, lawyer, economist and cultural manager in the field of museums. He was chairman of the Barcelona Museums Board – the body in charge of art museums of Barcelona since 1902 – from 1933 until July 1936, when Ventura Gassol dissolved it. To take its place, in a move aimed mainly at drawing attention away from the museum’s director (who was disliked by the trade unions, which accused him of being right-wing), the Generalitat created the Commissariat-General for Museums, so as to give the impression of a new body more in tune with the revolutionary circumstances. Pere Coromines, a left-winger with whom the director of the Museu d’Art de Catalunya was on the best of terms, was placed in charge of the Commissariat, and thus took overall control of Catalonia’s museum policy. See S. Izquierdo, Pere Coromines (Barcelona: Editorial Afers, 2001). 34. The formal opening ceremony was held on 24 May 1936, although the museum had been open to the public since 7 November 1934. As a consequence of the political events of 6 October, which resulted in the imprisonment of the entire government of the Generalitat, the opening of the museum took on a completely different significance to that initially intended. For that reason, the Catalan government ‘reinaugurated’ it in 1936. ‘Visita oficial de la Generalitat i l’Ajuntament al Museu d’Art de Catalunya,’ Butlletí dels museus d’art de Barcelona, July 1936, p. 221. 35. Martorell, ‘El patrimonio artístico nacional,’ p. 163. 36. Quoted in A. Swenson, The Rise of Heritage. Preserving the Past in France, Germany and England, 1789-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 194. 37. Ibid., p. 195. 38. A. Cócola Gant, ‘El Barrio Gótico de Barcelona. De símbolo nacional a parque temático,’ Scripta Nova, XV, 371, (2011) [available at http://www. ub.edu/geocrit/sn/sn-371.htm] 39. S. Berger, ‘National museums in between nationalism, imperialism and regionalism, 1750-1914,’ in National Museums and Nation-Building in Europe 1750-2010, ed. by P. Aronsson and G. Elgenius (London-New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 23–24. 40. Ibid. 41. J. Sureda, ‘Presentació,’ in L’art gòtic a Catalunya. Pintura III. Darreres manifestacions, ed. by J. Sureda (Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana, 2006), p. 13. 42. ‘Visita oficial de la Generalitat i l’Ajuntament al Museu d’Art de Catalunya,’ p. 221. 43. Letter from Manuel Azaña to his friend Ángel Osorio, dated 28 June 1939 and reproduced in A. Colorado Castellary, Éxodo y exilio del arte. La odisea del Museo del Prado durante la Guerra Civil (Madrid: Cátedra, 2008), p. 15. 44. ‘Visita oficial de la Generalitat i l’Ajuntament al Museu d’Art de Catalunya,’ p. 220. 45. A. M. Sbert, ‘El Patrimoni Cultural de Catalunya,’ Nova ibèria, 3 (1937), p. 13.

Implementing preventive strategies 99 46. E. Foundoukidis, ‘Rapport du Comité de Direction de l’Office International des Musées a la Comission Internationale de Coopération Intellectuelle,’ Mouseion, iii–iv (1936), pp. 198–200; Foundoukidis, ‘L’Office International des Musées et la protection des Monuments et Oeuvres d’Art en temps de guerre,’ Mouseion, Supplément mensuel, ix–x (1936), pp. 1–5. 47. J. Folch i Torres, ‘Les monuments et oeuvres d’art en Catalogne pendant les troubles civils,’ Mouseion, Supplément mensuel, xi (1936), pp. 1–6. As the article itself states, this same article was published in the Butlletí dels museus d’art de Barcelona. See Footnote 17. 48. Ch. de Visscher, ‘La protection internationale des Monuments historiques et des oeuvres d’art en temps de guerre,’ Mouseion, iii–iv (1936), pp. 177–186. 49. ‘L’Office International des Musées et la protection des Monuments et Oeuvres d’art en temps de guerre,’ Mouseion, iii–iv (1936), p. 193. A summary of this article was also published in the Barcelona art museums journal (‘La protecció de les obres d’art en temps de Guerra,’ Butlletí dels museus d’art de Barcelona, December 1936, pp. 382–384). 50. Diari Oficial de la Generalitat de Catalunya, 28 October 1936, p. 371. 51. J. Folch i Torres, ‘El patrimonio artístico de España. A los amigos extranjeros,’ La Vanguardia, 30 September 1936. 52. The alarming news was widely reported in the international press. Headlines in French newspapers left little room for speculation: ‘Visions d’horreur à Barcelone’ (Le Journal, 24 July 1936), ‘Barcelone. Les trésors artistiques détruits’ (Le Figaro, 8 August 1936), ‘La grande pitié des sanctuaires espagnols’ – title of a photo report containing eloquent images of devastated church interiors, especially in Barcelona (L’Illustration, 15 August 1936). Similar reports were also published on the other side of the Atlantic: ‘Church Art Gone in Barcelona Area. Only Cathedral Remains,’ wrote The New York Times on 9 August 1936. 53. J. Folch i Torres, ‘Nota al Comissari General de Museus de Catalunya relativa al salvament i guarda de les obres d’art reunides pel Museu d’Art de Catalunya i actualment dipositades a Olot,’ 26 July 1937, reproduced in Viatge a Olot. La salvaguarda del patrimoni artístic durant la Guerra Civil (Barcelona: Àmbit 1994), pp. 23–29. 54. Ibid., p. 24. 55. Months later, after this new methodology had been applied to a work in the Catalan museum, Foundoukidis asked Folch i Torres for permission to publish the results of the restoration in Mouseion (M. Grau Mas, ‘La restauration d’une toile du Greco,’ Mouseion, iii–iv (1934), pp. 223–227). This was not the first time an article about the Museu d’Art de Catalunya was published in the IMO journal. A few months earlier Mouseion had announced the acquisition of an important private collection for the Catalan museum (J. Folch i Torres, ‘Le Musée d’Art de Barcelone et la Collection Plandiura,’ Mouseion, iii–iv (1933), pp. 117–129). It should also be mentioned that Foundoukidis and Folch and Torres maintained an intense correspondence in 1934 in relation to the International Congress on museum architecture and installation in Madrid, for which IMO’s Secretary General chose Folch as one of the 19 guest speakers (A. J. García Bascón, ‘La Conferencia de Madrid de 1934, sobre arquitectura y acondicionamiento de museos de arte,’ (PhD diss., Universidad de Granada, 2017), p. 183. One year later, Mouseion published an article by Folch i Torres in which he described the content of the recently inaugurated Museu d’Art de Catalunya (‘La nouvelle installation du Musée d’art de Catalogne,’ Mouseion, iii–iv (1935), pp. 61–66).

100  Eva March 56. Folch i Torres, ‘Nota al Comissari General de Museus de Catalunya,’ p. 23. 57. M. Vidal, ‘Un text inèdit de Joaquim Folch i Torres. Algunes dades de la proposta,’ Viatge a Olot, p. 23. 58. Ibid., p. 119. 59. Internal museum communication dated 23 November 1936. Kept in the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya (ANC), ANC1-715/Junta de Museus de Catalunya, ‘Correspondència rebuda i emesa-Any 1936’. 60. The foresight shown by the Catalan authorities, both civilian and military, is also apparent in the publication of a pioneering work sponsored by the Barcelona City Council (M. Muñoz, Defensa pasiva antiaérea. Refugios. Instrucciones elementales para la protección contra ataques aéreos con bombas explosivas e incendiarias (Barcelona: Ayuntamiento de Barcelona, 1937)). There were at that time no publications giving information about the scope, power and type of bombs being used by the fascists. For that reason, the aforementioned book was used by, for example, J. L. Vaamonde, architect/conservator of the Prado Museum, to adapt the buildings in the city of Valencia in which the works evacuated from the Prado were deposited. R. Bruquetas Galán, ‘La protección de monumentos y obras de arte en tiempos de guerra: la acción de la Junta del Tesoro Artístico y su repercusión internacional,’ in Arte protegido. Memoria de la Junta del Tesoro Artístico durante la Guerra Civil, ed. by I. Argerich, and J. Ara (Madrid: Instituto de Patrimonio Cultural de España-Museo Nacional del Prado, 2009), p. 208. 61. Pérez Carrasco, Patrimonio Confiscado, pp. 83–86. 62. For what follows, see E. March, ‘Guerra, propaganda y nacionalismo catalán en el Paris de 1937,’ Acta/Artis. Estudis d’Art Modern, 4–5 (2016–2017), pp. 205–237; and, by the same author, ‘Hospitalidad transnacional: la implicación francesa en la exposición ‘L’Art Catalan de París (1937),’ Il Capitale Culturale. Studies on the Value of Cultural Heritage, xiv (2016), pp. 369–386. 63. Among the texts by Catalan authorities (L’Art Catalan. Du Xe siècle au XVe siècle, March–April 1937, Jeu de Paume des Tuileries, Paris. Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1937), those by Ventura Gassol and Pere Coromines deserve special mention. Ventura Gassol describes what the public would find in the Jeu de Paume as ‘the glory and past of an entire people’. The artworks that came out of that glory and past thus acquired a representative function and were to be seen not, or not only, as works of art but as a representation of the nation – of a nation or a very specific nationalism, a nationalism rooted in a common past and the desire to perpetuate it. That is why Gassol says repeatedly that the exhibition will show, through five centuries of a people’s history, ‘the perenniality of their destiny’. Coromines, for his part, affirms that what the Paris exhibition presented was a synthesis of the art created in Catalonia during ‘the historical period of its national life’. The terms are unequivocal: he was referring to a specific, categorised past. The works on display had been produced in a territory which between the tenth and fifteenth centuries had been free and independent. Having been created in that context, they became, almost automatically, objective evidence of a national memory. 64. A. Dezarrois, L’Art Catalan du Xe au XVe siècle (Paris: Librarie des Arts Décoratifs, 1937). 65. Paris: Cahiers d’Art, 1937. German edition Die Kunst Kataloniens: Baukunst, Plastik, Malerei vom 10. bis zum 15. Jahrhundert (Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1937); English edition Catalan Art from the Ninth to the Fifteenth Centuries (London: William Heinemann, 1937).

Implementing preventive strategies 101 66. During the months in which the exhibition remained open, besides the articles that appeared in specialised outlets such as Bulletin des Musées de France, Mouseion, Beaux-Arts, L’Art Vivant, L’Art et les Artistes, Cahiers d’Art and Revue de l’Art, dozens of reviews were published in general interest magazines and French newspapers, including Marianne, Candide, Le Mois, Larousse Mensuel Illustré, Études, Tribune des Nations, Visages du Monde, Miroir du Monde, Le Temps, Paris-Soir, Ce Soir, Le Populaire and L’intransigeant. As this list of publications shows, the exhibition received attention not only in what could be considered the predictable outlets, such as the Front Populaire newspaper Ce Soir, which was unconditionally supportive of the Spanish Republic and provided daily coverage of the Civil War, but also in the right-wing press, which had words of praise for the exhibition, even though the reviews were shorter and much more critical. It is nevertheless surprising that weeklies such as Gringoir (which took Franco’s side during the Civil War) and Candide and even extreme right-wing newspapers such as Je suis partout should have given space to the exhibition. The exhibition also had great impact beyond France, with long articles published in leading dailies in Belgium (Nation Belge), Holland (Het Vaderland, Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant), Germany (Berliner Tagesblatt, Frankfurter Zeitung) and England (Daily Mail). 67. Paris: Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle-Office International des Musées. The same text in: Mouseion, iii–iv (1939), pp. 9–229. 68. Ibid., p. 24. 69. Ibid., p. 25. 70. The measures taken by the Spanish authorities to protect heritage, including the adaptations made to the buildings in Valencia in which the artworks were preserved, are explained by the Director-General of Fine Arts in Mouseion (J. Renau, ‘L’organisation de la défense du patrimoine artistique et historique espagnol pendant la guerre civil,’ Mouseion, iii–iv, pp. 7–66). Accompanying this article, which was published in a separate edition, Mouseion also published an article about the measures implemented specifically in the Prado Museum (F. J. Sánchez Cantón, ‘Les premières mesures de défense du Prado au course de la guerre civile en Espagne,’ Mouseion, iii–iv (1937), pp. 67–73). 71. According to the person who acted as culture minister in the Catalan government between 1937 and 1940, see C. Pi i Suñer, La República y la Guerra. Memorias de un político catalán (Mexico: Oasis, 1975), p. 220. 72. For a detailed analysis of this topic, see Colorado Castellary, Éxodo y exilio del arte, pp. 169–75. 73. For a detailed study of these transfers and the measures that affected French artistic heritage in the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War, with a review of the bibliography published to date, see A. Bertinet, ‘Évacuer le musée, entre sauvegarde du patrimoine et historie du goût, 1870-1940’ in Modèles et modalités de la transmission culturelle ed. by J. P. Garric (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2015), pp. 9–40. 74. P. Tanchoux, ‘L’impact de la Guerre Civile espagnole sur la protection internationale des biens culturels en temps de guerre au XXe siècle,’ in Conflictos y cicatrices: fonteras y migraciones del mundo hispánico, ed. by A. Delgado Larios (Madrid: Dykinson, 2014), p. 383. 75. ‘Les mesures de précautions prises par divers Etats pour protéger les monuments et oeuvres d’art au cours de la guerre actuelle,’ Mouseion, i–ii (1940), pp. 9–26.

Part III

Propaganda, morale and resistance

5

‘The present is pretty terrible, the future is unknown, the past is the only stable thing to which we can turn’ Philip Ashcroft, Rufford Village Museum and the preservation of rural life and tradition during the Second World War Bridget Yates

Introduction In many ways, July 1939 seems to be an inauspicious time to start a new museum venture, however small and unpretentious. And yet in other ways it seems appropriate, as the story of the Rufford Village Museum encapsulates many of the ideas which were common currency in the interwar period and which were exemplified in the small rural museums founded at this time: concerns for the future of a declining English rural community, for rural democracy and citizenship, and for the roots of Englishness itself. At this time too, the larger urban museums were gradually adopting new ideas of collecting practice which laid a greater emphasis on local and social subjects of direct interest to their audiences, as advocated both by the Miers Report of 19281 and by the Markham Report of 1938, 2 and further promoted by the Museums Association in their publication Local Museums: Notes on their Building and Conduct.3 Catherine Pearson points out that ‘This created a drive for folk collecting to represent local cultures or national characteristics and was closely linked to refocusing attention on the nation state.’4 The Second World War marks a watershed in the development of volunteer run museums and Rufford Village Museum could be considered as the final manifestation of a particular type. After 1945, a different organisational model is apparent in the many small museums set up as part of the great expansion of interest in and enthusiasm for local history.5 Rufford is situated in the low-lying area of drained moss-land between the Ribble and the Mersey estuaries in south west Lancashire, between the large urban centres of Liverpool, Southport and Preston. The Hesketh family had

106  Bridget Yates been Lords of the Manor of Rufford for at least seven generations, but during the nineteenth century the focus for the family had moved from Lancashire to Northamptonshire and in 1936 Lord Hesketh gave Rufford Old Hall to the National Trust. The core of the building is a very fine sixteenth-century Great Hall, with a later addition of a further ‘black and white’ wing and a seventeenth-century wing of red brick.6 Initially, only a small amount of furniture and other items had been gifted with the house, and the greater part of the house, apart from the Great Hall, was empty and not open to visitors.

Philip Ashcroft and the birth of the Village Museum Philip Ashcroft, the founder of the Village Museum, was born in 1912, so he was a young man of 27 at the outbreak of war. He had been educated to secondary level at Ormskirk Grammar School, from where he joined his father’s business as a potato and produce merchant. In 1945, he wrote a short article in the Portfolio of the Merseyside Naturalists Association (MNA)7 on a visit to the site of a demolished country house in the adjoining parish: In front of me I could see Lathom Park rising from the moss, looking like a battle-scarred ridge, its few remaining trees scattered about the parkland and across the horizon. … When I was a small boy Lathom used to be pointed out to me on a winter’s night. Then I stood at my bedroom window and stared out into the black night. Far in the darkness I could see the twinkling lights from Lathom’s many windows, all a-glitter with nervous energy, as though a band of travellers with torches was hastening across the skyline. (pp. 34–35) Ashcroft clearly had a strong historical and geographical imagination, which could well have been nurtured at school, for although history was only taught to all ages from 1895, its significance as a subject progressed rapidly. In 1908, the Board of Education’s advisory booklet on The Teaching of History in Secondary Schools8 was strongly advocating the teaching of the history of the locality: It is essential that in each school attention should be paid to the history of the town and district in which it is situated. This will generally be best done not by giving a separate course of work on local history, but by constant reference to the history of the locality as illustrative of the general history …explained by the facts which are in the personal knowledge of the pupils. (p. 5) In 1923, The Board of Education Report on the Teaching of History noted that ‘greater attention is now being given to what is called ‘“Social History”.’9 In 1927, a Handbook of Suggestions for the Consideration of Teachers and others concerned in the work of public elementary schools stated categorically that ‘every child should know something of the history of his own village, town or county.’10

‘The present is pretty terrible’ 107 David Matless has pointed out the similarities between the encouragement of the historical imagination in schools as an important element in citizenship and the fostering of the geographical imagination for the same ends, especially through regional surveys, and each with the same focus on the local.11 He quotes from a contemporary author, F. J. Adkins: ‘Civic sense and initiative, trained thus on a basis of local knowledge, grows by conglomeration into a national sense and initiative. Devolution, or mastery over local conditions, is a necessary preliminary to effective political democracy.’12 In his 1986 chapter, ‘The Discovery of Rural England,’ Alun Howkins explores the origins of the conflation of the ‘rural’ with ‘Englishness’ and with the nation.13 This perception had intensified during the 1920s and 1930s as the countryside opened up to a more mobile, urban population.14 There was a plethora of guide books published encouraging people to explore the countryside on foot, by motor car and bicycle, with titles such as Enchanted Land;15 In Search of Romantic Britain16 and Exploring England: a book for seekers of romance in our own land, 17 and innumerable books on various aspects of England’s heritage and landscape, including the well-known Batsford series. And of course the National Trust was both one of the promoters and a beneficiary of this new-found interest and enthusiasm. Ashcroft was an early visitor to Rufford Old Hall, although he had clearly known the building, at least from the outside, since childhood, and he soon became frustrated with what he saw as the slow progress of the Trust in opening up more of the building and arranging its contents. In March 1939, he wrote to the Secretary of the National Trust at the head office in London, after an appeal for furniture had been published in the National Trust News for March 1939. A draft of his letter survives in an unsorted and uncatalogued collection of papers and letters mainly from Ashcroft to Ernest Jarratt, Vice Chairman of the National Trust Management Committee and later Chairman of the Village Museum Sub-Committee, now held at Lancashire Record Office (LRO). This collection forms the primary source material for this chapter, and all subsequent references will be from this source unless otherwise stated: Living in Rufford & taking a keen interest in its history I have been a frequent visitor to the Old Hall since it became Trust property in 1936. Naturally I expected the Management Committee to distribute the furniture in some manner, as I have suggested but now almost three years after, nothing has been done – the interior is as yet is quite unchanged. Why is this? It cannot be a question of finance – for the effect I suggest could be brought into being in a day at no cost what so ever. In May 1937 I wrote to the Committee regarding the arrangement of the furniture. Naturally I expected the furniture to be distributed – but even now almost 3 years after the opening nothing has been done.18 Presumably the more tactful version of the letter was sent, as an emollient reply came from Philip Barnes, Hon. Secretary to the Rufford Old Hall

108  Bridget Yates Management Committee (ROHMC). Ashcroft wrote again and this time he suggested if it would be possible for one of the small rooms to be set aside to house a village museum – that is a collection of photographs and maps and other objects of interest which might illustrate the development of the Manor and Village of Rufford. I have many exhibits that might start such a scheme. This suggestion was taken to the ROHMC, who agreed the idea in principle and set up a Village Museum Sub-Committee under the chairmanship of Ernest Jarratt, its vice-chairman and former town clerk of Southport,19 to look into the idea; Ashcroft was to act as secretary/convener. This SubCommittee first met on 25 July 1939 and agreed to recommend the following to the ROHMC: 1 That a Village Museum be established in the Hall 2 That it shall consist of material, given or loaned, which will illustrate: i The pre-historic period, including geology ii The history and development of Rufford, and the ancient parish of Croston 20 iii Place-names and field-names illustrated by maps and diagrams21 iv Manorial history v Church history and local education vi Evolution of local government vii Agriculture and country craft viii Local folklore 3 That an initial grant of £10 be made towards the cost of providing shelving, frames, etc By mid-August, this recommendation had been agreed both by the Management Committee and centrally, and a single room was allocated to Ashcroft, initially intended as a store room to collect the items offered and with no immediate intention of opening to the public. 22 He interrupted a series of articles he was writing on the history of Rufford village, begun in April 1937, to outline the scheme agreed by the sub-committee in an article in the Parish Magazine of St Mary’s Church, Rufford for September 1939: ‘We in this district know only too well the changed conditions in village life over this last quarter of a century; how old customs and traditions that were the very nature of the district are dying leaving only memories which will fade with the passing of this generation.’23 It seems that at this stage, Ashcroft was solely concerned with expressing the history of the village and parish which had been home to his family for many generations, and to which he was clearly very attached, and that he saw

The present is pretty terrible 109 the museum primarily as a way of demonstrating the long interconnection, both economic and social, between the manor house, now the property of the National Trust, and its surrounding community. At no point does Ashcroft suggest that he should be joined by other people in the museum project, except for a friend who helped him to arrange the displays; it appears always to have been his personal venture. In the letter quoted above, he also pointed out that ‘there are many such village museums in many parts of England – which attempt to preserve some of the village community’s history before all the traces are swept away.’ It is interesting that Ashcroft was aware of other village museums and their purpose, as they were mainly situated in villages in the South of England. However, one village museum, at Ashwell in Hertfordshire, had received very wide publicity when it opened in 1930, as it was started by two schoolboys. The archaeologist Stanley Casson wrote an article in The Listener in which he said that ‘any village in England can follow the example of Ashwell. Such museums serve an incalculable educational purpose. They are not mere repositories of forgotten things. They stimulate the children and young men and women by giving them something which will make them think.’ 24 As the war progressed, Ashcroft began to see the museum rather differently – as a microcosm of England and of the values and traditions which were being fought for and as a potential catalyst for rural regeneration after the war.

Building a museum during war War was declared on 3 September 1939. On 8 September, Ashcroft wrote to Jarratt: ‘I intended to have a meeting of the Committee this month to make arrangements for a definite commencement of the Museum. Perhaps now, in the present circumstances, it would be better to hold the scheme back until the war-clouds have rolled away.’ There seems to have been a lull in activity until in the following February 1940, when Jarratt wrote to Ashcroft: ‘I am not sure whether you are privately doing anything in getting ready information for the village museum at Rufford Old Hall, after the war. I have just come across a most interesting book by H.J. Massingham, entitled Country Relics which I think you would find most useful to refer to.’ Jarratt received an enthusiastic letter by return: Yes, I am still carrying on with the Village Museum scheme and am delighted to have your letter with the kind offer to loan me Massingham’s Country Relics. For some time now I have been anxious to read this book, ever since I read Vita Sackville-West’s review together with another similar book Old English Household Life by Jones & Jekyll. The latter book I have purchased & find it a useful guide to compiling a list of ‘wants’ for the Museum. Country Relics is rather beyond my pocket; but I do know that it would assist me in getting a list together of ‘agricultural exhibits.’

110  Bridget Yates H. J. Massingham was a prolific and influential author of ‘country’ books both during the interwar years and throughout the 1940s. Country Relics is a description of his own collection of rural objects and tools which he had acquired or been given in the years leading up to the publication of the book in 1939 and which he had displayed in a small garden building he called ‘The Hermitage.’25 It is also an account of what he perceived as the declining activities and crafts with which the tools were associated. Massingham had developed some strongly held theories on the changes in traditional rural life, changing relationships in the countryside, and the increasing mechanisation of agriculture, some of which skirted close to those held by the extreme right wing.26 In his preface to Country Relics justifying and interpreting his collection, Massingham wrote: I should like to make it clear that this is not a collector’s book. Nor have I attempted to recreate a past, in which the tools, implements, and products of craftsman and peasant were of daily service, merely for the sake of pleasing my own fancy or in the interests of historical research. It is my own conviction, founded upon many years of observation, that the effort to mechanize the countryside as a means of compensating for the absence of a peasantry from it and as a partial measure for checking the neglect and degeneration of the land to which that absence has led, is foredoomed to failure. (p. ix) Ten days later, Ashcroft returned Country Relics thanking Jarratt for a week’s good reading and saying ‘I have extracted quite a lot of useful information, & am glad to find illustrated many relics which I have examples of, either in my possession, or at farms waiting until the museum is ready.’ He then included a long list of items he had already collected, cross-referenced to Massingham. ‘From this list’ he adds ‘you will realise we have a nucleus for a museum; I feel confident this list can be greatly enlarged when the time is opportune.’ He also noted that after reading the chapter on basket making, he had ‘made arrangements to have a representative collection of materials & relics to illustrate the Basket Industry which now centres round Mawdesley, but has been a country craft in the ‘ancient Parish of Croston’ for many centuries.’ Country Relics was copiously illustrated by Thomas Hennell and the evidence here suggests that Ashcroft was using the book as reference for objects to look out for, 27 and to understand techniques of which he had no personal experience, as indeed did many social history museums in later years, and not necessarily as a guide to the future of agriculture through a return to past conditions. Country Relics appears to have given Ashcroft validation of the type of material he sought, as indeed did a number of other books he mentions that he has read. Old English Household Life by Gertrude Jekyll and Sydney R. Jones, 28 was again copiously illustrated both with photographs

The present is pretty terrible 111 and drawings by Jones, and written without the proselytising intent of Massingham’s work: This book, for the most part, records some aspects of the life of English villages in the past. … The men and women who fashioned the old household gods, of the kind here illustrated, represented the typical human contents of the countryside. …Many years ago they passed away; but their memories are still kept green by their handiwork. They remain unforgotten by the thought they inspired and the ideas they propagated, which now link the past with the present. (p. 1) Further on, Jekyll and Jones recognise that change has occurred: With much of the inheritance of past times now gone, and more being swept away … it is well that the National Trust and other similar bodies exist. (p. 40) Ashcroft’s copy of this book survives in the collections at Rufford Old Hall (and he must have delighted in the mention of the role of the National Trust) as do a number of his other books acquired between 1939 and 1946, which he would have used both for historical information and for guidance in acquisition. His notes on Thomas Hennell’s Change in the Farm, and on Thomas Tusser’s Good Points of Husbandry edited by Dorothy Hartley, survive among his papers in the LRO and he occasionally mentions what he has been reading in his correspondence with Jarratt. For example, in a letter of 5 October 1942 he mentions that he has borrowed J. Seymour Lindsay’s Iron and Brass Implements of the English House from Preston Library: ‘it is a fine book & is giving me plenty of inspiration. It is exciting to see illustrations of similar relics to those we have at Rufford.’ Seymour Lindsay’s book was first published in 1927 and it was reviewed by ‘T.S.’29 in the Museums Association’s Museums Journal: A quarter of a century ago the pages of the Museums Journal were anything but complimentary to the younger curators of museums who began collecting old farm implements and ‘bygones’ of various sorts … Since then times have changed, and old time utensils and implements are being sought by most of the museums in the country … ‘Oldfashioned’ objects in wood and metal are greatly in demand, especially in the provinces. … The frontispiece, ‘A Sixteenth Century Surrey Down Hearth’ might quite readily be copied by a number of our folklore museums. One of the interesting points in this review was the suggestion that something, such as a hearth, might readily be copied from one area to another

112  Bridget Yates without any loss of integrity or value as a historical record. It is known that many of the early collectors of folk material were indifferent to provenance, including Leonard Bolingbroke, founder of Strangers’ Hall Museum in Norwich, and Dr Kirk whose collection opened to the public in York Castle in 1936. Ashcroft, however, was clear from the very start that he would only collect from a tightly defined local area or region, and this is reiterated several times in his correspondence with Jarratt as the museum developed. For example, in April 1943 he sent Jarratt some literature which he had been sent from ‘a Folk Museum at Cambridge. … The museum collects from the whole county of Cambridge & in some cases from outside the area. In comparison our effort gives a truer picture of a region. Keeping within strict bounds for collecting will result in a very unusual assembly of relics which will present a true picture of life and work.’ In April 1940, Jarratt wrote to the Chairman of the Local Management Committee, Sir William Ascroft: When the War broke out, it was thought impossible to hold meetings and to press on with this work, but latterly it has seemed to me that under existing conditions, and especially while Mr P. Ashcroft is comparatively dis-engaged, it would be a great pity not to go forward with a good deal of the preliminary work and collection, which might be undertaken now. … I have therefore asked Mr Ashcroft to proceed tentatively with collecting and storing suitable relics and exhibits. Again it seems clear that, at least officially, there was no intention to rush into opening the museum. However, ‘tentatively’ was not in Ashcroft’s vocabulary and he threw himself enthusiastically into collecting, using all the opportunities that his work as a produce merchant gave him to look around farmsteads, to talk to people and to promote the museum scheme. He was an effective publicist too and quickly built up a good relationship with a number of local newspapers. The project was highlighted in an article in the Ormskirk Advertiser for 25 July 1940:30 In these days when so many gentle arts and lovely things must perforce be laid aside for the sterner things connected with national defence, it is pleasing to note that an interesting venture is gradually taking shape in the village of Rufford. … Many treasures belonging to by-gone days are stored in country cottages and farmhouses, some are prized possessions and others are to be found lying unappreciated, in the lumber-room in danger of being cleared out and destroyed in the next salvage drive. The article continued with a list of ‘wants’ for the museum, including wooden bowls, plates and ladles, iron pots and trivets, horn beakers,

The present is pretty terrible 113 pitchers, jugs and cups, samplers and rush bottom chairs, all of which he later acquired. Ashcroft sent a copy of the article to Jarratt, who responded: In some respects, I think the present is a very convenient time for gathering the things we want, though at the same time there is a danger that some of the things we do want will be lost unless a very alert look out is kept on the dumps of waste materials now being made over the countryside. The National Salvage Scheme had been introduced in December 1939, calling for paper, textiles, metals and food waste to be collected to contribute to the war effort; its implications were not lost on Barnes, the Secretary of the Lancashire Branch of the Council for the Protection of Rural England, who wrote to Ashcroft: It occurs to me that the current appeals for scrap metal etc. may lead people in the Rufford District to dispose of old farming implements and other objects which would be very acceptable in the Village Museum … it would be a great pity if rare and interesting old implements were lost in this manner, just when we are trying to build up a comprehensive local collection.31 On 10 August 1940, another article featuring the museum appeared in the Southport Guardian:32 In Rufford Old Hall, … an Idea is slowly taking realistic form…. an Idea which embodies the very spirit that is England, seeks to preserve the memory – dangerously near being lost- of the rural life of yesterday… It is a museum which tells the story of Rufford and district down the years. Mr. Philip Ashcroft …is building up the museum. To use his own words, the museum consists of material, given or loaned, which will illustrate the variety and nature of English country life when the farm, the manor house, the parish church, and the village were the important elements in the social, economic and mental life of the nation.33 The village museum project was beginning to assume a wider significance, although the author, F. H., makes it clear that the ‘museum is not yet open’ as much still remained to be done, and unfortunately progress ‘may have to be interrupted as Mr. Ashcroft is expecting to be called up for military service.’ Yet another mention appeared in the Preston Guardian for 5 October 1940 as part of a longer article about Rufford village generally: Now to introduce young Philip Ashcroft … Perhaps I can best describe this young man’s attitude by a sentence he used which stuck in my mind. It was: The present is pretty terrible; the future is unknown; the past is the only stable thing to which we can turn.34

114  Bridget Yates It seems that Ashcroft had begun to enlarge his vision for the museum, seeing it now as representing England, perhaps under the influence of Massingham and other rural authors on his bookshelf, and spurred on by an ‘unknown future,’ and his own situation of uncertainty. It is not entirely clear from the surviving correspondence exactly when the room allocated to the project actually opened to the public, although Ashcroft had shared some designs for simple exhibition stands with Jarratt in 1940, but a news-cutting from the Ormskirk Advertiser35 of 1 May 1941 states that a nucleus collection is now on exhibition, and once again it is apparent that Ashcroft’s ideas had grown further to ‘cover every aspect of the history of South-West Lancashire.’36 A second meeting of the Village Museum Sub-Committee, the first since July 1939, was held on 2 July 1941, so Ashcroft had had two years in which to develop and promote his vision for the museum, largely without scrutiny.37 The progress of the war, and his own imminent prospect of call-up, had added urgency to the project, although from the draft minutes that also survive, it appears that Ashcroft had been seriously ill. He had, however, managed to maintain ‘his interest and activities in connection with the museum.’38 It was noted in the final minutes that the museum was now ‘firmly established and the prospects for its future expansion assured by the interest and generosity of local people shown by numerous exhibits already presented’ and a resolution was passed to ask the ROHMC for more space, a request which was later granted.39 In the Secretary’s Report, Ashcroft reported that the museum now had 130 exhibits, which today seems a modest number, and that a number of schools had visited the museum. School visits had first been mentioned in a letter to Jarratt on 6 June 1941: On Tuesday I had a visit from Miss Howells, the Inspector of Schools for South Lancashire.40 She had heard of the Museum and wishes to get the local schools interested in its work. I showed her the progress made and also the Old Hall. She was keenly enthusiastic about the place. Her intentions seem to be to bring parties of school children with their teachers to the Hall to study the old furniture, armour, and of course the Museum. On Saturdays June 21st and 28th the Head-teachers from all the local schools are coming to the Hall and I have been asked to give them a talk on the history of the place and to tell them of the Museum and its plans for future development. I think we shall be able to make better progress in the way of collecting more exhibits if we get the local children becoming conscious of the history that lies around their villages. Ashcroft was finally called up in August 1941 when he was drafted into the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, and sent to Dorchester, where he found time to visit the museum and from where he continued to write to Jarratt ‘There

The present is pretty terrible 115 is a good museum here in Dorchester, but after seeing their collection of folk relics I think our museum is far ahead. It quite encourages me to see what other places are doing in this line. We are evidently well ahead both in exhibits and in style of display.’ Following initial training, he was posted to Hinckley where he again became ill and spent some time in hospital in Leicester in October 1941, still corresponding with Jarratt from his bed: Did I tell you that I have been offered the Toll-Bar Board used at the toll-house on the Preston-Liverpool Turnpike Road… There are many other exhibits promised which I will get after the war. And ‘after the war’ I think the museum will serve a good purpose in educating people in the delights of the history of the countryside. To make townspeople conscious of their ancestry. It is only by displaying fine architecture & craftsmanship freely & attractively to a wide audience that the public will discover the treasures that belong to them: so that in the future men & women will grow up learning of these things instinctively. After a brief period of recovery, Ashcroft was again in hospital, this time in York, but not before he had found time to visit York Castle Museum: ‘I must tell you of the wonderful Folk Museum at York. I only found it the other day. Have bought catalogues etc. so will let you see them. It is an inspiration, and has let my mind off on all sorts of journeys.’ He was sent home for a week, possibly over Christmas, but then returned to the military hospital in York from where he wrote to Jarratt on 16 January 1942: There is now some furniture, & odds & ends, in the two upstairs rooms at the Old Hall. The doors will be kept locked. This gives us four rooms – in a unit as it were- complete. I think we could plan an interesting layout – each room devoted to a section of our scheme. The present room could hold the household exhibits from farmhouse & cottage embracing furnishings & cooking utensils etc. The next room adjoining might be devoted to Agricultural objects: tools & implements. Upstairs, one room could contain maps, photographs, pictures and diagrams illustrating village history, geology, place-names etc. The other room having show-cases to contain old documents papers, books etc relative to our village and its history. That is only a brief outline – but it gives us an idea what we might achieve. An ideal museum to show village life and work through the centuries. Perhaps others will imitate us in the future – so that every “country-region” would have its museum. By April 1942, it had become clear that Ashcroft was unfit for military service, and was expecting to be discharged. He had returned to Rufford by the end of May and re-joined his father’s business – one letter mentions

116  Bridget Yates that he had been extremely busy loading lettuces for Glasgow – and threw himself back into collecting for the museum and in painting the additional rooms and arranging the exhibits. By early August he could report to Jarratt that the rooms allocated to the museum had been cleaned and painted and three weeks later he told Jarratt: I have painted the stands - & instead of blue, have chosen a delicate green which contrasts pleasantly with the walls; I have also varnished the floor surrounds. On Saturday I moved in, & am now busy arranging the exhibits. This is a more difficult task than I imagined, but gradually it is assuming a pattern. … The Agricultural relics are being arranged in the smaller room – in a pattern, grouped on the main wall. … Altogether the effect is very refreshing & I feel you will be gratified with it when you see it completed. I hope to have it finished in about a week’s time.41 In October, he moved on to labelling the items in a careful handwritten script on cards, some of which have survived at Rufford Old Hall and in the LRO, but although he described the museum as complete, he continued to collect enthusiastically: ‘You mention a girdle – we have one in the Museum: & like most of our relics cost us nothing! Some old witness comes to light to tell us something of the past life & work of our own countryside.’ ‘Witness’ is term which Ashcroft uses several times during his correspondence with Jarratt and in September 1944 he wrote an article for the Ormskirk Advertiser in which he said that: something must be done now and in the future to inculcate in the minds of our children and ourselves, an awareness of the spirit that has given us the British Way of Life. One way to do this is to re-discover the moral and spiritual values which our forefathers held, to turn to that storehouse of experience, the history of our nation. To look back along the way we have journeyed and to realise that in these relics of yesterday we have witnesses of faith, showing how man has struggled towards civilization, disassociating himself from primitive instincts and moving forward towards freedom of spirit and the good way of life.42 In a recent work Sharon Macdonald recounts an experience ‘in one folklife museum in Scotland, the man running it directed my gaze to the handle of a peat-cutting implement where a shinier and slightly indented area of wood indicated years of use. As he did so, he told me of the back-breaking labour …that this tool would have experienced. It was as though it was a witness telling me, if I had the will to listen imaginatively, what it had lived through.’ Borrowing a term from Walter Benjamin, Macdonald describes the prior existence of the object as a key aspect of its ‘aura.’43

The present is pretty terrible 117 ‘Witness’ is also a term which Ashcroft seems to have used in the talks to local societies and organisations, such as the Rotary Clubs of Ormskirk and Southport, that he gave after he was discharged.44 This was, to him, as much a contribution to the war effort as loading lettuces, as through his talks he encouraged his audience to look forward positively to a better future ‘after the war.’ In October 1943, he gave a talk on the museum to the Bromborough Society at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight and the extensive notes taken by the Society’s secretary survive among their records held in the Birkenhead Library. They are worth quoting at length as they demonstrate clearly how Ashcroft’s ideas of the role of village museums both during the war and, more particularly, in the future, had expanded and developed: (the museum’s) special purpose, he said, was to preserve and display the life of the countryside, now changing so swiftly that in a few years none would be left who could remember ways of life which were as old as civilization, the very roots of old England. … Sweden has been able to build up into her national life the best of both the old days and the new. This is very largely done by means of the hundreds of folk museums in the country. They keep alive the national tradition, and give every child an interest and a pride in the way his or her people have labored to hand down a beautiful country to them.45 That is surely the meaning of democracy; what else are we fighting for? There was something about every relic of the English countryside which tells a story of human effort; that is why we call such things witnesses. You could not even pick up a brass candlestick without a sense of that. Carry the idea a step further, present such things to the people in such a way as to bring out their full interest, and the rural museum could be made a great help in our national recovery after the war.46

‘What we are fighting for’ Rufford was not the only museum at which an attempt was made to link ‘what we are fighting for’ with the rural tradition, Englishness and the nation state through their collections and displays. In Gloucester, where a folk museum had opened in Bishop Hooper’s Lodgings in 1935, the objects were ‘tools and other belongings of our English forefathers.’47 At the outbreak of war, Gloucester City Museum closed and its collections of art, archaeology and natural history were removed, but ‘no attempt was made to alter the character of the Folk Museum.’ Indeed, a special Guide was compiled for the use of troops stationed locally.48 At Mary Arden’s House at Wilmcote in Warwickshire, opened in 1931 by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, ‘it seemed appropriate that the great barn, stable, and other farm buildings should be used as a setting for the display of a farming and folklife collection illustrative of the life of the Warwickshire countryside from

118  Bridget Yates Shakespeare’s period to modern times.’49 By 1938, the Trustees had built up a ‘considerable collection,’ some ‘were very old, going back as far as Shakespeare’s time; others of more recent date. Nevertheless, they had one characteristic in common in that they provided a physical link with the life of the folk who peopled the Warwickshire countryside in successive generations.’50 All the properties run by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust remained open during the war, but in 1940 the Trustees agreed that people in uniform should be admitted at a reduced rate of 6d to Mary Arden’s House, later further reduced to 3d, and that the wounded in hospital uniform should be admitted free. In March 1944 the Secretary to the Trustees reported that she had ordered 120,000 postcards from Raphael Tuck in an attempt to keep up with the demand from service men and women. 51 The postcard showing the kitchen hearth display had printed on the reverse the stirring words of the Prime Minister ‘We shall never stop, never weary and never give in,’ a reminder that it was the hearth and home that were being fought for.52 Rufford Village Museum also produced a set of postcards showing the displays; one of these can be seen in Figure 5.1. These were made from photographs taken by Mr Cowburn of Rufford Post Office to use as illustrations for an article written by Eric Hardy for Country Life and published on 1 January 1943 entitled ‘Making a Village Museum – a unique collection at Rufford Old Hall’: … just before the war, my friend Philip Ashcroft, of Rufford … conceived the idea of a model village museum to save the relics of Lancashire country life … If he could make a museum that was more than a parish-pump affair, perhaps other villages in other centres of rural England would do likewise, and a chain of local museums would arise distinct from the stereotyped town museum with its cases of stuffed birds, birds’ eggs, miserable mummies, and visitors who come in out of the wet to parade the galleries on Sunday afternoons because nothing else is open in town. … The museum has attracted visitors from all over the country, but its greatest tribute was given by a couple of American army officers who recently visited it and showed so much enthusiasm that they told Mr. Ashcroft … that they had never seen anything else like it anywhere and it was their first experience of old English village life since they had been in this country.53 Eric Hardy (1912–2002) was the founder of the MNA in 1938 and a prolific writer on the countryside and on natural history in Lancashire and the north west.54 Ashcroft was a member of the MNA and its President from 1943/4 to 1946. During the war, the MNA produced a series of handwritten ‘portfolios’ in place of a printed journal or newsletter, which included articles, photographs and drawings which were circulated round the

The present is pretty terrible 119

Figure 5.1  One of Mr. Cowburn’s photographs taken for inclusion in Eric Hardy’s article in Country Life 1 January 1943, showing a corner of the domestic room. The ‘Grandfather’ chair with its slipper drawer and the child’s chair are typical of South West Lancashire, as are the buttermilk bowl and ladle and the oatcake board shown on the stand. (copyright not traced)

membership. The Portfolio for 1943/4 includes a photograph of Ashcroft seated on a bench outside Rufford Old Hall (see Figure 5.2).55

A post-war future As the war progressed and victory began to seem possible, Ashcroft’s thoughts turned to the long-term future for his collection and of the museum venture. In 1944 he had written to James Lees-Milne, secretary to the Country Houses Committee of the National Trust in London, to see if it might be possible for the museum to be transferred to the Trust and for him

120  Bridget Yates

Figure 5.2 Philip Ashcroft taken outside Rufford Old Hall in 1943/4 for the Merseyside Naturalists Association Portfolio (Liverpool Record Office, Liverpool Libraries Hq570.6MER)

to remain as curator. As he explained to Jarratt, the main point of his letter had been that ‘here at Rufford the museum could become a cultural centre to assist in the regeneration of rural values, particularly in SW Lancashire where the rural region is enclosed by an urban population of one and a half millions.’ He had received an encouraging reply from Lees-Milne: I am in full sympathy with the motives and aims you outline as regards the moral and cultural impetus this museum should inspire in the S.W. Lancs. area and I feel pretty sure your enterprise and success has already gone a long way to achieve these very desirable ends. I am sure the Committee here would be proud to receive the collection formally… However, it seems that the final move was only precipitated by a fierce argument between Ashcroft and the new secretary to the ROHMC in 1945, in which, according to Ashcroft, Anderson said that the museum would be better out of the hall, and in the village and that the ‘stuff’ in the museum

The present is pretty terrible 121 was out of place and not suited to a building like the Old Hall. Jarratt appears to have smoothed things over, but it must also have become clear that there needed to be a more long-term, formal arrangement once the war ended, particularly as there had been a number of other, more minor disagreements with a succession of caretakers who were responsible for opening the property and looking after visitors on a day to day basis. In July 1946, probably as a preliminary to calling another meeting of the Village Museum Sub-committee, the first since 1941, Jarratt asked Ashcroft to provide another summary of the collections, which now contained 309 items in the four rooms and also elsewhere in the building. In August he wrote to Jarratt regarding the future of the Museum: I shall be happy to talk this over whenever you wish. I shall be most reluctant to see the museum and its contents go out of my complete care; it has been created under peculiar circumstances, perhaps out of my own personality – it would wither away if it got under any soul-less administration. I don’t think it is strong enough yet to be turned out alone in the world. Later that month, negotiations began in earnest between Ashcroft, Jarratt and the chairman of the local management committee, and a draft memorandum was drawn up in which the contents of the museum would be transferred to the National Trust, and Ashcroft would be retained as the Hon. Curator. After the Memorandum was agreed, he wrote formally to the National Trust secretary in London to offer the ‘contents of the village museum and my services as Curator to the National Trust,’ an offer which was willingly accepted and so ended the separate ownership of Rufford Village Museum and the existence of the Village Museum Sub-Committee. Ashcroft’s association with the building continued however, and he went on acquiring collections; but it seems that from 1946 he was gathering material such as costume and ceramics, for the whole house and not just for the village museum. Although the museum continued as a separate entity for a few years more, and indeed the Philip Ashcroft Collection is still acknowledged in the current Guide Book, his war-time collections ultimately became absorbed into the general exhibits at Rufford Old Hall and distributed throughout the property.56 Ashcroft died in 1959, tragically by his own hand, and a short obituary written by P. F.-H.57 appeared in The Times: News of Mr. Philip Ashcroft’s untimely death at the age of 45 will have come as a profound shock not only to his many friends but to that much wider circle in the north-west who have enjoyed his lectures or have met him at Rufford Old Hall … Here, indeed, lay his own greatest interest and the splendid museum he created there might justly be called his life’s work. … in one or two small rooms of the Old Hall he

122  Bridget Yates arranged this fascinating collection to which he was constantly adding … it now occupies six rooms and includes an astonishing variety of exhibits, mainly of the nineteenth century and collected locally. Philip Ashcroft’s affection for Lancashire, particularly west Lancashire and above all for his native Rufford, for which he did so much, was intense, and there must be many who will remember with pleasure being shown over Rufford Old Hall by him or attending some of the charming concerts he arranged there.58

Conclusion Ashcroft’s Village Museum is the end of one particular line in the development of independent museums and its genesis exemplifies many of the ideas that were current during the interwar years linking small museums to the wider hopes and fears for rural England and to the remembrance and preservation of a distinctive rural tradition. A number of these early small volunteer run museums simply closed for the duration of the war, and a few others were turned over to direct support of the war effort, as were some spaces in some larger museums; the Victoria Jubilee Museum at Cawthorne, for example, was closed and the exhibition area used for making parachutes. 59 The role of the Village Museum, as perceived by Ashcroft, was to support the war effort not by overt propaganda, but by providing emotional support for the cause, and by equating the concept of the nation with the region and the local and thereby legitimising it. By working so persistently to open the museum and to provide visitors with more to see and additional stimulation, he helped to ensure that Rufford Old Hall continued to provide a place for relaxation and enjoyment. His enthusiasm for working with schools, as well as supporting adult groups, clearly shows how he saw its role as helping to build a new future ‘after the war.’ The museum may well be unique in being established on the outbreak of war and one may speculate whether it would ever have come into being without the impetus given to it by wartime conditions. Not only did these conditions provide its raison d’être through emphasising what was in danger of being lost, either through salvage drives or neglect, and the values which were being fought for, as can clearly be seen in the various newspaper articles cited, but it is highly unlikely that the National Trust would have allowed Ashcroft so much freedom to act without the restraint of committee oversight in peace time. Indeed, the Trust itself would have been able to move more rapidly to furnish the Old Hall either with Hesketh material or with gifts from other supporters had the war not intervened. After 1945 rural communities themselves changed as the post-war population began to grow, and their demographics shifted with increasing migration from the towns to the countryside, especially of people with more disposable income, unconnected with agriculture.60 During the late 1940s

The present is pretty terrible 123 and 1950s, there was a further expansion of volunteer-led museums in villages and small towns in England, the majority set up by grass roots local history societies, many established as a direct consequence of the Festival of Britain in 1951, which encouraged local communities to explore their own history and traditions of democracy through exhibitions, displays and pageants.61 We have seen earlier in this chapter how Ashcroft perceived his collection as encapsulating democracy and ‘what we are fighting for,’ primarily because the objects came from the homes and workplaces of ordinary men and women. He referred to it as ‘created under peculiar circumstances, perhaps out of my own personality.’ The new museum ventures, however, were exploring a different vision of democracy by embarking on a shared endeavour in a spirit of equality, where they could express what they wanted to about the history of their own communities. In this, they were laying the foundations for the many independent museums set up from the 1960s onwards that are now such a feature of the museum landscape. Many of Ashcroft’s ideas, such as his emphasis on locality and a sense of place, his involvement in adult education and his desire to see the museum become an important player in the cultural and educational dynamic of the community, were very forward-thinking and are now common currency. His difficulties lay in trying to run a small venture inspired by a very personal vision within the boundaries of a much larger organisation whose priorities lay elsewhere, particularly after the war. Had Ashcroft involved others through the creation of a museum society or association before moving to donate the collection to the National Trust, then he might have been able to turn the museum out ‘alone in the world,’ but sadly he was never able to let go, despite, or perhaps because of, his passionate commitment to his own rural region, his village and to its history and traditions.

Acknowledgements With many thanks to the staff of Lancashire Records Office, Liverpool Record Office and Metropolitan Borough of Wirral (Birkenhead Central Library) and to past and present staff of the National Trust, Richard Dean, Lynne Mills, Katie Owen, Caroline Schofield and Samantha Wilson. I would also like to thank Frank & Zena Ashcroft, Mrs Jean Ashcroft, Barbara Lee of the Merseyside Naturalists Association and Judith Beastall of the Bromborough Society for their help with the research for this paper.

Notes 1. Sir Henry Miers, Report on the Public Museums of the British Isles (other than the National Museums) (Edinburgh: Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, 1928). 2. S. F. Markham, A Report on the Museums and Art Galleries of the British Isles (Other than the National Museums) (Edinburgh: Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, 1928).

124  Bridget Yates 3. H. A. Kennedy, Local Museums: Notes on their Building and Conduct, (published for the Museums Association by the Oxford University Press, 1938). Ernest Jarratt, the Chairman of the Rufford Village Museum committee, obtained a copy for Philip Ashcroft in 1940; it was to prove excellent guidance. 4. Catherine Pearson, ‘Curators, Culture and Conflict: the effects of the Second World War on museums in Britain’ (unpublished PhD thesis University of London, 2008), p. 35. 5. Bridget Yates, ‘Volunteer-run Museums in English Market Towns and Villages’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Gloucestershire, 2010). Twenty-nine museums set up in the 1920s and 1930s have been identified by the writer, overwhelmingly in the south of England, not all of which have survived. Some remain volunteer enterprises, others have grown sufficiently to employ staff and a few have become local authority services. It is worth noting that local authorities in rural areas were not empowered to provide museums until the Local Government Act of 1972. 6. Richard Dean, Rufford Old Hall- A Souvenir Guide (Swindon: National Trust, 2007). 7. Portfolio IV Merseyside Naturalists Association, 1945, Liverpool Record Office, Liverpool Libraries, Hq570.6MER. 8. Board of Education, Circular 599: Teaching of History in Secondary Schools (London: HMSO, 1908). 9. Board of Education, Educational Pamphlets no 37: Report on the Teaching of History (London: HMSO, 1923), p. 22. 10. Board of Education, Handbook of Suggestions for the Consideration of Teachers and others concerned in the work of public elementary schools (London: HMSO, 1927), p. 122. 11. David Matless, ‘Regional surveys and local knowledges: the geographical imagination in Britain 1918-1939’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 17: 4 (1992), pp. 464–480. 12. F. J. Adkins, The approach to citizenship through history and through regional surveys, 1934, quoted in Matless, ‘Regional surveys’, p. 472. 13. Alun Howkins, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’ in R. Colls and P. Dodd, eds. Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880-1920 (London: Croom Helm 1986), pp. 62–88. 14. David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998). 15. Arthur Mee, Enchanted Land (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1936). 16. A. S. Jenkinson, In Search of Romantic Britain (London: Arthur Barron, 1936). 17. D. Francis Morgan, Exploring England: a book for seekers of romance in our own land (London: C. Arthur Pearson, n.d.). This author’s copy is inscribed ‘Jessie, Summer Holiday, 1937’. 18. Lancashire Record Office (LRO) DDX129 ACC1489. This collection also appears to include Jarratt’s own notes and committee papers as well as drafts of lectures and guide leaflets by Ashcroft and drawings of some of the items he had found and collected for the museum. 19. Jarratt was a good choice for the role. As a former town clerk of Southport, he would certainly have been familiar with museums as the Atkinson Art Gallery & Library had been open since 1878. Later correspondence between Jarratt and Ashcroft shows that he was good friends with the Director of York Museums, Reginald Wagstaffe, who visited Ashcroft in York Military Hospital in 1942. 20. This had once included Croston, Mawdesley, Bispham, Rufford, Tarleton, Hesketh, Hoole and Bretherton, and was the ‘sphere of influence’ of the manor of Rufford.

The present is pretty terrible 125 21. As the museum developed Ashcroft gave a number of maps of Lancashire and the immediate locality to the collection, many of which are still on display at Rufford Old Hall. Clearly, he understood the importance of nurturing the geographical as well as the historical imagination and understanding. On 25 June 1941, he wrote to Jarratt that ‘… on Saturday last 40 local head-teachers from the Ormskirk rural schools paid a visit with the H. M. I. This next weekend about 70 are expected from Leyland district. This is part of a scheme to show the teachers what a great amount of historical & geographical material lies under their noses – waiting to be used. Why should a child know what happened in 1066 - & not know the history of their village’. 22. Barnes received the approval of head office of the National Trust for this scheme on 14 September 1939. 23. Found in LRO DDX129 ACC1489. 24. The Listener, 5 October 1932, p. 490. This extract is included in an album of news cuttings held at Ashwell Village Museum. Although started by two schoolboys as a personal interest, Ashwell Village Museum was opened and managed, as it still is, by the Ashwell Museum Society. The boys became the joint curators. 25. H. J. Massingham, Country Relics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939). Massingham’s collection later became one of the foundation collections of the Museum of English Rural Life at the University of Reading in 1951. 26. R. J. Moore-Collyer, ‘Back to Basics: Rolf Gardiner, H.J. Massingham and “A Kinship in Husbandry”’, Rural History, 12: 1, April 2001, pp. 85–108. 27. On 7 March 1943, Ashcroft wrote to Jarratt describing recent acquisitions including some ‘instruments to bleed calves– such as Massingham has illustrated in his “Country Relics”. They are usually called Fleams’. 28. Gertrude Jekyll and Sydney R. Jones, Old English Household Life (London: B.T. Batsford, 1939). This is a revised version of a book of the same title written by Jekyll and published by Batsford in 1925; Jekyll had died in 1932. A second, cheaper edition was published during the war in 1944/5. Country Relics was not re-published until 1974. 29. Museums Journal, 28: 8 (December 1928), pp. 201–2. ‘T.S.’ was almost certainly Tom Sheppard, director of Hull Museums, who had set up a large collection of agricultural implements and ‘folk’ material at Easington near Spurn Head in 1928, which unfortunately was later destroyed by enemy action. 30. Cutting found in LRO DDX129 ACC1489, npn. 31. Barnes to Ashcroft July 27th 1940 LRO DDX129 ACC148. 32. Cutting found in LRO DDX129 ACC1489, npn. 33. The article continues with a description of some of the items already acquired, including ‘a grandfather chair with a slipper drawer in the seat, an ale warmer, a candle box, a flail, a drinking ladle – legacy from a time when farm labourers, coming in thirsty from work, helped themselves to buttermilk from the bowl on the farmhouse sideboard …’ Some of these can be seen in figure 5.1 34. Cutting found in LRO DDX129 ACC1489, npn. 35. Cutting found in LRO DDX129 ACC1489, npn. 36. The article also states that ‘The Old Hall is open every day from 10 a.m. until dusk, and in these difficult days it is a refreshing change to wander through the peaceful gardens’. 37. One of the Museum Sub-Committee members, R. Sharpe France, wrote to Jarratt on 19 June 1941: ‘On Sunday I spent a very enjoyable day with the Ashcrofts at Rufford. Naturally we were at the Old Hall for some time (my

126  Bridget Yates













first visit since the Museum started) & I was amazed at the excellent work which Philip has done. No praise could be too high. Rufford is fortunate indeed to have such an enthusiast – one who is practical as well as an idealist.’ 38. This does not appear in the final version of the Minutes. 39. When Ashcroft sent the draft minutes to Jarratt on 28 July 1941, he also noted in his letter that ‘Yesterday was another record day at the Old Hall - & perhaps the enclosed letter in the press had something to do with it: publicity is the thing even in war – time’. 40. The School Code of 1895 recognised visits to museums and other places of interest as school attendance provided an Inspector was told in advance. 41. See figure 5.2. Two of Ashcroft's stands can be seen in this image. 42. Ormskirk Advertiser, 14 September 1944, npn. Cutting found in LRO DDX129 ACC1489. 43. Sharon Macdonald, Memorylands: heritage and identity in Europe today (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 147. 44. He continued to give talks immediately following the end of the war. In November 1945, he wrote to Jarratt describing a series of six talks he had given in Croston on the history of the village, which had, he estimated, been attended by ‘about 800’ people showing the ‘tremendous enthusiasm of local folk for their own locality-its culture and traditions. And the Museum is the nucleus of this awakening.’ 45. It is not known how Ashcroft acquired his knowledge of Swedish folk museums. He mentions that the museum was a member of the North West Federation of Museums and Galleries in a letter to Jarratt on 14 February 1944, so he may have learnt of them through his contacts with other curators. 46. Metropolitan Borough of Wirral, Birkenhead Central Library. I am most grateful to Judith Beastall of the Bromborough Society for locating these notes for me. Ashcroft’s talk inspired the Bromborough Society to attempt to set up their own museum, an idea which despite many years ‘on the table’ never came to fruition. 47. City of Gloucester Short Guide to the Collections (1939), p. 17. 48. City of Gloucester Short Guide to the Folk Museum (1942), price 3d, Free to Service Men. ‘Compiled specially for the Imperial and Allied Troops in the neighbourhood by Councillor Captain T. Hannam-Clark, Chairman of the City Library and Museum Committee. Curator: Charles Green (on War Service)’, p. 5. 49. Levi Fox, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust: a personal memoir (Norwich: Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in association with Jarrold Publishing, 1997), p. 67. 50. Fox, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, p. 67. 51. The Trustees and Guardians of Shakespeare’s Birthplace Minute Book TR2/1/4, Shakespeare Centre, Stratford-upon-Avon. 52. Author’s collection. The quotation comes from Winston Churchill’s broadcast to France, 21 October 1940, http://www.churchill-society-london.org. uk/LaFrance.html. 53. Eric Hardy, ‘Making a Village Museum – a unique collection at Rufford Old Hall’, Country Life 1 January 1943, p. 20. 54. Anon., ‘Eric Hardy’, http://www.mnapage.info/eric-hardy/ 55. Portfolio iii, Liverpool Record Office Hq570.6MER. 56. Recently there has been a resurgence of interest in Ashcroft’s war-time collection at Rufford. During the summer of 2019 the author was invited to work with colleagues in attempting to identify these objects, using evidence from his letters in the absence of more detailed documentation.

The present is pretty terrible 127 57. This was almost certainly Peter Fleetwood-Hesketh, the architectural historian and writer, who was a member of the ROHMC and of the Village Museum Sub-Committee. 58. The Times, Friday 20 March 1959, p18 downloaded via www.ancestry.co.uk, 28.8.2012. Ashcroft wrote to Jarratt on 14 December 1944 that a representative from CEMA, the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (the precursor of the Arts Council) had ‘suggested the other day that a concert of Tudor music on contemporary instruments would be delightful in the Hall one summer’s day.’ 59. Yates, ‘Volunteer-run Museums’. 60. Alun Howkins, The Death of Rural England – A Social History of the Countryside since 1900 (London: Routledge, 2003). 61. Yates, ‘Volunteer-run Museums’. The first of these local history museums appears to be that at Shaftesbury Town Museum, set up by the Shaftesbury and District Historical Society in 1946.

6

Museums without objects? The Staatliche Sammlungen für Kunst und Wissenschaft in Dresden during the Second World War Karin Müller-Kelwing

Introduction During military conflicts, museum employees are confronted with particular challenges. They must continue their regular museum tasks, including a commitment to education through activities like exhibitions and lectures, while also preserving the objects under their care, protecting them against damage, destruction and loss. This leads to a constant conflict of interests. This challenge is particularly evident in the work of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (Dresden State Art Collections), which is one of the most important and oldest collections of museums in Europe. It originated for the most part in the sixteenth century, in the Kunstkammer (Chamber of the Arts) of the Saxon Electors. War, destruction and loss are part of the more than 450-year history of this institution. Throughout the 12-year period of the Third Reich the collections were called the Staatliche Sammlungen für Kunst und Wissenschaft (State Collections of Art and Science) in Dresden.1 These included the art and cultural history collections, 2 as well as the natural history museums, 3 the Sächsisches Armeemuseum (Saxon Army Museum) and the Sächsische Landesbibliothek (Saxon State Library). All the associated 13 collections, located in different historical buildings in the city centre, were under the direction of the Sächsisches Ministerium für Volksbildung (Saxon Ministry of Education) in Dresden, which for its part was subordinated under the control of the Reichsministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung (Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture) in Berlin.

Staffing of museums under the Third Reich Already by the beginning of the 1930s, the staffing level of the Staatliche Sammlungen was minimal. Most museums were guided by a director, who was an expert with a Ph.D. in the field. Each collection usually also had a curator, a research assistant and a trainee as well as a conservator. They also had several guards and a cleaning staff. Most of the museum’s scholarly staff were men. From 1925 to 1946, the only long-time female scholarly

130  Karin Müller-Kelwing employees in the museums were Erna von Watzdorf (1892–1976) in the Historisches Museum (Historical Museum) and Ragna Enking (1898– 1975) in the Skulpturensammlung (Sculpture Collection). There were a few more women among the employees of the Sächsische Landesbibliothek. The library was also an exception due to the fact that the number of the scholarly employees remained largely the same even during the war, fluctuating between 10 and 12. In 1933, the 12 museums of the Staatliche Sammlungen were supervised by 11 directors. The research staff included seven curators, five research assistants, and four trainees. During the following 12 years, employee numbers at the higher ranks continued to decline, as the positions left by those who were conscripted into the Wehrmacht or delegated to other departments were kept vacant. Similarly, the positions of those who retired, passed away, or were killed in action were often left unfilled in order to save money. Due to the lack of employees, certain aspects of museum administration were centralised. At the beginning of 1945, only half the personnel of 1933 was available. Only 5 of the 13 collections still had directors. The others were co-managed by the directors of these other institutions, or looked after by the remaining staff of curators, assistants and conservators. With regard to all the Staatliche Sammlungen in Dresden, over the course of the 12 years of the Third Reich, four museum directors died and seven others left their posts for various reasons. Some of these positions remained unfilled, as administrative tasks were consolidated. Others were filled, usually with in-house personnel. The only applicants who were hired from outside were the directors of the Gemäldegalerie (Paintings Gallery) and the Museen für Tierkunde und Völkerkunde (Museums for Zoologie and Ethnology): Hermann Voss (1884–1969) und Hans Kummerlöwe (1903–1995). When the directorship of the Gemäldegalerie was reappointed after the death of Hans Posse (1879–1942), the decision for a suitable successor was not taken by the responsible Sächsisches Ministerium für Volksbildung in Dresden. It was the Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, himself who in March 1943, following Adolf Hitler’s instructions and Posse’s suggestion, appointed Hermann Voss director of the Gemäldegalerie. This shows the importance attached to this position. Posse, who died on 7 December 1942, had been director of the Gemäldegalerie since 1910. Before that, he was assistant to Wilhelm Bode in Berlin. As curator of the Dresden International Art Exhibition 1926 and of the German contribution to the 1922 and 1930 Venice Biennale, Posse advocated for modern art works. This provoked bitter opposition. When Posse applied to become a member of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP, National Socialist German Workers’ Party) in 1934, his membership was rejected. Because of these various conflicts he was dismissed in March 1938. When Hitler visited Dresden on 18 June 1938, he questioned Posse about

Museums without objects? 131 his dismissal and decided to give him the position back.4 One year later, in June 1939, Hitler set up the Sonderauftrag Linz (Special Commission: Linz) to build a new art museum for Linz, the so-called Führermuseum (Museum of the Führer), and appointed Posse as his special envoy. 5 In March 1943, Hermann Voss took over the directorship of the Gemäldegalerie and followed Posse as special envoy for Linz. Like Posse, the art historian Voss, a specialist in Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting, had worked as a trainee for Bode in Berlin. Later he managed the Graphische Sammlung of the Museum für bildende Künste (Museum of Fine Arts) in Leipzig and was deputy director of the Kaiser-FriedrichMuseum in Berlin before he headed the Städtische Kunstsammlung (Municipal Art Collection) at the Nassauisches Landesmuseum (Nassau State Collection) in Wiesbaden in 1935. Now, in 1943, Voss took over the office as director of the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden and as Hitler’s special envoy. Since this staffing decision was Hitler’s personal wish, the political attitude and the Party membership of the candidate were not investigated; in fact, Hermann Voss was not a member of the Nazi Party.6 The case of Hans Kummerlöwe was different. Already during his studies in Leipzig he had joined the Nazi Party in 1925. After his doctorate as a zoologist he worked as a teacher at several schools before he was appointed director of the Museen für Tierkunde und Völkerkunde in Dresden in January 1936. What was decisive in securing this appointment was his party commitment. The Sächsisches Ministerium für Volksbildung selected him even though he had no museum experience at all, as he ‘appears to be up to all the demands of the position to be transferred to him and is a particularly proven pioneer of the movement.’ 7 But Kummerlöwe was a careerist and was not particularly interested in museum work. As soon as he became a director in Dresden, he made further contacts with people from politics and administration. After only three years Kummerlöwe left Dresden and took over the provisional management of the Wissenschaftliche Museen (Scientific Museums) in Vienna in June 1939. There he was appointed director in August 1940 and took over the National Socialist transformation of the Naturhistorisches Museum (Natural History Museum). He also commissioned anthropological investigations of prisoners in prisoner-of-war camps and of Jews in the Amsterdam Ghetto. After 1945, Kummerlöwe never worked again in a museum or in the public service, so he did not have to face denazification proceedings. Instead, he attempted to get rid of his Nazi past by changing his name to Kumerloeve.8 It is obvious that a generational change took place in the Staatliche Sammlungen in Dresden in the Nazi era. Whereas it had been natural to work as a specialist for decades on a collection and thus obtain a precise knowledge of the inventory, beginning in the Nazi period, inexperienced, but politically reliable staff were hired, most of whom also had a school-teaching qualification. Furthermore, membership in the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche

132  Karin Müller-Kelwing Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) was important. About 45% of the scholarly employees of the collections joined the Nazi Party. Of the 39 scholars who led the collections or had to take responsibility for them between 1933 and 1945, eighteen were party members. Whenever staff were promoted, the Sächsisches Ministerium für Volksbildung asked the Party leadership in Dresden for the evaluation of their political reliability. When the zoologist Klaus Günther (1907–1975) from the Museen für Tierkunde und Völkerkunde was to take over as deputy head of the Münzkabinett (Numismatic Cabinet), the party evaluated him in February 1941: ‘Günther is a quite apolitical person who faithfully fulfils duties that have been imposed, but will hardly act on his own initiative. His attitude towards the state and the movement is undoubtedly affirmative. […] We take the position that for this purely academic institution only personalities are demanded as leaders, who by membership to the NSDAP first of all offer the guarantee to be politically and ideologically reliable. […] Because of G.’s completely apolitical general behaviour, we do not agree with the intended proposal at the moment.’9 Only a few days later Günther, confronted with this answer, applied for party membership. In September 1942, he was commissioned to supervise the Münzkabinett, despite the fact that other candidates, mostly recognised numismatists, would have been more suitable from a professional point of view.10 Membership in the Nazi Party became increasingly important in the museum sector as well, rather than specialist knowledge. On the other hand, all the political opponents, like members of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD, Communist Party) and the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party) or any related organisation, as well as those who were ‘non-Aryan’ according to the National Socialist definition, were dismissed. The legal basis for this was the Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums (Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service) and the Nuremberg Laws. In the Staatliche Sammlungen five scholarly employees were affected. The art historian Wolfgang Balzer (1884–1968), director of the Kunstgewerbemuseum (Arts and Crafts Museum), was arrested for a few days in March 1933 because of his proximity to the SPD and dismissed in December 1933.11 Two librarians from the Sächsische Landesbibliothek, Anna Löwenthal (1902–1967) and Lucie Walter (1895–1961?), were dismissed for being Jewish in August 1933. Shortly after Kristallnacht, Löwenthal left Germany on board of the SS Washington on 30 November 1938 and emigrated to New York. Despite her knowledge of English, her time in the United States was problematic. She could not find a job as a librarian and worked as a maid, then in a factory, and later as an accountant in New York, where she died in 1967.12 Walter emigrated to Palestine, where she lived until at least 1961.13 The curator of entomology from the Museum für Tierkunde (Museum of Zoology), Fritz van Emden (1898–1958), suffered a similar fate. He

Museums without objects 133 was dismissed in September 1933 for having Jewish ancestry. Due to his recognition as a Carabidae (ground beetles) specialist he was able to emigrate to London in 1934, where his wife with their two sons followed him two years later. Emden could continue his scientific career working at the Commonwealth Institute of Entomology, where he became an internationally recognised expert on Tachinidae (caterpillar flies). He died in London in 1958.14 Karl Jähnig (1888–1960), the curator at the Gemäldegalerie, a specialist in paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, among other topics, was dismissed for being married to a Jewish woman in October 1937. Jähnig emigrated to Switzerland where he worked as a freelance art historian.15 Anti-Semitism spread unhindered in the Staatliche Sammlungen through the rules of conduct issued by the government. Like the entire population, museum employees were prohibited from shopping in Jewish stores after Adolf Hitler declared the ‘National boycott of Jewish business’ in April 1933. As a further effect of the Nuremberg Laws on museum work, the Jewish population was denied access to the Staatliche Sammlungen by ministerial decree on 18 November 1938. A sign ‘Jews are forbidden to enter’ had to be posted at every museum.16

Figure 6.1 Fritz Fichtner at the Zwinger in Dresden, 1939. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Porzellansammlung, Inv. no. FN_A_140

134  Karin Müller-Kelwing By contrast, pure Nazi Party careers were now achievable in the museum world. One of these new employees was the art historian Fritz Fichtner (1890–1969) (Figure 6.1), who would ultimately become a museum director in the Staatliche Sammlungen during the Nazi period. A look at his life shows a typical path to leadership in the Third Reich.17 Fichtner was born in Dresden on 16 June 1890. He went to college in Zschopau in the Erzgebirge in Saxony, where he studied pedagogy, which, together with art, would remain the overriding interest in his future studies and work. After serving his mandatory military service, he worked as a middle school teacher for several years, before returning to school in 1912 to study art education at the Kunstgewerbeakademie (Academy of Applied Arts). During the First World War he served as a medical volunteer. After the war, he began teaching in a high school. At the same time, he studied art history at the universities in Leipzig and Dresden, as well as history, archaeology, architecture and philosophy. In July 1921, he received his doctorate in Leipzig. He defended his habilitation thesis two years later in Dresden. Afterwards, Fichtner continued teaching at the high school level, but also became a lecturer at the Technische Hochschule Dresden (Technical University Dresden) and taught classes at the Kunstgewerbeakademie – all at the same time. It was in 1929, at the age of 39, that Fichtner began his museum career, working as a research assistant in the Porzellansammlung (Porcelain Collection). Four years later, in 1933, he became head of that collection after his predecessor, Ernst Zimmermann (1866–1940), retired. In the same year, he also became director of the Kunstgewerbemuseum, when he replaced the dismissed director of this collection, Wolfgang Balzer. What was decisive in fuelling this rapid rise within the museum world was Fichtner’s active involvement in the Nazi Party, which he joined in January 1933. Ten months later, he signed the ‘Bekenntnis der Professoren an den deutschen Hochschulen zu Adolf Hitler und dem nationalsozialistischen Staat’ (Commitment of Professors at German Universities to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist State).18 He even joined a number of Nazi organisations, including the Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund (National Socialist Teachers League), and worked as an instructor for the Kreisschulungsamt (District Education Office) and as a consultant for the Rassenpolitisches Amt (Office of Racial Policy).19 Additionally, he gave lectures at Party conventions and organised courses for the Nationalsozialistische Frauenschaft (National Socialist Women’s League). Fichtner’s political commitment to the Nazi Party led to his being appointed director of the Porzellansammlung and civil servant in February 1937 and spokesman for the Staatliche Sammlungen in the Sächsisches Ministerium für Volksbildung two months later. It is at this time that he stopped teaching. Even after he was drafted into military service in December 1941, he was able to continue his museum work as his service

Museums without objects 135 was not as a soldier but rather as a military administrator: this enabled him to continue his work at the Staatliche Sammlungen on the side, which he willingly put in the service of the Nazi State. Despite the burden of working in his four different functions – as a military administrator, spokesman of the Staatliche Sammlungen in the Sächsisches Ministerium für Volksbildung, and director of two museums (which he essentially supervised himself) – Fichtner also did regular inspections of the collections as well as mundane tasks like night watches. After he was assigned to organise the safekeeping measures of the Staatliche Sammlungen in 1942 by the Reichsstatthalter (Governor of the Reich), he regularly travelled to the collections’ storage areas outside of Dresden to make sure the work was being done correctly. After the war, in May 1945, Fichtner left Dresden and Saxony, returning to his former work as a professor in what became the West German cities of Bamberg and Erlangen. He died in September 1969 in Erlangen. Although it is difficult to reconstruct a detailed understanding of Fichtner’s working relationships, it is clear that he worked closely with staff in all of the Staatliche Sammlungen in Dresden and with officials in the Sächsisches Ministerium für Volksbildung. His daily routine included talks with the Gauleiter of Saxony, Reichsstatthalter Martin Mutschmann. A letter from 1939, in which Fichtner informed the Reichsstatthalter that he has ‘been able to use my relationship with the SD [Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS] in earlier cases for the benefit of the museums,’20 suggests that he probably worked for the Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS (Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS). While ‘securing’ the porcelain collection of the Jewish banking family of Viktor von Klemperer, at least, he was in contact with the Gestapo. 21 It is not the only example of his involvement in the National Socialists’ robbery of European art collections. After the Germans occupied Poland, in November 1939, Fichtner travelled on behalf of the Reichsstatthalter to Warsaw and Krakow to track down porcelain pieces of Saxon origin that were in museums and private collections there and bring them back to Germany. 22 In his actions, Fichtner was clearly a committed Nazi for whom the art collections were important and for which he used his various connections to both continue the collections’ mission and to protect the works when war loomed.

Museums at war After the Nazis took power in 1933, the museum’s task of preservation gained importance, especially as the threat of war became more pronounced. By 1937, shortly after the bombing of the Basque city of Guernica, which was one of the first aerial bombings by Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe, the protection of objects and the provision of air-raid shelters for the Staatliche Sammlungen had been discussed in Dresden. By the end of that year, the

136  Karin Müller-Kelwing directors of each of the museums had submitted an emergency plan: it divided the museum objects into three groups according to the subjective assessment of the respective directors. The first group was composed of the most valuable and important objects, those that were to be salvaged first in an emergency. Less valuable objects were assigned to the second group, while the third group included the least valuable objects, those from the depots. 23 During the Sudeten crisis in September 1938, some museums – such as Gemäldegalerie and Grünes Gewölbe (Green Vault) – closed as a precautionary measure and packed their most important objects (those falling into Group I) into crates. But once the Munich Agreement was signed a few weeks later and the threat of war was over, these museums reopened. A few days before the German Wehrmacht attacked Poland on 28 August 1939, however, the Reichsministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung in Berlin ordered: ‘As far as it’s not yet done, the protection of cultural goods and works of art within the museum is to be arranged as a precaution.’24 Immediately all of the Staatliche Sammlungen in Dresden were closed. The most valuable objects were packed back into crates and stored – some stayed in the exhibition rooms in the museums, others went into the museums’ basements or were moved to other shelters in the city. Objects from the second and third groups were crated but remained in the museum (Figure 6.2). This condition did not last, however: by January 1940, the museums were opened again to the public. Even as late as 1942, people in Dresden thought they were safe. The air war that the Nazis had been waging for years was not yet affecting Germany’s cities. Nonetheless, the museums in the Staatliche Sammlungen gradually began to close for good: first with the art collections – beginning in October 1940 with the Gemäldegalerie (immediately after the German air strikes on London in September 1940) – then with the natural sciences, and lastly, the Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte (State Museum of Prehistory) and the Museum für Mineralogie und Geologie (Museum of Mineralogy and Geology) in mid-to-late 1944. These last two museums, which had emerged from the Museum für Mineralogie, Geologie und Vorgeschichte (Museum of Mineralogy, Geology, and Prehistory) in April 1938, were able to remain open longer because, following the latest exhibition methods, they tended to use replicas rather than original objects. It was only after the first heavy air raids on German cities – such as Lübeck in northern Germany in March 1942 – that museum directors and politicians recognised the ‘necessity of the complete evacuation of the inner historical city and [the] salvage of all works of art.’25 It was at this point that plans were made to move the art treasures to a more secure location outside of the city. The responsible directors began to look for suitable sites: locations far away from major cities, military installations and industrial plants. In 1942, by order of the Reichsstatthalter, the staff at the Staatliche Sammlungen Dresden moved their holdings to more than 40

Museums without objects 137

Figure 6.2  Safekeeping of objects in the Porzellansammlung in the Zwinger, 1939. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Porzellansammlung, Inv. no. FN_A_69

locations around Saxony, mostly to castles, palaces, and mansions, but also to former mines. This was a major logistical achievement given the lack of transportation options during the war. 26 The distribution of works across many different locations was intentional to insure their survival. The main storage sites were the Albrechtsburg Meissen, the Königstein Fortress and the Weesenstein Castle, all between 25 and 40 kilometres from Dresden. Often these locations had to be adjusted due to adverse climatic conditions; at the very least, they needed to be equipped with heaters and fire protection. Additionally, the objects had to be guarded and needed to be in a climate-controlled environment. Every two months, reports about the condition of the art works were sent to the relevant ministry.

138  Karin Müller-Kelwing

Museums without objects How, though, does a museum work when its treasures are not present, when its gallery spaces are empty? There is of course not just one answer to this question. In order to be able to both fulfil the educational mission and actively participate on the home front, the directors and curators of Dresden’s Staatliche Sammlungen pursued different strategies. They tried to keep their collections open to the public during the war years while also protecting the objects in their care. Trapped between these conflicting responsibilities, they initially decided to secure the most precious objects by boxing them up and putting them into storage while keeping the rest of the collection open to the public for as long as possible. A report on museum activities of 1940 testifies to this: ‘On the one hand, war demands that the museum’s treasures receive every conceivable protection. […] On the other hand, the directors responsible for the museums want to help satisfy the German people’s desire for exaltation, joy and knowledge with all their remaining strength. […] In this sense, the State Collections for Art and Science in Dresden want to be living facilitators of art that also perform their tireless work on the front in their Homeland!’27 In the Nazi state, museums, as ‘National Socialist educational institutions’28 had to ‘serve the fatherland and the nation.’29 Museum education was therefore important. In a decree titled ‘Museums during the War’ from December 1939, Reich Minister Bernhard Rust described museums as ‘indispensable sites of nationalistic instruction and self-reflection’ and demanded that directors, ‘[…] actively integrate German museums into the home front. Every open museum, even makeshift and low brow, gives the German people inspiration and joy and strengthens their confidence.’30 This statement makes it clear that in addition to protecting their objects, museums needed to convey a sense of normal life in their exhibitions and, after the war broke out, to motivate their visitors to persevere. In this sense, museum work was often described as a ‘fight on the home front’ and classified as ‘important to the war effort.’ For the few remaining academic staff members of the museums, a so-called ‘uk-Stellung,’ a release from service in the Wehrmacht, could be requested so that they could continue their museum work. But ambitious plans for the presentation of each collection were also pursued. In May 1935, after ten years of renovation, the Sächsische Landesbibliothek reopened as the most modern library in Germany. Located in the Japanese Palace, it had a book museum and a lecture hall with the latest technology. The Gemäldegalerie opened its newly established German department with works by Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Dürer in June 1938. Other museums were relocated during the Third Reich. Relocation plans for the Porzellansammlung and the Museum für Tierkunde, for example,

Museums without objects 139 were published in November 1936.31 Less than a year later, in October 1937, the Museum für Tierkunde reopened in its new location in the former Lodge House, which had been expropriated and rebuilt after the ban on Freemasonry by the Nazis. The Porzellansammlung, which was moved from the Johanneum to the Zwinger and even had its rooms installed, was prevented from opening, however, because of the outbreak of war in September 1939.32 Museum programming was an important focal point during the Third Reich, and in 1937, a new instrument of education was introduced: the Museum Week. Held each year until 1941, the Museum Week usually began with a keynote address and included several special exhibitions as well as numerous lectures and guided tours. It was intended to offer a diverse population access to the museums, including members of the Wehrmacht and Nazi-related organisations, police officers, and students as well as school classes and families. Throughout the year, guided tours of all collections were offered regularly. Numerous additional tours were offered explicitly for school classes, Wehrmacht groups, and various Nazi organisations. The various events in the museums – both, the museum week and regular programming – were frequently mentioned in the local newspapers. The schedule of events was also printed, initially as promotional flyers, but later, as the war years progressed, as simple, typewritten copies. Regular programming included daily film screenings in the newly established Museum für Tierkunde, which were a crowd favourite. They ended only when the equipment was confiscated for war purposes by the Wehrmacht in October 1943.33 The Staatliche Sammlungen offered museum lectures with a slide show on Sunday mornings: usually 12 times a year. These lectures given by employees from the various collections were advertised with postcards and posters until March 1944, at which point the talks stopped. Only very rarely did their titles reveal the political ambitions of the speakers. Most of the time they were dedicated to special professional topics. Thus Franz Schubert, curator of the Kupferstich-Kabinett (Collection of Prints, Drawings and Photographs), spoke in January 1944 about ‘Old German Prints and their Relationships with Sculptures.’34 As the war continued, the guided tours that were usually offered as part of the museum’s regular programming were gradually scaled back as objects were increasingly packed away into storage for safekeeping. As a substitute, the staff invented so-called ‘guided-tour lectures’: instead of walking through the galleries, these tours were presented as lectures that included a few original objects from the respective collection that were set up for display at the front of the room. It may come as a surprise to learn that Dresden’s museums took up the challenge of presenting exhibitions even during the war years. Despite the significantly reduced number of personnel and the enormous effort required to take care of the objects being held at numerous locations outside Dresden, exhibitions were mounted and shown in the city until 1944.

140  Karin Müller-Kelwing How do you present the ‘Kostbarkeiten des Grünen Gewölbes im Lichtbild’ (Treasures of the Green Vault) if these treasures are stored outside the city due to the war? The art historian Walter Holzhausen (1896– 1968), who had been entrusted with the direction of the Grünes Gewölbe after the death of its former director, had a clever idea: he curated an exhibition that focused explicitly on the absence of objects. He showed a generous selection of photographs of the collection taken in the mid-1930s by the Dresden artist and photographer Edmund Kesting (1892–1970). The exhibition took place in the otherwise empty rooms of the museum from 19 September 1943 to 15 November 1943.35 Born in Dresden in 1892 and educated at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, Kesting was in contact with avant-garde artists. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, he was forced to close his Bauhaus-like art schools in Dresden and Berlin and was banned from exhibiting his paintings. In response, he turned more towards photography, something he had experimented with since the 1920s. Indeed, it became his main source of income during those years. In the mid 1930s, Holzhausen commissioned Kesting to make glass-negative photos. This commission provided Kesting with an income and, since documenting the collection and preparing the exhibition in 1943 were considered to be of strategic interest – part of the ‘fight on the home front,’ as it was called – it saved Kesting from being drafted into military service. The courage of the curator was rewarded: the photos by Kesting were much more than documentary photography – they were independent artworks. Kesting’s photos show the objects from the Grünes Gewölbe in a play with light and shadow. The exhibition attracted over 7,600 visitors in two months. The response in the press was similarly impressive. In a review, the newspaper explicitly mentioned that ‘photograph of the beautiful crystal which is invigoratingly contrasted by the window’s wrought iron grating.’36 That photograph (Figure 6.3) shows the sixteenth-century rock crystal globe that the Duke of Savoy had given Dresden’s Elector August. In the background appears the Semper opera house, which is also visible as an upside-down image in the sphere. Because of its success, the exhibition travelled to two other cities – Posen and Zwickau. More locations were planned but had to be cancelled because of the war. Another example of an exhibition without objects is ‘Veit Stoss,’ which was staged by the Historisches Museum from August to October 1944 at Johanneum.37 It paid tribute to the life and work of the famous Southern German woodcarver of the fifteenth century, a contemporary of Albrecht Dürer. As with the exhibition in the Grünes Gewölbe, it was photographs, not original carvings, that were on view in the exhibition. For example, there were monumental photographs of the St. Mary Altar from Krakow, made by the Polish photographer Stanisław Kolowca. The existence of several catalogues of the same content of Veit Stoss exhibitions in different cities, such as Görlitz, Berlin, Krakow, Bautzen, and

Museums without objects 141

Figure 6.3 Rock crystal sphere, Milan, 1574–1578, Photograph by Edmund Kesting, about 1937. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Grünes Gewölbe, Inv. no. V 174

Dresden, suggests that it was a touring exhibition. In fact, it was commissioned by the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda) and developed by the Publication Office Berlin. Archival documents show that museums interested in the exhibition usually approached the Publication Office. A local clerk then arranged the appropriate contacts. 38 The catalogues, which differed only in their covers, were produced by the publisher Korn in Breslau. The museums organised the exhibitions and shared the transport costs. It was shown, for example, in 1941 in the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin.39 It is currently unclear how Dresden came to host the exhibition in 1944 and who was responsible for it. It could have been Walter

142  Karin Müller-Kelwing Holzhausen or Erna von Watzdorf who brought the exhibition there – they were the only scholars at the Historisches Museum at that time. But it is certain that although the exhibition gave the impression of a narrative-documentary photo show, it served political purposes. As early as the nineteenth century, there had been vehement debates about Veit Stoss’s nationality because he had lived in two places in his lifetime – Krakow and Nuremberg. Now a Nazi press release dated July 1938 read as follows: ‘Behind the exhibition in Breslau is the Propaganda Ministry, but this mustn’t be revealed. The exhibition is clearly a defensive one that shows the artistic origins, the genealogy, the work itself, and the impact of Veit Stoss’ art in the East. First and foremost, therefore, it is a political exhibition under the pretext of an artistic one. This shortcoming, however, should be covered with the coat of Christian charity.’40 This document is an example of unconcealed Nazi exertion of influence. Apart from that, it is a clear commitment to the underlying motives for the Stoss exhibition, which travelled through Germany from 1939. At the same time as this exhibition, and shortly after the invasion of Poland by the Wehrmacht, German museum officials toured the recently occupied territory – the Generalgouvernement – searching Polish museums and private collections for German art that they wanted to send back to their country. Dresden museum directors were involved as well, among them Fritz Fichtner and director of the Gemäldegalerie, Hans Posse, who was also responsible for setting up the Linz collection as Hitler’s special commissioner.41 In this way the St. Mary’s altar had been transported from Krakow and brought to Germany; on 5 January 1940, Albert Speer, General Building Inspector for Berlin, communicated to the Reichskanzlei: ‘Yesterday at noon […] the Führer instructed me to arrange for the transfer of the altar of St. Mary in Krakow by Veit Stoss to Nuremberg.’42 Considering this historical context, the Veit Stoss exhibition in Dresden had a clear ideological dimension. Large-format photos of the altar of St. Mary showed an artwork that had been removed from occupied territories and brought ‘back to the Reich.’ That itinerary exhibition propagated and celebrated national socialist art looting. It primarily served political interests and is therefore an example of the ideological instrumentalisation of cultural property. It demonstrates how museum work was put into the service of Nazi politics. About the same time, as the new rooms of the Porzellansammlung in the Zwinger could not be opened due to the war, Fritz Fichtner decided to use his working relationships to fill the empty rooms with an exhibition of porcelain that were not in the collection. As a member of the artistic advisory board of the Deutsche Keramische Gesellschaft (German Ceramic Society), he therefore contacted various porcelain factories. He planned to show in February 1944 an exhibition entitled ‘Serienporzellan für Küche, Keller, Kantine und Kaserne’ (Serial Porcelain for Kitchen, Cellar, Canteen and Barracks) in the Zwinger.43 This was, though, more of a sporadic

Museums without objects 143 ‘work in progress’ because Fichtner’s many tasks and responsibilities for the whole of the Staatliche Sammlungen in Dresden left him little time to conceptualise and realise the project. The first deliveries – for example from the porcelain manufacture Meissen – reached Dresden already in March 1944. After that, the exhibition was expanded with additional objects as they arrived. The porcelain factory Bauscher in Weiden sent pieces from their tableware series ‘Amt Schönheit der Arbeit’ (Office of Beauty of Labour). To some extent, Fichtner made a virtue out of necessity with this exhibition: By elevating the current industrial war production of porcelain to a museum object and allowing the museum to take over the task of a trade fair, he tried to cover up the fact that the museums had lost their functionality. However, the decree of Reich Minister Joseph Goebbels on the Totaler Krieg (total war effort) from July 1944 let the exhibition system completely collapse and caused the closure of the last cultural institutions. Fichtner was forced to inform the lenders: ‘The exhibition is available and will be made available to interested parties. Unfortunately, it must be withheld from the public for the time being, as exhibitions, […] according to the well-known decree of the Reich Minister are currently not allowed.’44 But even this interim solution could not be maintained for long, without putting the objects at risk. The last event of one of the Staatliche Sammlungen in Dresden was a guided tour held at the Museum für Tierkunde on September 1944 by the entomologist Klaus Günther, who had replaced the dismissed curator Fritz van Emden.45 Only two weeks later, on 7 October 1944, the museum was hit in an aerial raid and was gutted by fire. Thus ended public museum work in Dresden. Thereafter, protecting the objects became the museum workers’ sole priority. As Reichsstatthalter Mutschmann stated on January 1945: ‘For the heads of the collections, there should be no other concern at the moment than to think about worst-case scenarios day and night and act accordingly with regard to preserving the objects entrusted to them, including the libraries and furnishings.’46 Fichtner’s hope, that ‘[…] the porcelain is packed away in a way that allows for an immediate rebuild at a later time,’47 which he had communicated to the managing director of the Deutsche Keramische Gesellschaft two months earlier, was not fulfilled. All the Staatliche Sammlungen remained closed because of the progress of the war and the bombing of Dresden on 13 February 1945.

Conclusion During the Nazi era, education became a major focus for museums early on for ideological reasons. By 1939 at the latest, it was joined by a focus on preservation. By the early 1940s, there was a constant tension in museum work between the need to protect the objects and the need to play an active role in the ‘home front.’ In the Staatliche Sammlungen für Kunst

144  Karin Müller-Kelwing und Wissenschaft in Dresden, this dual focus was accompanied by a generational change in among employees. New directors were chosen more for their political reliability than their knowledge. The biography of Fritz Fichtner offers an example of this. The three exhibitions of the Staatliche Sammlungen in the Second World War show three different strategies for engaging with art during the difficult time of the world war: The first example, the exhibition with photographs by the artist Edmund Kesting, illustrates how the curator was able to create an exhibition – and thus keep the museum open to the public – at a time when the objects themselves were no longer located in the museum. The second exhibition, the presentation of the photographs of the works of Veit Stoss, shows how cultural property could be instrumentalised for ideological purposes. And the third, the exhibition of serial porcelain, shows how current war production could be elevated to a museum object. While the first example bears witness to the courageous work of museum directors and employees under the difficult conditions in the war, the latter two reveal the ideological uses of museum work in war. The concept of ‘work on the home front’ imposed on the few remaining employees in the museums in the 1940s meant they had to continue creating exhibitions and engaging with the public, but under the imperative of the Nazis’ ideological agenda.

Notes 1. This chapter presents a part of the current research project of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden ‘Between Art, Science and Politics: Museums in National Socialism. The Staatliche Sammlungen für Kunst und Wissenschaft (State Collections of Art and Science) in Dresden and their scholarly employees’. The purpose of this project sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft is to research the biographies of more than 80 people who worked at thirteen cultural institutions in Dresden between 1933 and 1945. The results of the project will be published: Karin Müller-Kelwing, Zwischen Kunst, Wissenschaft und Politik. Die Staatlichen Sammlungen für Kunst und Wissenschaft in Dresden und ihre Mitarbeiter im Nationalsozialismus, edited by Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and Gilbert Lupfer (Köln: Böhlau, 2020). The author would like to thank Gilbert Lupfer, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, for supervising the research project, and Kate Hill, University of Lincoln, without whose commitment to the present volume this essay would not have been published. Furthermore the author would like to thank Michael Korey, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, as well as April Eisman and Grant Arndt, Iowa State University, for their support in discussing the text. 2. Gemäldegalerie (Paintings Gallery), Kupferstich-Kabinett (Collection of Prints, Drawings and Photographs), Porzellansammlung (Porcelain Collection), Grünes Gewölbe (Green Vault), Historisches Museum (Historical Museum), Münzkabinett (Numismatic Cabinet), Skulpturensammlung (Sculpture Collection), Kunstgewerbemuseum (Arts and Crafts Museum).

Museums without objects 145 3. Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon, Museen für Tierkunde und Völkerkunde (Museums of Zoologie and Ethnology), Museum für Mineralogie, Geologie und Vorgeschichte (Museum of Mineralogy, Geology and Prehistory). 4. See Thomas Rudert, ‘Konservativer Galeriedirektor – Kulturdiplomat der Weimarer Republik – NS-Sonderbeauftragter. Bausteine zu einer Biografie Hans Posses,‘in Kennerschaft zwischen Macht und Moral. Annäherungen an Hans Posse (1879–1942), ed. by Gilbert Lupfer and Thomas Rudert (Köln: Böhlau, 2015), pp. 61–149. 5. See generally Kennerschaft zwischen Macht und Moral, ed. by Gilbert Lupfer and Thomas Rudert; Birgit Schwarz, Auf Befehl des Führers: Hitler und der NS-Kunstraub (Darmstadt: Theiss, 2014). 6. See generally Kathrin Iselt, ‘“Sonderbeauftragter des Führers”: Der Kunsthistoriker und Museumsmann Hermann Voss (1884–1969)’ (Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau, 2010) (PhD diss., Technische Universität Dresden, 2009). 7. Letter from Sächsisches Ministerium für Volksbildung (SMV) to Reichsstatthalter, April 27, 1935, Bundesarchiv Berlin (BArch), R 76-I/59, f. 84: ‘allen Anforderungen der ihm zu übertragenden Stelle gewachsen erscheint und ein besonders bewährter Vorkämpfer der Bewegung ist.’ (All the following quotes were translated by the author, supported by April Eisman.) 8. See diverse records, BArch, R 76-I/59a. See also Maria Teschler-Nicola, ‘Richard Arthur Hans Kummerlöwe alias Kumerloeve (1903–1995). Erster Direktor der wissenschaftlichen Museen in Wien in der NS-Zeit’, Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien, vol. 142 (2012), pp. 279–304. 9. Letter from NSDAP Gauleitung Dresden to SMV, 5 February 1941, Sächsisches Staatsarchiv, Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden (HStA Dresden), 11125 Sächsisches Ministerium des Kultus und Öffentlichen Unterrichts, no. 22897, f. 7: ‘Günther ist ein durchaus unpolitischer Mensch, der wohl auferlegte Pflichten getreulich erfüllt, aber kaum aus eigener Initiative handeln wird. Seine Einstellung zu Staat und Bewegung ist zweifelsohne bejahend. […] Wir stehen auf dem Standpunkt, daß für dieses rein wissenschaftliche Institut als Leiter nur Persönlichkeiten gefordert werden, die durch Mitgliedschaft zur NSDAP zunächst einmal die Gewähr bieten, politisch und weltanschaulich gefestigt zu sein. […] Auf Grund des vollständig unpolitischen Gesamtverhaltens des G. stimmen wir dem beabsichtigten Vorschlag zurzeit nicht zu.’ 10. See letter from SMV to Klaus Günther, 5 September 1942, HStA Dresden, 11125, no. 22897, f. 13. See also diverse records, HStA Dresden, 11125, no. 22897. Cf. Emanuele Sbardella, ‘Das Dresdener Münzkabinett im Nationalsozialismus’, Dresdener Kunstblätter, no. 2 (2019), pp. 48–55, here: 53. 11. See CV Wolfgang Balzer, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Archiv (SKD Archiv), 02/VA 41, vol. 1, f. 62 and letter from SMV to Finanzministerium, October, 25, 1933, HStA Dresden, 11125, no. 19192, f. 113. 12. See employee records, Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (SLUB), Personalakten Anna Löwenthal and letter from Anna Löwenthal to Ewald Jammers, 26 August 1962, SLUB, Mscr. Dresd.App.2830, f. 106; see also New York, Southern District, U.S District Court Naturalization Records, 1824–1946, database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QP7X-8N52: 31 May 2018), Anna Loewenthal, 1939; citing Immigration, New York, United States, 280350, NARA microfilm publication M1972, Southern District of New York Petitions for Naturalization, 1897–1944. Records of District Courts of the United States, 1685–2009, RG 21. National Archives at New York. For the information from the American resources the author thanks Marisa Bourgoin, Archives of American Art, Smithonian Institution.

146  Karin Müller-Kelwing 13. More information is not known. See employee records, SLUB, Personalakten Lucie Walter; see also Bürger, Thomas. ‘Dresdner Bibliothekare - emigriert, geflohen, geblieben. Briefe der Nachkriegszeit aus dem Nachlass von Ewald Jammers’, SLUB-Kurier, 21, no. 2 (2007), pp. 13–15. 14. See work reference for Fritz van Emden, written by Arnold Jacobi, 24 November 1933, HStA Dresden, 13842 Staatliches Museum für Tierkunde, no. 114; see also Helmut van Emden, email to author, 12 March 2018. 15. See letter from Martin Heydrich to Bernhard Struck, 18 November 1937, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Museum für Völkerkunde Dresden, SMVD n20, 25/6; see also Die Ausbürgerung deutscher Staatsangehöriger 1933-45 nach den im Reichsanzeiger veröffentlichten Listen, ed. by Michael Hepp, vol. 3 (München: Saur, 1985), p. 291. 16. Letter from SMV to directors of Staatliche Sammlungen, 18 November 1938, SKD Archiv 01/PS 45, vol. 1, f. 35. 17. See employee records, HStA Dresden, 13859 Reichsstatthalter (Staatskanzlei), Personalamt, no. 1553 and no. 1960. Cf. ‘Fritz Fichtner’, in Die Professoren der TU Dresden 1828–2003, ed. by Dorit Petschel (Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau, 2003), p. 209. 18. Bekenntnis der Professoren an den deutschen Universitäten und Hochschulen zu Adolf Hitler und dem nationalsozialistischen Staat, ed. by Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund Deutschland/Sachsen, (Dresden 1933), https:// archive.org/details/bekenntnisderpro00natiuoft, 13.2.2019. 19. See letter from Fritz Fichtner to SMV, 24 October 1936, SKD Archiv, 01/PS 40, f. 218–219. 20. Letter from Fritz Fichtner to SMV, November 30, 1939, SKD Archiv, 01/PS 43, vol. 2, f. 97: ‘meine Beziehungen zum SD in früheren Fällen zum Vorteil der Museen ausnützen können.’ 21. See meeting proceedings, 23 January 1939, SKD Archiv, 01/PS 43, vol. 2, f. 91-96. Cf. Annette Loesch. ‘Das Schicksal der Porzellansammlung Gustav von Klemperers’, In Beiträge öffentlicher Einrichtungen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland zum Umgang mit Kulturgütern aus ehemaligem jüdischen Besitz. (Veröffentlichungen der Koordinierungsstelle für Kulturgutverluste, 1), ed. by Ulf Häder (Magdeburg: Koordinierungsstelle für Kulturgutverluste Magdeburg, 2001), pp. 56–77. 22. See letter from Fritz Fichtner to Reichsstatthalter, Staatskanzlei, 11 December 1939, SKD Archiv, 01/PS 43, vol. 2, f. 130. 23. See letter from SMV to directors of Staatliche Sammlungen, 15 December 1937, SKD Archiv, 01/PS 44, vol. 1, f. 133. 24. Letter from Reichsministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung to all subordinate administrations, 28 August 1939, HStA Dresden, 10701 Staatskanzlei, no. 320/1, vol. 1, f.1: ‘Der Schutz von Kulturgütern und Kunstwerken ist, soweit noch nicht geschehen, vorsorglich innerhalb der Museumsgebäude […] vorzubereiten.’ 25. Letter from Fritz Fichtner to SMV, April 1942, SKD Archiv, 02/VA 50, f. 138–142, here: 140: ‘Notwendigkeit der vollständigen Räumung der inneren, historischen Stadt und Bergung aller Kunstwerke’. 26. For information on the history of the Staatliche Sammlungen für Kunst und Wissenschaft during the Second World War and the safekeeping of their art treasures see generally Gilbert Lupfer, ‘Die Staatlichen Sammlungen für Kunst und Wissenschaft von 1918 bis 1945,’ Dresdner Hefte, special edition ‘Die Dresdner Kunstsammlungen in fünf Jahrhunderten’ (2004), pp. 71–83; Gilbert Lupfer and Christine Nagel, ‘Die Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen für

Museums without objects 147











Kunst und Wissenschaft im Zweiten Weltkrieg’ in Bergung von Kulturgut im Nationalsozialismus. Mythen – Hintergründe – Auswirkungen, ed. by Pia Schölnberger and Sabine Loitfellner (Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau, 2016), pp. 271–86; Thomas Rudert, ‘Die kriegsbedingte Bergung der Kunstwerke aus der Staatlichen Gemäldegalerie Dresden ab August 1939,’ Dresdener Kunstblätter, no. 3 ‘Kunst im Krieg 1939–1945’ (2015), pp. 5–17; Alexander Hänel, ‘Die Auslagerung von Kunst- und Kulturgütern in die Burgen und Schlösser Sachsens’ in Bombensicher! Kunstversteck Weesenstein 1945, ed. by Staatliche Schlösser, Burgen und Gärten Sachsen (Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2018), pp. 33–43. 27. Report on museum activities in winter 1939/1940, SKD Archiv, 01/PS 34, vol. 1, f. 136–137: ‘Einerseits fordert der Krieg, daß die Museumsschätze jeden nur erdenklichen Schutz erfahren. […] Andererseits aber haben gerade die für Museen verantwortlichen Direktoren den Wunsch, das Bedürfnis des deutschen Volkes nach Erhebung, Freude und Wissen mit aller noch verbleibenden Kraft befriedigen zu helfen [...] Die Staatlichen Sammlungen für Kunst und Wissenschaft in Dresden wollen in diesem Sinne lebendige Kunstvermittler sein, die unermüdliche Frontarbeit auch in der Heimat leisten!’ 28. A. u., ‘Museen – nationalsozialistische Erziehungsstätten,’ Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, 4 October 1937, p. 2. 29. A. u., ‘Tierkundemuseum in neuem Heim,’ Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, 4 October 1937, p. 6: ‘dem Vaterland und der Nation zu dienen’. 30. Decree of the Reichsministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung, Bernhard Rust, 8 December 1939, SKD Archiv, 02/VA 50, f. 101–103: ‘[…] die deutschen Museen aktiv in die innere Front des uns aufgezwungenen Abwehrkampfes eingliedern. Jedes, sei es auch behelfsmäßig und anspruchslos, geöffnete Museum gibt zahlreichen Volksgenossen Anregung und Freude und stärkt sie in ihrem Vertrauen.’ 31. See anon., ‘Ein Museum zieht um,’ Dresdner Anzeiger, November 14, 1936, p. 5. 32. Cf. diverse records, SKD Archiv, 01/PS 135, f. 50, 68, 72; 01/PS 43, vol. 1, f. 206–209. 33. See Museum für Tierkunde, Annual Report, 1943/1944, HStA Dresden, 13842, no. 115. 34. See Leonore Kupke, ‘Aus den Vortragssälen,’ Dresdner Zeitung, 18 January 1944, p. 3. 35. See W. Pr., ‘Die Kamera entdeckte ungeahnte Schönheiten. Kostbarkeiten des Grünen Gewölbes im Lichtbild,’ Der Freiheitskampf , 27 September 1943, p. 5; a. u., ‘Ausstellung im Grünen Gewölbe verlängert,’ Dresdner Zeitung, 11 November 1943, p. 3. 36. Leonore Kupke, ‘Kostbarkeiten im Grünen Gewölbe,’ Dresdner Zeitung, 25 September 1943: ‘Photo des schönen Kristalls, zu dem die schmiedeeiserne Vergitterung des Fensters in einem merkwürdig belebenden Kontrast tritt’. 37. Veit Stoß. Ausstellung Dresden 1944, exhibition catalogue, Breslau 1944, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Kunstbibliothek; Cf. Christine Nagel, ‘Kriegsbedingte Auslagerungen des Grünen Gewölbes und des Historischen Museum’, Dresdener Kunstblätter, no. 3 (2015), pp. 19–29, here: 27. 38. Cf. diverse records, BArch, R 43/II/1236a. 39. See Zwischen Politik und Kunst: Die Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, ed. by Jörn Grabowski and Petra Winter (Köln: Böhlau, 2013), p. 445.

148  Karin Müller-Kelwing 40. ‘Pressemeldung 7. Juli 1938’, in NS-Presseanweisungen der Vorkriegszeit. Edition und Dokumentation, vol. 6/I: 1938, ed. by Karen Peter (München: KG Saur, 1999), p. 632: ‘Hinter der Breslauer Ausstellung steht das Propagandaministerium, was aber nicht gesagt werden darf. Die Ausstellung ist ausgesprochenermassen eine Abwehrausstellung, die die künstlerische Herkunft, die Genealogie, das Werk selbst und die Auswirkung der Kunst von Veit Stoss im Osten zeigen wird. In erster Linie handelt es sich also um eine politische Ausstellung, bei der das Kuenstlerische als Deckmantel benutzt wird. Diesen Mangel moege man aber etwas mit dem Mantel der christlichen Naechstenliebe zudecken.’ 41. See Footnote 15 and Birgit Schwarz, Auf Befehl des Führers: Hitler und der NS-Kunstraub (Darmstadt: Thesis, 2014), pp. 114–120. 42. Letter from Albert Speer to Reichskanzlei, Reichsminister Hans Lammers, 5 January 1940, BArch, R 43/II/1236a, f. 96: ‘Der Führer hat mich gestern Mittag […] beauftragt, die Überführung des Krakauer Marienaltars von Veit Stoss nach Nürnberg in die Wege zu leiten.’ Later the altar was stored in the Nuremberg bunker under the castle to protect it from air raids. Only after the end of the war, in 1946, was the altar returned to Poland. 43. See Staatliche Sammlungen, Annual Report, 1943/1944, HStA Dresden, 11125, no. 23053, f. 151r and diverse records, SKD Archiv, 01/PS 54, vol. 1. 44. Letter from Fritz Fichtner to Carstens-Uffrecht K.G. Haldensleben, 5 September 1944, SKD Archiv, 01/PS 54, vol. 1, f. 94: ‘Die Ausstellung steht, wird keramischen Interessenten auch zugängig gemacht. Leider muß sie vorläufig der Öffentlichkeit vorenthalten werden, da Ausstellungen […] nach dem bekannten Erlaß des Herrn Reichsministers z. Zt. nicht erlaubt sind.’ 45. See HStA Dresden, 11125, no. 23080, f. 159. 46. Letter from Reichsstatthalter to directors of Staatliche Sammlungen, 19 January 1945, SKD Münzkabinett Archiv, 1945, p. 2: ‘Für die Leiter der Sammlungen darf es zurzeit keine andere Sorge geben, als Tag und Nacht über die letzten Möglichkeiten der Erhaltung aller ihnen anvertrauten Gegenstände einschließlich der Büchereien und des Inventars nachzudenken und entsprechend zu handeln.’ 47. Letter from Fritz Fichtner to Deutsche Keramische Gesellschaft, 1 December 1944, SKD Archiv, 01/PS 54, vol. 1, f. 186: ‘Das Porzellan ist aber so weggepackt, daß zu späterer Zeit die Ausstellung sofort wieder aufgestellt werden kann.’

7

Exhibiting in wartime. Nazification and resistance in Dutch art exhibitions Evelien Scheltinga

Introduction This paper focusses on the exhibitions organised in contemporary art museums in the Netherlands during the German occupation between 1940 and 1945 through the exhibition histories at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. I have spent the last five years collecting material about the exhibitions organised in these museums during the occupation. It is not a history that has been preserved well, if at all. My research, and this chapter, is a first step into unravelling the exhibition histories of the Netherlands during the occupation. The Stedelijk Museum and the Van Abbemuseum had a very different character and position within the Dutch art scene, but underwent a similar development. Their practice will be discussed separately, and analysed in the conclusion. In the Netherlands in general, art museums had (most of) their collection in hiding during the occupation. This meant empty galleries to fill, giving an opportunity to contemporary artists to exhibit their work, but also for organisations outside the art field to share their propaganda. In the Stedelijk Museum, a lot is known and written about the occupation era, but always from the perspective of curator Willem Sandberg, his work in and for the resistance, and his developments as a graphic designer. Thanks to his heroic story no in depth research about daily life in the museum and the content of the exhibitions has been done. I compared the archives kept at the Stedelijk Museum with external archives to widen the knowledge about the institution. The Van Abbemuseum has a different history; as a young museum, with a part time director, the administration and archive were not well organised. Almost no archival material survived the Second World War. To reconstruct their story, I had to find all the information in external archives. After the Rotterdam Blitz, the aerial bombardment of Rotterdam by the Luftwaffe on 14 May 1940, the Netherlands surrendered and was occupied by Nazi Germany. Although expecting the worst, daily life was not immediately affected by the occupation. The German regime more or less immediately outlawed all Socialist and Communist parties and in 1941 it forbade

150  Evelien Scheltinga all parties, except for the Dutch national socialist party, NSB. Arthur Seyss-Inquart promised, during his inauguration as Reich Commissioner of the Netherlands, not to impose a new culture.1 This can be interpreted two ways: either he did not want to change much in the daily life of the Netherlands, or he considered the Dutch to be part of the Germanic people and their culture. For the first year, it seemed that he meant the first, but in 1941 it became clear that the Netherlands could not escape national socialist ideas about life and art. Before the German occupation, the Netherlands did not have a clear national policy on art, nor a structured support system for artists. This rapidly changed when the existing Department of Education, Arts and Science (DEAS) was split up into the Department of Education, Science and Cultural (DESC) Protection and the Department of Propaganda and Arts (DPA). The latter was based on the model of the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda) in Germany. The DPA was led by philosopher Tobie Goedewaagen. Following the new department, the Dutch Kultuurkamer (Chamber of Culture) opened in 1942, based on principles and ideas of the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture) in Germany. The aim of the Kultuurkamer was to support artists on a social, economic and legal level; its arrival changed the Dutch system for art, exhibiting and artist support. For both the DPA and the Kultuurkamer, new civil servants were hired. They were selected based on their membership of the NSB, rather than their work experience, or knowledge about art. 2 The Kultuurkamer started with actively promoting art and artists through activities such as exhibitions for their members. Every Dutch artist society was asked to register their members - this is how most artists were registered. Some artists chose to decline when they received the Ariërverklaring (Aryan Declaration), in which one declares oneself of Aryan descent, in their mail. Already before the Second World War, Dutch museums and the government were thinking about how to safeguard art and heritage in case a new world war broke out. After a visit to Spain in 1938, Willem Sandberg, curator at the Stedelijk Museum, advised the safeguarding of art in deep bunkers at the coast, far away from crowded cities, harbours and other bombing targets.3 In March 1940, the art bunker of the city of Amsterdam was finished; some months later the national bunker followed. These were all located in the dunes between Amsterdam and The Hague. Besides the bunkers, in-house storage basements were used. Immediately after the Rotterdam Blitz museums remained closed, but the Stedelijk Museum and the Van Abbemuseum both reopened on 1 June 1940. The Stedelijk Museum opened with an exhibition of the artist society Sint Lucas, the Van Abbemuseum with a presentation of local heritage objects from Museum Kempenland. The Sint Lucas exhibition had already opened on 4 May but following the evacuation of the permanent collection, the exhibition

Exhibiting in wartime 151 committee rehung all the works to fill the empty galleries.4 When this exhibition ended on 14 July, the galleries remained empty until 8 September.

The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam In 1940 the Stedelijk Museum was not just a museum for modern and contemporary art: the building also housed period rooms, the Museum of Asian Art, and a Pharmacy Museum. Before the occupation, director David Röell and curator Willem Sandberg organised various types of exhibitions, from modernist abstract art and arts and crafts to religious art, but also sales exhibitions from art societies, a tradition that started in 1896. At the end of the nineteenth century, art societies were considered avant-garde and innovative, but in the thirties they became more traditional. Before the occupation, Röell had already placed a sign in these exhibitions saying that the museum was not responsible for the content of their exhibitions.5 During the occupation, however, Röell used these exhibitions as an excuse to refuse national socialist propaganda exhibitions. He seemed to be more keen on hosting these exhibitions as a way to keep the galleries occupied. After the liberation, Röell said that he had to choose between hosting ‘the Germans,’ the NSB, or the art societies, indirectly claiming that by hosting the art societies, national socialist propaganda was avoided.6 However, hosting art societies still led to NSB influence in the museum because some art society artists were also members of the NSB. During the first year of the occupation, the Stedelijk Museum did not change its program. The art societies still organised their sales exhibitions according to the set schedule, and Röell and Sandberg organised exhibitions such as ‘Dutch painting from the 19th century’ (1940). Röell received many letters from the DEAS and later DPA about what was permitted, and what was forbidden under the new government. The Stedelijk Museum was a municipal museum and all civil servants had to sign the Ariërverklaring. The museum had one Jewish employee, the curator of the Museum of Asian Art (housed in the Stedelijk Museum), H. F. E. Visser. He was fired on 26 November 1940 and fled to Switzerland.7 The Jewish art historian Hans Jaffé who worked as a volunteer at the museum, was not registered as an employee and therefore could not be fired. He was secretly involved in the organisation of exhibitions until he fled to England in 1942. Röell tried to figure out how flexible the new government was with their new rules. He wrote letters to the government, in which he tried, without success, to free several artists from concentration camps, underlining their important role for Dutch art.8 He also allowed several societies, who were even banned from bars because they had Jewish members, to organise lectures at the museum. Being the director of a prominent institution, he received several invitation for national socialist-oriented events and lectures, which he declined in a friendly manner.

152  Evelien Scheltinga Although no one dictated rules about which art could and could not be shown in The Netherlands, Röell and Sandberg did not show work from artists who were considered to be degenerate in Nazi-Germany, to be on the safe side.9 That the definition of ‘good’ art was fluid, became clear in the exhibition ‘Jan Sluijters,’ a solo show that opened on 5 April 1941. Sluijters was at that time a celebrated Dutch artist, mainly known for his portraits and female nudes, influenced by the Fauves. From 1933, he was an officer in the order of Orange-Nassau, a title not a lot of artists had in that time. This exhibition, and Sluijters’ art, was widely discussed in newspapers. On the one hand there was Kasper Niehaus, who applauded the ‘Entartete Kunst’ exhibition10 and the idea of purging art. He considered Sluijters work to be among the best of the Netherlands.11 On the other hand there was Storm, the weekly journal of the Dutch SS. They described Sluijters work as provocative, perverse, shameful and mocking of workers and farmers.12 Although politically national socialists were all aligned in the Netherlands, in art there was no clear vision. When the exhibition traveled to the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, Tobie Goedewaagen, head of the Kultuurkamer, called Sluijters work ‘representative for both for our pictorial national spirit and for the dynamic element of this time.’13 Jos de Gruyter, critic for Het Vaderland wrote after Goedewaagens speech that De Storm seemed to have a different opinion just half a year earlier.14 The exhibition reveals that there was no clear policy on which art should be part of the new national socialist society and which art should not, and gave the museum an idea of what they could expect. In 1939, Röell and Sandberg started to develop an exhibition of modern interior art and interior decoration, planned for the summer of 1940. The committee started a competition and invited around 30 architects, amongst whom Gerrit Rietveld and Mart Stam, to send in proposals focussing on social housing. The types of rooms to be designed were given, including the surface area, and available budget. The preparations for this exhibition were advanced, but because of the occupation the exhibition was postponed. In their first meeting since the occupation, a new assigned committee asked themselves if an interior exhibition would be possible ‘under the given circumstances.’ Their conclusion was that ‘an exhibition with modern interiors, under the given circumstances was not possible, a retrospective was.’15 The designs that were send in for the original exhibition were influenced by Bauhaus ideas. Not so strange considering exhibition designer Johan Niegeman taught there, and some of the designs came from former Bauhaus students. One could conclude this would not fit the ideas of the German occupier, since they closed the school in Berlin in 1933. ‘In Holland staat een huis’ (‘There’s a house in Holland’)16 opened 5 July 1941 with an overview of interiors from 1810 to 1940. Only the last three rooms showed modern interiors. They were not based on the proposals sent in for the 1940 competition, but newly designed by Alexander Bodon. Most of

Exhibiting in wartime 153 the furniture pieces shown were loans from the network of the committee. Storm commented on the aristocratic nature of the interiors; they did not represent the average Dutch household. Storm suggested it would be better to see countryside and farm interiors. They also noted that no attention was paid to ‘the spirit of the new era’ in the modern part of the exhibition, and that French objects and styles were used in an exhibition about Dutch interior. They concluded that the pieces shown did not reflect Dutch interiors, but ‘the interiors of the friends and family of sir Röell.’17 On top of that, the collectors room showed an art collection, whereas the average Dutch person collected tin objects or similar low value things, not modern artworks. It is clear the exhibition did not fit to the ideas of several national socialists; not only were the interiors shown un-Dutch, they were also far from average and not representative of the people. The fact that the museum censored itself by cancelling the original plans, proves that Röell was well informed and knew his risks. It also proves that to an extent the museum did give in to the influences of national socialist ideas about art, though it also failed to gain national socialist approval. The lack of folk elements in the exhibition was criticised in two national socialist journals. A copy of De Waag is in the archive of the museum, and so Röell and Sandberg most likely read the review. The exhibition ‘150 jaar mode’ (150 years of fashion) is known as one of Sandberg’s deeds of resistance. He designed the exhibition poster, showing the title of the exhibition and some keywords from fashion. One of the words, moffen (muff) was widely used as a swear word for Germans. The original poster had to be replaced by a censored one.18 More interesting however, is the content of the exhibition. ‘150 jaar mode’ was organised by a committee of fashion experts under the leadership of Sandberg. They wanted to show the development of fashion through prints. Costumes and accessories were also shown, not only to give a lively experience, but more to educate visitors about the materiality of fashion and what different types of fabrics look and feel like. In a trade exhibition set up, several departments and stands showed clothes from all levels of society, including from the working class and farmers, focussing also on the materiality of the objects. Such aspects of the exhibition were not recorded in photographs, probably because of their ordinary aesthetics. Their presence is however mentioned in newspapers and journals. In De Schouw, the new and official journal of the Kultuurkamer, the position of fashion within society was analysed. They wrote that the First World War was a turning point were, in the higher classes of society, a trend developed of snobbish and exclusive fashion. As a result, ‘healthy, hard working people developed their own fashion.’19 The exhibition, according to De Schouw, gives ‘a clear overview of 150 years of coquetry and civilisation.’20 In comparison to ‘In Holland staat een huis,’ the response to this exhibition was extremely mild. Especially taking in consideration the similarities: both exhibitions take

154  Evelien Scheltinga up a historical subject from the same period, show French influences and mainly focus on objects that only wealthy citizens could afford. ‘In Holland staat een huis’ was criticised for the French focus and the interiors of aristocrats, but in ‘150 jaar mode’ this did not seem to be a problem, almost as if a French influence was accepted when it comes to fashion, or maybe the inclusion of farmers’ clothing made the rest of the exhibition acceptable. Clearly Röell and Sandberg wanted to avoid more negative attention for the museum. Not only would this risk their own independent positions as director and curator, it could also focus attention to Sandberg’s work in the resistance. More than that, they were guardians of their collection, and the loans given by several collectors and Jews fleeing the country, hidden in bunkers in the dunes.21 By representing the working class they tried to please the national socialist oriented press and gave in to their comments. ‘Stad en land’ (‘City and Land’) has become the most known exhibition held at the Stedelijk Museum during the occupation. It opened in June 1942 and was planned to stay just for the summer. The exhibition was extended to 11 November. ‘Stad en land’ showed ‘the preservation and the increase of Dutch cities and landscapes’ and would, according to Röell, ‘open the eyes of the visitor to the beauty of Dutch landscapes and cities.’22 This exhibition was organised by an advisory board of mostly civil servants in high positions. They were experts on local history, historic preservation, heritage, and natural monuments and proposed themes for the exhibition. Röell, Sandberg and architect Koen Limperg worked on the practical side of the exhibition; collectively they selected visual material within the themes, and Limperg developed the exhibition design (see Figure 7.1). Several ‘artists’ were hired to develop visual material; artists in quotation marks, because according to the German occupier they were not artists, due to the fact that were not registered at the Kultuurkamer. The museum illegally hired them and referred to them in communications with the organising committee and journalists as ’the artists’ as a collective, without exposing their identities. The selection of these artists was made based on a letter sent to Sandberg’s private address in December 1941. The letter lists artists who were in financial need, amongst whom were Jaap d’Oliveira, Emmy Andriessen, Eva Besnyö, Cas Oorthuis and Ad Windig. 23 Sandberg was praised for hiring them after the liberation, because he helped artists in need, a deed of resistance. What is never really discussed is the content and the organisation of the exhibition, which suggest a less resistant attitude to national socialist views on art. In ‘The Stedelijk Museum & The Second World War,’ an exhibition dedicated to the museum during the occupation, a speech given by NSB leader Anton Mussert about the beauty of the Dutch landscape was shown. Sandberg underlined Mussert’s quote about how preserving the Dutch landscape in its beauty, was good for popular culture. 24 No further attention was spent on the content of the exhibition, yet ‘Stad en Land’

Exhibiting in wartime 155

Figure 7.1 Unidentified artists at work during the installation of Stad en land, 1942. Photo: J.C. Stevens, from: Het Algemeen Handelsblad 23 June 1942

commented on modern adjustments and changes in the Dutch landscape, a theme that invigorates national nostalgic feelings. Moreover, Röell allowed the influence of NSB members in the museum through the advisory board of the exhibition. One of them was Moritz, secretary of the society of local history in Amsterdam. He published Ontsiering stad en land I: de stad (Disfiguration city and land I: The city) at the fascist publishing house Hamer in 1942. In the book he underlined how careless demolition and excessive advertisement ruined the cityscape, a theme also present in the exhibition. De Waag noted that the exhibition was more accessible than ‘In Holland staat een huis,’ and served all Dutch people. They commented on how the changes in land- and cityscape were discussed in an ideological way. In general the exhibition promoted preservation, which De Waag did not agree with. 25 In De Schouw, the exhibition was praised for the attention paid to big problems in society. Because of population growth, cities were expanding and taking over the landscape. The newspaper praised the work of local history societies raising awareness of these subjects. 26 The exhibition was considered by De Schouw as the birth of a national plan to preserve city and landscape. This was the very first positive review from De Schouw on an exhibition organised at the Stedelijk Museum. In general, the exhibition was received positively, most likely because of the nationalistic theme. The fact that the exhibition was used for several acts of resistance

156  Evelien Scheltinga is the always mentioned when discussing this exhibition. The fact that NSB members had an active role on the content of the exhibition has not been discussed before. Themes such as banning modernist advertisement from public space, that were propagated in national socialism, were represented in the museum. From the inception of the Kultuurkamer, there was resistance from the art community. Some artists who decided not to register formed an artist resistance group. Their main work was falsifying identification documents, but they also helped people to go into hiding. Their ideas about the art world after the liberation and the general developments in the art were shared in the illegal magazine De Vrije Kunstenaar (The Free Artist). Sandberg was an active member of the resistance. He facilitated meeting places, such as the art bunker in the dunes. Sandberg’s role with the resistance was incorporated in his job at the museum during the organisation of ‘Stad en Land,’ when artists were illegally hired for paid work. At the end of 1942, the resistance became more active; the group planned to attack the population register in Amsterdam, were copies of identity documents were held. Although Sandberg was not present during the attack, the police discovered that he was involved in its planning and organisation. Sandberg therefore went into hiding on 31 March 1942. From this moment on, Röell had to manage the museum, and the collection, by himself. Since the police knew about Sandberg’s activities in the resistance, they also watched Röell closely. It became more challenging for him to refuse national socialist influences and exhibitions in the museum after Sandberg left, which had an immediate effect in the programming. This is not just due to Sandberg’s absence, but also due to the Kultuurkamer. Some artist and artist societies could not be shown in the museum any more, leaving a gap in the programming. The exhibition ‘Kunstenaars zien den Arbeidsdienst’ (‘Artists see the Labour Service’) was the result of an open call from De Nederlandsche Arbeidsdienst (Dutch Labour Service), a forced labour service for men and women during the occupation, founded on 27 June 1940 by Seyss-Inquart. It was a Dutch form of Arbeitseinsatz, the forced labour service for young men from occupied countries in Nazi-Germany. The Dutch Labour Service did not send their ‘men’ to Germany, they worked in The Netherlands. National socialist language was used, and national socialist ideas were spread among the participants. From 1942, unarmed conscription was mandatory for men and women. Men worked on the land, build roads or dug canals; women prepared food for the working men. The open call asked for artists to capture people in the Labour Service. They were offered board and lodging, and a space to work. The workers would pose for them, and after the residency, there was a sales exhibition with a f10.000, acquisition budget.27 Originally the exhibition was planned to be shown in the Rijksmuseum; but their galleries were unavailable. The DPA therefore got in touch with the Stedelijk

Exhibiting in wartime 157 Museum. Röell’s secretary wrote ‘The Germans insist that art practiced in the camps must be shown, they are pushing the exhibition through.’28 Röell tried to refuse, but it did not work. He decided to keep out of the organisation. Johan de Ruyter, leader of the Labour Service worked through contact with Mr Hendriks, administrator at the museum. The concept of the exhibition was simple, all the works produced were judged and a selection was shown in the museum. 40 artists participated in the project and lived in a camp for a short or longer period. 29 A total of 156 works from 29 artists were selected for the exhibition.30 The formal goal of the project was to bring artists closer to the people, which is also underlined in newspaper articles about the exhibition, and one of the focal points of the Kultuurkamer. The labour service had a bad name, and needed positive representation and attention. There were not a lot of established artists in the project; in fact most of those participating abandoned their artistic career after the liberation. A lot of dignitaries were present at the opening, which was reported by Polygoonjournaal, the cinema newsreel. The photographs and videos of the exhibition make clear that the strong, Aryan man was the main focus of the artists. Sometimes they were pictured with a bare torso, with a focus on their muscles while performing physical labour for the country. They were strongly reminiscent of antique Greek and Roman sculpture, as well as of the works of Nazi Germany’s most well-known sculptor, Arno Breker. In Het Nationale Dagblad, Den Hertog underlined the representation of Germanic men, portrayed as people with a character.31 According to him, not all artists were able to capture the soul of the Labour Service. Newspapers steered clear of an assessment of the content or quality of the works, because, as they stated, these artists are at the start of their career and not professional yet. In other words, the quality was low. The project and exhibition had strong propaganda value, by bringing the labour service to the attention of people through the production and display of art. The exhibition broadcast the political ideals of the DPA, shaping people through art and brought the ideals of the Labour Service to a wide audience through art. In none of the archival material available is there any evidence of the involvement of Röell in this exhibition. The exhibition travelled to Pictura in The Hague and the Boijmans museum in Rotterdam. In 1944, the Stedelijk Museum hosted only exhibitions by artist societies. Because of material shortages and electricity cuts, Röell limited opening hours. After the battle of Arnhem and the railway strike, the museum closed on 20 September 1944. With ‘Kunstenaars zien den Arbeidsdienst’ national socialist propaganda had finally found its way into the museum. It is clear that after Sandberg’s departure, Röell had a hard time managing the museum while safeguarding the collection. He could not refuse the exhibition, but decided not to collaborate in its organisation, or give his advice in any way.

158  Evelien Scheltinga

The Van Abbemuseum The Van Abbemuseum reopened after the invasion on 1 June 1940, without an exhibition, but with artworks from the collection on display. On 20 June, the first exhibition during the occupation opened; it was by the Bredasche Kunstkring, the artist society of Breda. As a relatively young museum, the Van Abbemuseum was not one of the big players in the cultural field. When it opened in 1936, Wouter Visser was hired as director for two days a week and Piet van Stipdonk as concierge, porter and guard for four days a week. This was all the staff the museum had. After opening, Visser organised a wide range of exhibitions, from sixteenth century to contemporary art. During the exhibition ‘Contemporary Belgian painting and sculpture’ (1937), Visser was asked to remove nude portraits; with Catholic views strongly present in the south of the Netherlands they were perceived as immoral.32 It is clear that Van Abbemuseum and the Stedelijk Museum operated in completely different contexts. The municipality of Eindhoven did not take art and the museum as seriously as in Amsterdam. When Museum Kempenland, a museum with archaeological finds and local history objects, was closed, its collection was moved to the Van Abbemuseum. The basement of the museum was used as an office for the Air Protection Service. Visser was told to paint the glass roof of the building in a matt dark paint, to be less visible as a target for air strikes. This glass roof, however, was designed to allow daylight into the galleries and its painting must have influenced the presentation of works in the galleries. The NSB had a strong local department, and the Van Abbemuseum building belonged to the municipality. In the same way as at the Stedelijk Museum, the consequences of the occupation were not very obvious in the museum in the first two years of the occupation. The museum continued with their regular programming with both artist societies, and thematic exhibitions. A turning point for the museum began with the arrest of Mayor Verdijk on 15 October 1941, and his replacement by veterinarian and active NSB member Hub Pulles. Pulles’ mayoral installation took place in one of the main galleries of the museum on 21 February 1942. The gallery was decorated with the portrait of NSB leader Anton Mussert, Adolf Hitler and flags and emblems of the NSB and the NSDAP (see Figure 7.2). It was not just the inside of the museum that was decorated, the facade of the museum was covered with the flag of Eindhoven, of Noord-Brabant, the Prince’s Flag, 33 the NSB-flag and the Nazi-German, or Swastika flag.34 The WA, the paramilitary arm of the NSB, awaited the newly installed mayor outside. Pulles made clear that from this moment on, Eindhoven would be under national socialist governance. Just like his predecessor, Pulles received a position on the advisory board of the museum. This national socialist parade at the museum, and the growing influence of national socialism on the museum convinced Visser to resign. He wrote his resignation letter to mayor Pulles on 20 February.35 His successor Piet Peeters, an artist, started

Exhibiting in wartime 159

Figure 7.2 Installation of Dr. H.A. Pulles as Mayor of Eindhoven at the Van Abbemuseum. Photo: Foto Onno. Copyright, RHC Eindhoven

on 1 April 1942. From this moment on, more national socialist narratives entered the museum. On 20 May, the first exhibition under Peeters’ directorship, called ‘Huisvlijttentoonstelling’ (Applied Objects Exhibition), opened. ‘Huisvlijttentoonstelling’ was the last event of a national campaign by the society Vreugde en Arbeid (Joy and Labor), part of the national socialist trade union. Their huisvlijtactie (applied arts call) promoted DIY culture and national self-sufficiency, which links to the Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) slogan used by the national socialist party of Hitler. Huisvlijtactie aimed at giving children a positive and fruitful occupation. Another important factor was to motivate children to be attracted to handicrafts and become aware of the work processes behind handmade objects. In the society’s opinion, mass production threatened good taste. The DPA supported the exhibition financially. The project attracted major media attention; in newspaper advertisements, children and housewives were asked to send in huisvlijt to be shown in the exhibition. The exhibition was popular with the national socialist community; a lot of representatives visited the opening, as reported by local newspapers. NSB mayor Pulles said in his opening speech that the urge to create was present in every human being, although some were more gifted than others.36 With that he underlined the difference

160  Evelien Scheltinga in quality of works presented in the exhibition. In the exhibition, object such as a working train model, or a ship model, must have taken years of work to create besides peoples’ day jobs.37 Both local and national newspapers published photographs of the installation and opening of the exhibition, which was not common for an exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum. Polygoonjournaal was present at the opening and documented the tour of Tobie Goedewaagen, head of the Kultuurkamer, through the exhibition. On 29 May the museum was closed to the public, to allow NSB leader, Anton Mussert to visit during his day-trip to Eindhoven.38 It is not known what he thought about the exhibition; there are, however, photographs of his visit.39 ‘Volkstentoonstelling Nederlandsche Kunst van de provincies Brabant en Zeeland’ (‘Folk exhibition Dutch Art of the provinces Brabant and Zeeland’) opened on 6 June 1942, only a week after ‘Huisvlijttentoonstelling’ closed. This exhibition was organised by the Kultuurkamer with financial support from the DPA. It was the first big effort to provide financial support to artists. For the whole project of multiple folk exhibitions, an acquisition budget of f50.000 was made available by the National Sozialistische Volkswohlfahrt (National Socialist People’s Welfare).40 The Nederlandsche Volksdienst (Dutch Peoples Society) was responsible for the practical organisation of the exhibition. The society was found in 1941 based on the principles of the German National Sozialistische Volkswohlfahrt. Every region was supposed to have their own exhibition, like every region was supposed to have their own Kultuurkamer department. The Van Abbemuseum kicked-off with an exhibition for artists registered at the Kultuurkamer in Noord-Brabant and Zeeland with the goal to promote local production in the community and to sell their work. A jury with representatives from DPA, Nederlandse Volksdienst and the Kultuurkamer selected the works.41 Various national socialist representatives attended the opening of the exhibition. In his opening speech, Dr. J.A. Stellwag, deputy head of visual arts at the Kultuurkamer spoke about the exhibition as the first in which the values of the Kultuurkamer were fully represented. He emphasised the importance of the work of artists in and for society.42 Van Anrooij, head of architecture at the Kultuurkamer said in his speech that the true artists would be employees of the community.43 He also announced the new governmental system of support for artists, focussing more on creating a fair market, making a bridge between the artist and all layers of society, and fighting against kitsch.44 Creyghton discussed the exhibition in Dagblad van het Zuiden; in general he was positive about the artworks on display but criticised the fact that some artists who were active before the occupation were missing.45 They probably decided not to participate in a government funded exhibition, or were not registered at the Kultuurkamer. Eindhovensch Dagblad wrote that the exhibition was well visited, and sales outperformed expectations.46 Thanks to the high visitor

Exhibiting in wartime 161 numbers, the exhibition was extended to 30 June. The works that remained unsold traveled to Amsterdam, where the DPA organised the exhibition ‘Hulpwerk Beeldende Kunst’ (‘Aid Work Visual Arts’), a collection of all the 900 unsold works of the planned exhibitions, at the Rijksmuseum.47 The exhibition actively promoted national socialist ideas about art and the Kultuurkamer. The artworks on display were even selected by people from the Kultuurkamer. Peeters was not actively involved in the organisation of the exhibition, but neither did he distance himself from it. The war in the meantime took its toll in Eindhoven. On 6 December 1942, the RAF bombed the Philips factories, where amongst other items, radios for the German occupier were produced. The Philips factories were located in the city centre at the Emmasingel and at Strijp S. Because the bombing took place on a Sunday, the factories were empty; nonetheless the bombs also hit houses, churches, shops and a hospital, and 135 people died. The biggest destruction took place at the Demer, a street not far from the museum. After this bombing, Peeters had difficulties with receiving loans and exhibiting artworks at the museum. People were hesitant to loan their work to the museum, so close to where the bombs hit.48 ‘Huisvrouwen worden vindingrijk’ (‘Housewives become resourceful’) opened 4 March 1943 at the Van Abbemuseum after first being shown at the Tehuis in Groningen. The exhibition was organised by the NS Frauenschaft, the women’s wing of the NSDAP. The exhibition showed objects, mainly to be used in the household, made by women from scraps and material considered as trash, such as worn out stockings. The exhibition was very hands on in presentation and content, and national socialist propaganda was actively presented in the exhibition. The exhibition was open every day, and free of charge. Women of the NS Frauenshaft were present to provide visitors with information and guidance. Visitors could bring old sheets or curtains and the women would help cut them to make garments.49 During the opening the Kreisleiter (County Leader) of the North-Brabant region, Zimmerman, spoke about the important position women had in wartime and maintained that the exhibition helped them to create a rich and happy environment. Kreisleiterin (County Leader) of the NS Frauenschaft Hertzog pointed to the fact that for the exhibition no objects were bought, everything was made by women and nothing was for sale, they were private household projects.50 The exhibition was discussed in several newspapers, authors were surprised how inventive the women of the NS Frauenschaft were, and advised all mothers and daughters to visit the exhibition. Dagblad van Noord-Brabant seemed surprised by the capabilities and inventiveness of women with materials in times of scarcity, calling it ‘curious.’51 The exhibition was reported in newspapers from a very patriarchal perspective, fitting the ideas of an ideal national socialist household. Dagblad van het Zuiden reported that the visitor numbers to the exhibition were high; on Sunday 14 March 1,000 people visited the

162  Evelien Scheltinga exhibition. Deutsche Zeitung in den Niederlanden reported that 4,600 people visited the exhibition in the 13 days it was open.52 This was the first exhibition with the active physical presence of national socialists in the museum. Their main objective was to spread a national socialist ideal, and to represent the role of women in the national socialist society. During or after the exhibition, Peeters had to step down as director because of health reasons. The fascist and active NSB member Louis Vrijdag was installed as director on 15 March 1943. Vrijdag, who grew up in Eindhoven, learned about fascism at the age of 17 when he studied in Amsterdam. He was an active member of the Youth Fascist Movement in the late twenties, and sold the fascist weekly De Bezem on the streets of Amsterdam.53 When he moved back to Eindhoven, he opened a branch of the Youth Fascist Movement, with around 20 members.54 Under Vrijdag’s directorship fascist exhibitions were organised. The last exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum before the liberation of Eindhoven, ‘Wansmaak en Gezonde Kunst’ (‘Bad Taste and Healthy Art’) opened on 2 September 1944. This exhibition was previously shown at Kunsthuis Amsterdam, the exhibition venue of the Kultuurkamer, and travelled to the Mauritshuis in The Hague, amongst other smaller venues before arriving at the Van Abbemuseum. The title is reminiscent of the notorious ‘Degenerate art’ exhibition that was first shown in Munich in 1937. However, in terminology, they chose the term kitsch rather than degenerate, trying to avoid a big discussion and getting lost in opinions without a definition of ‘healthy art.’ The exhibition showed examples of art defined by the DPA as kitsch, or, as newspaper Het Vaderland called the objects, ‘worthless and tasteless products.’55 This definition is also different from degenerate, which suggests the artist is sick. The exhibition was organised to create awareness of the growing art market that the DPA had no control over. When the foreign exchange border was lifted, the value of the Dutch Guilder fluctuated. People sought secure investments, finding them in art.56 The number of galleries grew rapidly, and the production of artworks was very high, which was not always good for the quality. A lot of works were produced to be exported to Germany. It was an impossible mission to fight kitsch, since neither the Kultuurkamer, nor the DPA had a clear definition of what kitsch exactly was. ‘Wansmaak en Gezonde Kunst’ aimed to change this by educating people. Eduard Gerdes, artist and head of the department of architecture and visual arts at the Kultuurkamer, said in his opening speech that before the occupation there was a lack of information about art from the government. According to him, this allowed mass-produced artworks to be advertised widely; and anything could be sold as long as it had good advertising. 57 The exhibition also gives examples of what this good art entails.58 A photograph of the exhibition in De Schouw gives an example (see Figure 7.3). It describes an artwork on display that is valued at f 0,-. The subtitle of the photograph makes clear that the canvas is worth f0,15, the mass produced

Exhibiting in wartime 163

Figure 7.3 Painting shown at the exhibition Wansmaak en gezonde kunst at Kunsthuis Amsterdam, 1943. The sign under the painting says: Art value f0,00, canvas value 0,15, mass produced frame value 0,90. Nominal value f1,05, selling price 35,-. From: Schouw, 15 May 1943

frame is worth f0,90. A total of f1,05. The selling price of the artwork, as the newspaper reports, was f35,-, which, as is concluded in the simple calculation, overpriced with f33,95. The working hours of the artist, cost of renting a studio, and even the paint and/or other material used besides the canvas are not taken in consideration. Because the quality of the painting did not match with the ideas of the Kultuurkamer about art, the painting was not worth a penny. Kasper Niehaus, art critic at De Telegraaf, reviewed the exhibition. He drew a line between the kitsch shown, and degenerate art; for Niehaus, degenerate art was still art, but kitsch was far from art and therefore worse.59 The exhibition, according to him, gave great guidance on how to recognise healthy art. Storm similarly gave examples of what was kitsch: ‘flowerpots with fake plants, fake gnomes in gardens, a teapot in the shape of a white elephant painted in colours which will never be used to pour tea, a silver cake server with a reproduction of the Nachtwacht.’60 In Storm and De Telegraaf authors describe the artworks in the exhibition as failed reproductions, paintings made with no knowledge of, or love for art and as mass production. Het Nationale Dagblad made a connection to

164  Evelien Scheltinga modernism, Jewish influences in art, and degenerate art. Kitsch, according to them, existed because artists started to make paintings in mass production for economic benefit rather than focussing on subject and technique.61 There are no reports about this exhibition when it was on show at the Van Abbemuseum; right after the opening, the Allies were planning the liberation of the Netherlands. On 3 September, the airport used by the German army was severely bombed by the RAF. The days before the liberation of Eindhoven were marked by unrest. National socialists and Germans fled, people were hanging around in the city or in their houses, or going to the countryside to find some food. Eindhoven was liberated on 18 September 1944. We can only assume that ‘Wansmaak en gezonde kunst’ did not change much in content and presentation during the tour, and that it did not have a lot of visitors in Eindhoven. The visitors that did see the exhibition encountered a strong national socialist narrative about which (applied) art did, and which (applied) art did not fit in a national socialist society. What happened to the objects presented in the exhibition is unclear.

Conclusion That the German occupation resulted in a turbulent period in Dutch art and museology is clear. Museum staff had to decide how to act upon their personal political preferences in reference to protecting either their own name and status, or the institute they worked for. Whereas in the history of the Stedelijk Museum the personal stories of Röell and Sandberg as protagonists and guardians of the collection are a central theme, the story of the Van Abbemuseum is dominated by changes in directorship. Under the leadership of Röell, who wanted to make sure that the museum was safe and free from national socialist influences, the Stedelijk Museum organised a lot of other exhibitions. Visser, Peeters and Vrijdag, at the Van Abbemuseum all had different ideas about art and the role of art in society. Visser knew he could not prevent national socialist influences in the museum and decided to stand with his political beliefs and leave the museum. As a result, under Peeters and more actively under Vrijdag national socialist influences entered the museum and propaganda was regularly on display. In terms of programming, both museums come from a different background. The Stedelijk Museum already had a status and reputation as contemporary art museum, whereas the Van Abbemuseum was still looking for a clear identity, and struggling with the strong Catholic views present in the south of the country. For Röell and Sandberg it became clear that, in order to protect the museum from national socialist influences, they had to change their exhibition programming. After 1939 they stopped having exhibitions focussing on international artists and international, or modern, movements. After the solo exhibition of Jan Sluijters, it was clear that whatever they did, it would not be good enough for the new government, and

Exhibiting in wartime 165 that the topic of ‘good art’ was important for several influential national socialists. They started to focus on thematic exhibitions where art was less central. In ‘Stad en land’ for instance, art was used as an illustration to the story. The artworks were produced by artists who were not registered at the Kultuurkamer, and thus the Stedelijk allowed them to work clandestinely. Equally at the Van Abbemuseum, artworks became less the focal point of exhibitions. This was not so much a strategy, but more a result of the bombings on Eindhoven and the risk of transporting artworks. After Pulles was installed as mayor and Visser chose to resign, educational exhibitions were organised, focussing on the household and pastimes, with narratives from a national socialist perspective. Both museums underwent a shift in programming. After 1942, when registration at the Kultuurkamer was compulsory, both the Bredasche Kunstkring and the Nederlandse Kring van Beeldhouwers decided not to register and therefore not participate in exhibitions any more, leaving a gap in the programming at both institutions. From 1943, the new government was stricter and the Stedelijk Museum also started to show propaganda exhibitions. This is also due to the fact that Sandberg went into hiding and Röell had to manage both the collection and the exhibitions on his own. The Stedelijk Museum not only showed ‘Kunstenaars zien den Arbeidsdienst,’ but also ‘De Jeugdherberg van morgen,’ a design competition for a new youth hostel. In the 1940s, youth hostels were often national socialist in ideology and were used to educate youth. Where the Stedelijk Museum actively avoided any collaboration with the Kultuurkamer, the Van Abbemuseum collaborated with them for exhibitions such as the ‘Huisvlijttentoonstelling,’ ‘Volkstentoonstelling voor Nederlandsche Kunst van de provincies Brabant en Zeeland’ under Peeters. Vrijdag only enhanced this collaboration and national socialist narrative with ‘Wedstrijdtentoonstelling Kempenland van Nederlandsche Beeldende Kunst’ (‘Competition Kempenland of Dutch Visual Art’), ‘Zoo leeft Eindhoven’ (‘How Eindhoven lives’) and ‘Wansmaak en gezonde kunst’ (‘Bad taste and healthy art’). The latter tried to put an end to the discussion that rose in the media after the ‘Jan Sluijters’ exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum about what good art was, and which art was not allowed. It is unfortunate that there is not much documentation about this exhibition, because it was a first step towards defining a ‘generate art’ for the Netherlands. In their different backgrounds, policies and approaches, it does become clear that the national socialist influences were unavoidable in museums. These influences grew slowly over time, from small adjustments in the exhibition, such as showing farmers’ clothing, to strong propaganda coming from national and local societies presented through small and informative exhibitions. Due to the rise of the Kultuurkamer it was difficult to show some artists, and transporting artworks became risky. Exhibitions developed into narratives, illustrated with objects, rather than with artworks. This devious way of showing fascist propaganda to the

166  Evelien Scheltinga general public had an effect on how museum visitors looked at art between roughly 1942 and 1945. With an emphasis on local history and realistic art, a stage was provided for a new group of art museum users, and these topics were radically excluded from exhibition soon after the liberation. For the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and specifically Sandberg, the period after the liberation was focused on honouring artists who had earlier been banned from public view, or whose voice had been silenced. The Dutch art scene focused on artists who turned their backs on the developments in the art during the Second World War. The Stedelijk Museum gave a stage to international modern artists, specifically to artists from the international avant garde movement CoBrA. In effect, Sandberg set up a strong judgmental narrative about occupation and art, in which those who behaved ‘well’ (resistance) and those who behaved ‘badly’ (collaboration) were honoured or punished for their deeds; a very black and white narrative that is still present in writing and thinking about art today.

Notes 1. Inauguration speech Seyss-Inquart via: https://www.tracesofwar.nl/articles/2376/Inauguratiespeech-Seyss-Inquart-29-05-1940.htm?c=gw. 2. Fransje Kuyvenhoven, De Staat koopt kunst. Geschiedenis van de collectie 20ste-eeuwse kunst van het ministerie van OCW 1932–1992 (Amsterdam/ Leiden: Primavera Pers 2007), p. 99. 3. Willem Sandberg, ‘Bescherming van kunstschatten in oorlogstijd, naar aanleiding van een studiereis naar Spanje’ in: Kroniek van Kunst en Kultuur, 4: 3 (1 December 1938), pp. 33–34. 4. Anon., ’Sint Lucas. De heropende tentoonstelling’, Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, 1 June 1940. 5. Claartje Wesselink, Kunstenaars van de Kultuurkamer: Geschiedenis en herinnering, (Amsterdam: Prometheus Bert Bakker, 2014), p. 198. 6. Hans Mulder, Kunst in crisis in bezetting. Een onderzoek naar de houding van Nederlandse kunstenaars in de periode 1930-1945 (Utrecht: Het Spectrum, 1978), p. 229. 7. Margreeth Soeting, ‘Museum in oorlogstijd’, in Het Stedelijk in de oorlog, ed. by G. Langfeld, M. Schavemaker and M. Soeting (Amsterdam: Bas Lubberhuizen, 2015), pp. 41–65. 8. Wesselink, Kunstenaars van de Kultuurkamer, pp. 104–105. 9. Evelien Scheltinga, ‘Beladen exposities. Episoden uit de tentoonstellingsgeschiedenissen van het Stedelijk Museum te Amsterdam, 1940–1945’ (Unpublished thesis, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2017). 10. The first Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) exhibition was organised in 1937, organised by the Nazi Party in Munich. The exhibition presented 650 works of art from German museums and was the counterpart of the Great German Art Exhibition. The artworks on display ‘insult German feeling’, destroyed or confused natural form, or revealed an absence of manual and artistic skill. After the edition in Munich, the exhibition travelled to various venues in Germany. A lot of artists whose work was shown in the Entartete Kunst exhibition fled Germany. 11. Kasper Niehaus, ’Eeretentoonstelling Jan Sluijters in het Stedelijk Museum’, De Telegraaf, 18 April 1941.

Exhibiting in wartime 167 12. Maarten Meuldijk, Ontaarde kunst: Een aantal opstellen over beeldende kunst (Amsterdam: De Amsterdamsche Keurkamer, 1941). 13. Speech Goedewaagen in: Jos de Gruyter, ‘Jan Sluijters. Twee gezichtspunten van nat.-szo. zijde. Een “Cri-coeur” om grootere klaarheid’, Het Vaderland, 28 December 1941. 14. Gruyter, ‘Jan Sluijters’. 15. Notulen 1e vergadering interieur-tentoonstelling 1941, SSA toegangsnummer 30041, inv.nr. 3164. 16. In Holland staat een huis also refers to a Dutch song from the 19th century with the same title. 17. Anon. ‘In Holland staat een huis. Een tentoonstelling, waarbij angstvallig iedere volksche uiting is vermeden’, Storm 1 (1941b) 20, pp. 6–7. 18. Caroline Roodenburg-Schadd, Expressie en ordening: Het verzamelbeleid van Willem Sandberg voor het Stedelijk Museum, 1945-1962 (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 2004), 106–07. 19. H. Buys, ‘Anderhalve eeuw mode’, De Schouw 1 (1942) 6, p. 142. 20. Buys, ‘Anderhalve eeuw mode’, p. 142. 21. Soeting, ‘Museum in oorlogstijd’, pp. 48–49. 22. Letter Hester den Tex to the DPA 5 June 1942. NIOD toegansnr. 102 inv.nr. 3318. Letter Röell to the alderman of art in Amsterdam 13 April 1942. SSA toegangsnr. 30041 inv.nr. 3193. 23. Letter from Limperg to Sandberg, 23 December 1941. SSA toegangsnr. 30041 inv.nr. 3193. 24. The Stedelijk Museum & The Second World War was held at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 2015. 25. Wolters, ‘Stad en Land’, De Waag, 6 (1942b) 27, pp. 1120–1121. 26. H. Buys, ‘Stad en land, Sted. Museum - Amsterdam. juni - october 1942’, De Schouw 1 (1942) 13, pp. 308–09. 27. National Archief 10. Opbouwdienst, Arbeidsdienst en Arbeidsinzet: Wat is het verschil?, . 28. Phonecall note, 19 October 1943. SSA toegangsnr. 30041 inv.nr. 269. 29. L.A.C. de Bock & Eduard Gerdes, ex. cat. Kunstenaars zien den Arbeidsdienst (Den Haag: DVK, 1943), p. 1. 30. De Bock & Gerdes, Kunstenaars zien den Arbeidsdient. 31. N. H. Den Hertog, ‘De Ned. Arbeidsdienst in beeld’, Het Nationale Dagblad, 9 December 1943. 32. ‘1936-1946: W.J.A. VISSER’, https://vanabbemuseum.nl/over-het-museum/ gebouw-en-historie/1936-1946-wja-visser/, visited 15 February 2019. 33. The Prince’s Flag is a Dutch flag from the Eighty Years’ War whose colours are orange-white-blue. The NSB preferred the Prince’s Flag over the Dutch flag, it was commonly used during the German occupation. 34. Anon., ‘Installatie-plechtigheid Burgemeester Dr. H. A, Pulles te Eindhoven.’ Dagblad van het Zuiden, 23 February 1942. 35. René Pingen, Dat museum is een mijnheer, (Amsterdam: Artimo, 2005). 36. Anon., ‘Huisvlijttentoonstelling in het Van Abbe-Museum geopend’, Dagblad van het Zuiden 21 May 1942. 37. Polygoon cinema newsreel week 42-22 via: www.beeldengeluid.nl. 38. Anon., ‘Musserts reis door het Brabantsche land’, Het Vaderland, 30 May 1942. 39. They are kept in the national war and genocide archives via: www.oorlogsbronnen.nl 40. Anon., ‘De National Sozialistische Volkswohlfahrt zal voor f50.000 aankopen voor de “Heime” in Nederland’, Dagblad van Rotterdam, 30 May 1942.

168  Evelien Scheltinga 41. Anon., ‘Tentoonstelling van Schilder- en Beeldhouwkunst.’, Dagblad van Noordbrabant en Zeeland, 22 May 1942. 42. Anon., ‘Volkstentoonstelling van Nederlandsche Kunst in het Van AbbeMuseum’, Dagblad van het Zuiden, 8 June 1942. 43. Anon., ‘Volkstentoonstelling van beeldende kunst’, Dagblad van NoordBrabant, 8 June 1942. 44. Anon., ‘Volkstentoonstelling van Ned. kunst te Eindhoven’, Het nationale dagblad 8 June 1942. 45. Creyghton, ‘Brabantsche en Zeeuwsche schilderkunst’, Dagblad van het Zuiden, 11 June 1942. 46. Anon., ‘De volkstentoonstelling van Nederlandsche kunst’, Eindhovensch Dagblad, 26 June 1942. 47. Baruch 1985, pp. 39–40. 48. https://www.ed.nl/algemeen/sinterklaasbombardement-op-philips-fabriekenin-eindhoven-precies-74-jaar-geleden-video∼ab29e5f2/; video vanaf 6.13 of foto’s https://www.ad.nl/eindhoven/philips-museum-herdenkt-sinterklaasbom­bardeme nt∼ac3e91301/115945222/ 49. Anon., ‘Huisvrouwen worden vindingrijk’, Nieuwsblad van het Noorden, 31 December 1942. 50. Anon., ‘Huisvrouwen worden vindingrijk’, Dagblad van Noord-Brabant, 5 March 1943. 51. Anon., ‘Huisvrouwen worden vindingrijk’, Dagblad van Noord-Brabant, 6 March 1943. 52. Anon., ‘4600 Besucher wurden gezählt’. Deutsche Zeitung in den Niederlanden, 17 March 1943. 53. Frans Dekker, B&W rond de Tweede Wereldoorlog in Groot-Eindhoven (Amsterdam: In de knipscheer, 1992), p. 41. 54. Dekker, B&W, p. 42–43. 55. Anon., ‘Wansmaak en gezonde kunst’, Het Vaderland, 13 April 1943. 56. Wesselink, Kunstenaars van de Kultuurkamer, p. 81. 57. Anon., ‘Wansmaak en gezonde kunst’, Het Nationale Dagblad, 12 April 1943. 58. Anon., ‘Beeldende Kunst “Wansmaak en gezonde kunst”’, De Gooi- en Eemlander, 12 April 1943. 59. Kasper Niehaus, ‘Wansmaak en gezonde kunst’, De Telegraaf, 28 April 1943. 60. Anon., ‘Wankunst’, Storm, 3 (1943) 6, p. 9. 61. Eduard Rijff, ‘Wansmaak en gezonde kunst’, Het Nationale Dagblad, 28 May 1943.

Part IV

Museums of war and conflict Foundations and Disavowals

8

Displaying Ravensbrück concentration camp memorial From the ‘Antifascist Fight’ to ‘history and memory of the women’s concentration camp’ Doreen Pastor

Introduction With the founding of the two German States in 1949, the FRG (West Germany) and the GDR (East Germany), two commemorative narratives of the Nazi past developed. Whilst West Germany’s attempts to come to terms with the past went through several phases, at times very volatile, the GDR declared itself as the ‘better’ German state with the introduction of communism. Indeed, the GDR’s first prime minister Otto Grotewohl announced proudly in 1959 that the roots of fascism had been successfully eradicated.1 The concentration camp memorial sites of Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Ravensbrück were the most important instruments in defending communism and the antifascist narrative. As a consequence, exhibitions and memorial sites were designed to emphasise the communist victims who had been lost during the Nazi era with all other victim groups either being marginalised or ignored. Ravensbrück concentration camp memorial played a significant role in the GDR’s memorial landscape; however, it was overshadowed by the memorial sites of Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. Thus, extensive historical research into the camp’s history and the women’s experience of the Nazi past did not commence until after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The female victims at Ravensbrück were predominantly regarded as antifascist fighters and instrumentalised as the future mothers who died in the camp. After German reunification, this manipulation of history was no longer deemed appropriate and a new format for displaying Ravensbrück’s history needed to be created. However, this was not a smooth path as large sections of the former camp had been converted into a Soviet army base and bore little resemblance to the previous camp structure. In this chapter, I will first briefly explain Ravensbrück’s history before I explore in more depth the development of the memorial site and the exhibitions since liberation in April 1945. I will highlight how the GDR used exhibition and memorial design to reinforce the communist narrative. I will conclude this chapter by focussing on the current exhibitions and their challenges.

172  Doreen Pastor

Historical development of Ravensbrück concentration camp Initially, the largest concentration camp specifically for women was established in December 1937 in Lichtenburg after the previous camp in Moringen became overcrowded. Lichtenburg, however, also quickly lacked adequate space. It was subsequently decided to build a larger women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück, 50 miles north of Berlin, gaining its name from the nearby village. The village itself had a few settlements and was close to lake Schwedt which had an important recreational function with three beaches used for swimming in the summer months. Traditionally, locations for concentration camps were influenced by economic factors, yet at Ravensbrück the choice of location is less certain. Its secluded location, but good transport links, near major trunk roads and a railway track seems to have been the deciding factor. 2 The construction work commenced in 1938 using male prisoners from the nearby concentration camp Sachsenhausen.3 Initially, the focus was on building the SS accommodation and the first barracks of the concentration camp called Stammlager (main camp). Outside the camp boundary ‘special’ buildings were erected to process further punishment or death. The first buildings in this regard were the ‘punishment block,’ the ‘camp prison’ and the ‘execution path.’ The camp prison consisted of 78 solitary confinement cells in which prisoners were subject to physical and psychological torture. For the survivors, this building now stands for the terror and murder they experienced. During the first years of the camp’s operation, corpses were cremated in the nearby local crematorium of Fürstenberg.4 In 1943, the first camp crematorium appeared on SS maps, built between the camp boundary wall and lake Schwedt. In the final few months of Ravensbrück’s operation, the camp was changed from a forced labour camp to an extermination camp by transforming a barracks near the crematorium into a gas chamber. With the advance of the Red Army, the SS began with the destruction of evidence including the gas chamber. Thus today, one can only assume the exact location of the gas chamber as there are no physical remains. Upon opening of Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1938, the largest prisoners’ groups were German and Austrians (one third of them Jehovah’s Witnesses), followed by the so-called ‘asocials.’5 After the outbreak of World War II, the prisoners’ structure changed significantly. Jewish prisoners were now 15%; however, by far the largest group of prisoners were activists who had been involved in the resistance movement. Some of the most well-known prisoners were Käthe Niederkirchner (communist activist), Corrie ten Boom (religious activist who became world famous for her books) and Rosa Thälmann (the wife of the communist Ernst Thälmann). Children often arrived with their mothers at Ravensbrück or were born on-site. According to current knowledge, approximately 880 children between the ages of 2 and 16 were imprisoned at Ravensbrück.

Exhibiting Ravensbrück 173 The women were forced to work, for instance at the local textile company Texled, at the Siemens factory or as prostitutes at either Ravensbrück or other camps.6 They were also subject to medical experiments which consisted of forced sterilisations or Sulfanomid experiments. Sulfanomid as a chemical was thought to avoid infections from wounds soldiers had sustained, yet it had not been tested. Ravensbrück, therefore, became a medical testing ground for the chemical. Predominantly, Polish women were inflicted with wounds, for example, foreign objects such as glass were implanted which were subsequently treated with Sulfanomid. Often the women did not survive these procedures or were scarred for life. Between June 1944 and December 1944, a new wave of prisoners, more than 52,000 women, arrived at Ravensbrück. Overcrowding caused dramatic scenes. Food and accommodation were no longer available for these new prisoners and consequently diseases such as dysentery and typhus spread fast. Thus, the management team decided to erect a temporary tent with the most appalling living conditions. Subsequently, in January 1945, a section of the youth protection camp Uckermark, established for young girls between the ages of 16 to 18, was cleared for women who were destined to die. The women were living in the most inhumane conditions and were provided with minimal food rations which often caused their death. The Soviet army took possession of the camp on 2 May 1945 and initially concentrated on the medical care of the remaining prisoners. Officers were also confronted with a high number of corpses at the former Siemens factory and forced local people from Fürstenberg to clear up the camp. In June 1945, the Soviet repatriation camp 122 was established at Ravensbrück dealing with Soviet prisoners who were displaced during World War II. This camp was closed by the end of 1945. Ravensbrück was then converted into a Soviet military army base, the second largest in the GDR.

The development of the first memorial and museum: 1945–1959 In the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ), the Trust for Victims of the Nazi regime (VVN) was launched in 1947. In Mecklenburg (the region surrounding Ravensbrück), Fanny Mütze-Specht headed up the local research centre.7 She travelled to Ravensbrück in April 1948 and remarked that the camp was in a desolate condition, parts of the barracks were used by refugees from the Eastern Territories and the rest of the site had been adapted for military use. Since a reunion of former prisoners was planned for September 1948, she proposed the transformation of the former crematorium as a memorial. After a meeting with the Soviet Kommandant, a piece of land between the former camp boundary and lake Schwedt was transferred for the development of the site. The first memorial was opened on 14 September 1948 and consisted of a simple wooden pillar and a ‘fire

174  Doreen Pastor bowl,’ erected next to the crematorium. The practice of an annual meeting of survivors at this very basic memorial site continued until the new memorial was developed, with the local parish council of Fürstenberg frequently complaining about the lack of financial resources to maintain the site.8 With the founding of the GDR on 7 October 1949, the potential for developing a permanent memorial changed.9 On 21 February 1953, the GDR declared that the roots of fascism had been eradicated and the foundation for a socialist state had now been established, making the VVN obsolete.10 Instead, ‘the committee of the antifascist fighters’ was launched which consequently influenced the development of the memorial sites in the GDR. Moreover, the responsibility for the design of the memorial sites was handed over to the Staatliche Kommission für Kunstangelegenheit (state commission for art) and in so doing, the management of the future memorial sites was centralised. This commission had the required political influence that had previously prevented a permanent memorial. However, with state influence the commemorative focus shifted towards an emphasis on the communist victims. Eduard Ullmann, the first director of the newly founded Museum of German History in Berlin, travelled with a delegation to Ravensbrück in October 1953 and remarked that nothing could now be done at the camp, as it had changed too substantially.11 However, the new memorial should encompass the crematorium and the former boundary wall. On 31 May 1954, the GDR Institute for Conservation, which encompassed the department for national memorial sites, asked the Buchenwald committee to develop plans for a new memorial at Ravensbrück. The artist Will Lammert was subsequently asked to propose a structure for the site. He suggested including the former solitary confinement block and the execution area within the memorial complex. In addition, a sculpture of a woman should be erected overlooking lake Schwedt towards Fürstenberg. Yet this suggestion had a fundamental flaw: the former solitary confinement block and the surrounding area formed part of the Soviet army base and was not owned by the GDR. Consequently, Johannes R. Becher, the first minister for culture in the GDR, contacted the Soviet military commanders asking for a transfer of the land to the GDR. However, it took until June 1956 before the negotiations between Willy Stoph, the defence minister for the GDR, and Marshall Gretschko, from the Soviet Military Forces, were successful. In the meantime, the building work at Ravensbrück had already commenced. A pedestal with a quote from Anna Seghers, a GDR author, was erected at the entrance to the memorial site: Sie sind unser aller Mutter und Schwestern. Ihr könntet heute weder frei lernen noch spielen, ja, ihr wäret vielleicht gar nicht geboren, wenn solche Frauen nicht ihre zarten, schmächtigen Körper wie stählendernde Schutzschilder durch die ganze Zeit des faschistischen Terrors

Exhibiting Ravensbrück 175 vor euch und eure Zukunft gestellt hätten [They are our all mother and sisters. You could not learn or play freely today, yes, you might not have been born if such women had not put their tender, slender bodies in front of you and your future like steel shields through the entire time of fascist terror]. Anna Seghers’ quote speaks directly to the visitor in a strong, almost forceful voice. In this way, the GDR attempted to reinforce the message that only communism can fight fascism, leaving very little room for the visitor to question this narrative. The path would then lead the visitor to the ‘areas of suffering’: the execution path, the crematorium and the cell block. The cell block (solitary confinement) was transformed to house the Lagermuseum which also comprised reconstructed cells on the ground floor and individual national memorial rooms. The theme of the museum was declared to be ‘Ravensbrück warnt: Für Frieden in der Welt! Gegen Krieg und Faschismus’ (‘Ravensbrück warns, for peace in the world, against war and fascism’). Next to the crematorium, individual nations were commemorated with their names mounted on the former camp boundary wall.12 In front of the wall, a bed of roses was planted at the location of the former mass grave. These roses were donated from various former prisoners’ groups including Luxemburg, Hungary, Yugoslavia, France, the Soviet Union and Denmark. From the mass grave, the path would take the visitor to Will Lammert’s statue The Burdened. The Burdened portrays a woman carrying another woman in her arms on a 25-feet-high plinth looking towards Fürstenberg, with one step forward as if she was attempting to walk across the lake. Referred to as the Pieta of Ravensbrück, it intends to portray the true story of a prisoner carrying another prisoner back to the barracks after she collapsed during an Appell.13 With its location at the edge of the lake, The Burdened created the link between the atrocities committed in the camp and the women’s yearning for a life in freedom, symbolised by the nearby town of Fürstenberg. In fact, the very slim vertical structure speaks directly to the only other high structure in an otherwise very flat landscape: Fürstenberg’s church tower. Thus, The Burdened established a permanent relationship between the camp and the town of Fürstenberg which cannot be severed since it is highly visible for residents and tourists alike.14 The Burdened was supposed to be surrounded by a group of women at the bottom of the statue who signified the solidarity between the different nationalities and age groups at the camp, yet due to the premature death of the artist in October 1957, this design was never realised. This incomplete statue was not accepted by the committee of former Ravensbrück prisoners (Kommittee der Ravensbrückerinnen). They emphasised that it needed to be clear that this camp was a women’s and children’s camp. A letter

176  Doreen Pastor was sent to Otto Grotewohl by the committee, demanding that the original plans should be implemented. He subsequently suggested that another sculpture would be built, a group of mothers; yet the committee had to wait for another seven years before this sculpture was erected near the memorial entrance. Will Lammert’s statue The Burdened differs significantly from the heroic, antifascist interpretation of the rest of the site and did not meet with overwhelming approval.15 Having lost his art teachers in Auschwitz and Majdanek, Lammert was acutely aware of the atrocities committed in the concentration camps and did not subscribe to the antifascist narrative. The prototypes Lammert made in preparation for The Burdened showed women’s suffering by displaying thin, overworked bodies with shaved heads. Yet, their heads are held upright with a calm expression. Thus, Lammert emphasised the women’s dignity despite being surrounded by horrific atrocities. In fact, The Burdened also features a strong, upright face which tends to be interpreted as looking into future; yet considering Lammert’s personal experiences and the numerous interviews he conducted with survivors, it is more likely to represent the strength and solidarity of the women. The Lagermuseum exhibition in the cell block, however, followed the GDR’s narrative. Günter Meier an employee of the ministry of culture in the GDR, on reflected the design of the exhibition in a GDR museum journal. According to him, because of a lack of artefacts, artists had to be deployed to decorate the walls in the exhibition (see Figures 8.1 and 8.2).16 All interpretation panels used the colour scheme of black, encouraging a cold, hateful atmosphere.17 Text on the interpretation panels was written using a typewriter setting, creating the illusion that all exhibits were official documents, therefore instructing the visitor to understand the facts (see Figure 8.2). Less well designed, according to Meier, were the sub-sections of the ‘prisoner’ and ‘extermination’; he argued that a single image of the gassed prisoner Vera Snissarenko and her grieving mother would have been more ‘impressive.’18 Nevertheless, he thought, the exhibition would awaken visitors to the courageous fight of the women against the fascist regime. The ground floor of the former solitary confinement block featured reconstructed cells, designed to show the torture women experienced while the upper floor featured national memorial rooms which highlighted the international dimension of the ‘communist struggle’ at Ravensbrück. Consequently, women were only commemorated collectively according to their nationality and as resistance fighters. Individual victim groups such as Jewish prisoners, Sinti and Roma or the Jehovah’s Witnesses merged into a uniform mass of antifascist fighters.19 Hence, the concept of the first exhibition was based on an interplay between a hateful past and a hopeful future. The conditions in the camp were shown in their most brutal form with the aim of forging a feeling of disgust against the ‘fascist imperialistic’ system, and ultimately against

Exhibiting Ravensbrück 177

Figure 8.1 Exhibit in Ravensbrück’s first museum, 1959. Source: Heinz Nagel, 1959. Reproduced courtesy of Deutsche Fotothek Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden

capitalism. In contrast, the focus on the resistance amongst women was designed to legitimise the communist future. After all, the founding myth of the GDR was the victory over fascism by introducing a better communist state. Yet, Anna Seghers’ quote on the pedestal also emphasised the treatment of female victims; they were not solely communist victims, but also the future mothers who had been lost in the concentration camp. The Uckermark sub camp (for girls between the ages of 16–18), however, did not meet the criterion of the ‘gentle female victim.’ Most of the girls in the Uckermark camp were either ‘fallen women’ or so called ‘asocials’ who did not support the image of the strong, unblemished communist mother, so their suffering fell into oblivion.

178  Doreen Pastor

Figure 8.2 Exhibit in Ravensbrück’s first museum, 1959. Source: Heinz Nagel, 1959. Reproduced courtesy of Deutsche Fotothek Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden

The concept of shock pedagogy extended to the outside. The path visitors were supposed to take would lead them from the dark to the light.20 The dark was symbolised by the execution path, the Lagermuseum and the crematorium, whilst the light was the statue with one step forward into the future, the GDR. This experiential path therefore guides the visitor from suffering (death) to salvation (The Burdened). Hence, the GDR’s memorial concept abdicated responsibility and focused on redemption, leaving no space to explore the individual’s involvement in supporting Nazi Germany, and thus reiterating the GDR’s state doctrine that fascism had been eradicated.

The first re-design of the exhibition, 1980 A significant change in the history of the memorial occurred in the 1980s. The Soviet army, who had been owner of the Kommandantur, handed over the building to the GDR. This meant that suddenly 700 m 2 were available for a new exhibition. Ravensbrück was subsequently closed and the building work for the new exhibition began. The 1980s museum concept emphasised that ‘the exhibits should cause hatred and condemnation amongst all visitors against the atrocities of fascist ‘German imperialism’ and should

Exhibiting Ravensbrück 179 at the same time encourage the fight against the aggressive inhumane politics of imperialism in the present.’21 The exhibition was then divided into four different sub-themes, encompassing the historical development of the camp, a model of the camp, a history of the resistance and finally the legacy of the antifascist fight and its implementation in the GDR. Indeed, the visit to the museum commenced with a confrontation of the ‘ugly’ face of fascism, demonstrated on the example of German imperialism against the socialist Soviet Republics, and ended with a portrayal of ‘female antifascist fighters.’22 Egon Litschke, Ravensbrück’s last GDR memorial manager, emphasised that the exhibition displayed how the legacy of Ravensbrück was implemented in the GDR by creating a communist state. 23 Hence, the women’s experiences were yet again instrumentalised to support the GDR narrative. Eschebach notes that in the first few rooms of the 1980s exhibition, seven oversized images of women and children were featured behind barbed wire. 24 None of the images were, in fact, from Ravensbrück; two were taken at Auschwitz and one was the well-known image of the young boy in the Warsaw Ghetto. The visitors were not informed of the origin of the image, their context or indeed the year they were taken. Furthermore, much as in the 1960s exhibition, artists hand painted typical scenes from life in the camp onto walls. 25 In fact, the artists stayed onsite during the design process which was a challenging experience for those involved as Friedrich Porsdorf explained: ‘the stay at Ravensbrück haunted me.’26 His paintings were also placed behind barbed wire fences which he rejected as it distracted from the message he was trying to convey. However, since the aim of the overarching museum concept was to engage visitors emotionally, the oversized images behind barbed wire fences remained in the museum.27 Particularly distressing in the exhibition, according to Litschke, was the portrayal of medical experiments on women and children, alongside the systematic killing of Jews and Sinti and Roma. 28 Thus, the 1980s exhibition extended the concept of shock pedagogy by playing with visitors’ emotions. However, Litschke’s reference to Jews, Sinti and Roma highlights a slight shift in the GDR towards the end of the 1980s. Since the GDR sought greater acceptance with the West, it began to acknowledge specific victim groups. Alongside the development of the new museum, the former cell block was also re-developed. Egon Litschke decided to re-construct the cells of the ground floor including the cell doors. He emphasised that ‘the bleak and cold atmosphere of the cell block and the echo of the steps should evoke an emotional reaction.’29 On the upper floor of the cell block, the individual national memorial rooms were also re-designed, either by the nations themselves or by the GDR Ravensbrück management team with the limited information they had. The individual memorial rooms were arranged in the chronological order in which fascism spread across Europe, commencing

180  Doreen Pastor with Spain (1936) and followed by Austria (1938), Czechoslovakia (1938) and Poland (1939).30 Ironically, if the visitor now follows the recommended route, s/he involuntarily follows the steps of the Wehrmacht.31 At times, the memorial rooms featured a design that had little in common with the women’s experiences of Ravensbrück concentration camp. For instance, the Bulgarian room celebrated the ‘progressive development’ of women under state socialism. Today, the room is so controversial that in 2004 the Frankfurter Allgemeine commented that communism was alive and well in Ravensbrück’s cell block.32 The memorial room of the Soviet Union exhibits images of Jewish executions (amongst others) in Latvia yet does not explain it. The 14,000 female forced labourers, by far the largest group at Ravensbrück, were ignored. With the break-up of the Soviet Union, newly formed states such as Latvia, Lithuania or the Ukraine, rejected the memorial rooms and demand a separation. However, after German reunification, the Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten, the manager of the current memorial site, decided to retain these memorial rooms as a reminder of the political influence in commemorating the Nazi past.33 Whilst the design of the rooms is explained to the visitor, my own research has shown that visitors often ignore these messages and therefore do not understand the political context of these rooms.34

The redesign of the memorial site and the exhibitions after German reunification The politicisation of Ravensbrück’s history to fit the GDR’s political agenda was deemed inappropriate after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The EnqueteCommission für die Überwindung der Folgen der SED-Diktatur im Prozeß der deutschen Einheit (‘the overcoming of the consequences of the SED dictatorship within the process of German reunification’) concluded that the GDR exhibitions at the memorial sites had to be redesigned.35 The GDR’s focus on antifascism could no longer be justified within the new German Erinnerungskultur (culture of remembrance). In line with the Enquete Commission, the federal state of Brandenburg (to which Ravensbrück belongs) launched a separate expert commission for the re-development of the memorial sites in 1991. This expert commission recommended that the GDR exhibition should be closed and replaced by a new exhibition called ‘History and Topography of the Women’s Camp.’ In addition, former Youth Protection Camp Uckermark, the Siemens factory, the former SS guard houses and the wider grounds of the camp should be incorporated into the memorial. However, this was not an easy task. The Soviet army left a waste land behind. The grounds were contaminated by chemicals such as kerosene, and the former camp structures had been significantly altered. Subsequently, a landscape architectural contest was launched in 1998 with the aim of transforming

Exhibiting Ravensbrück 181 the site closer to its 1945 appearance without reconstructing buildings. The architectural bureau Oswalt/Tischer won the overall contest. Their proposal included the covering of the area where barracks once stood with a surface made of clinker, exposing the outlines of the former barracks. Although they envisaged the retention of the Soviet army buildings, this was rejected by the memorial management team, the conservation authority and the survivors.36 Trees that were planted during the camp’s operation would remain as ‘natural eye witnesses,’ whilst any other vegetation which had grown onsite since 1945 would be removed. As there was no physical evidence left of the former Uckermark camp, the ground would be transformed into a grassland seeded with wildflowers to demonstrate the fragility of life.37 The first part of the landscape design, the clinker stone surface, has been completed allowing visitors access to area of the barracks for the first time (see Figure 8.3). It created a vast and bleak open space, and whilst the architects were open to a future rewilding of the area, new vegetation is continuously removed by groundsmen. This landscape design is thought to symbolise the suffering of the victims, although Oswalt and Tischer acknowledge that without further explanation, visitors would be unable to interpret the site.38 Returning the site to its 1945, appearance has removed almost all traces of the former Soviet army base, a 49-year history (between 1945 and 1994). One could therefore argue that this is a new form of selective memory, since the voice of the Soviet soldier who lived onsite is erased. Of course, the Soviet soldier did not suffer in the same way that the Nazi victims suffered; nevertheless, the post-war history is a significant part of GDR history and has had an undeniable impact on the local community. For instance, one local father lost both his teenage sons; they were shot near the army base by a Soviet soldier. This incident was never resolved, and the father never got any justice. This example highlights that the relationship between the local community and the Soviet army was not an amicable one, although officially the GDR celebrated the German/Soviet friendship.39

Figure 8.3  Landscape design plan showing the coverage with the clinker surface. Source: Oswald and Tischer, 1998, unpublished

182  Doreen Pastor Creating a ‘dead’ landscape by suppressing all nature is also somewhat paradoxical when one considers the description of the camp by eye witnesses. Margarete Buber-Neumann, for instance, explained her surprise on seeing carefully manicured pathways planted with flowers on arrival in the camp.40 Hence, the bleak landscape one sees today is not an ‘authentic’ representation of the site and exposes the challenging curatorial decisions which have to be made when designing ‘traumatic’ landscapes. Neither the Uckermark camp nor the former Siemens factory are integrated into the current memorial landscape. With regards to the Uckermark camp, this was partially due to the severe contamination of the land and partially due to difficult ownership arrangements, as the former Uckermark area was not owned by the memorial trust.41 Although the land has now been transferred into the memorial’s ownership, significant financial resources are required to create safe access to the Siemens area and the Uckermark camp which were, and still are, not available. Although the Uckermark camp is theoretically accessible to visitors, it is not on any official visitor map. It is approximately 3 km from the main camp and situated on the new Berlin–Copenhagen cycle path. Unless a visitor ventures off the cycle path, s/he will not access this area. The site itself is currently maintained by political activists who carry out general maintenance approximately once a year. Violi pointed out that the significance of memorial landscapes lies in their indexicality, i.e., the trauma is contained in their spatiality.42 Yet this trauma is only visible once the traces have been preserved and appropriated with meaning. Consequently, conservation practices for ‘traumatic landscapes’ can move between two extremes: an obsessive preservation of historical evidence that cannot be changed or a downplay of ‘authenticity’ by transferring the symbolic character of the site to a new discourse.43 Ravensbrück’s memorial landscape has shifted between the two extremes. For the young GDR, Ravensbrück served as a site that legitimised the existence of a communist state. After all, the women had courageously struggled against fascist Germany and built a better future. In fact, the statue The Burdened was symbolically interpreted as Olga Benario-Prestes, a communist who was imprisoned at Ravensbrück but later died in Bernburg. After German reunification, conservation of the traces of mass murder gained in importance. Based on a 1945 RAF aerial photograph, Ravensbrück’s landscape was transformed into its presumed 1945 appearance. Soviet army buildings, and even nature, were removed to achieve a landscape that resembled the suffering of the women. Today, two memorial landscapes sit side by side: the GDR’s focus on a brighter, communist future, and contemporary Germany’s narrative of a responsibility for the past. Hence, today’s visitors have to navigate these very different styles of memorialisation. In fact, since the landscape is largely characterised by absence, visitors need to rely on their own imagination to interpret the site.

Exhibiting Ravensbrück 183

The current exhibitions Alongside the exterior transformation, the onsite exhibitions were also changed. Initially, the GDR exhibition was replaced by a new exhibition called ‘Topography of the Women’s concentration camp’ which opened in 1993, and ‘Biographies of female prisoners’ opened in 1994. Both exhibitions were designed to contextualise the camp as an integral part of the local community and to address the previously neglected victim groups. However, these two exhibitions were always regarded as temporary solutions until the historical research could inform a new exhibition. In 2006, a new overarching memorial concept under the theme Geschichte vor Ort (history onsite) was developed in consultation with key stakeholders. The main exhibition in the Kommandantur would be the central focus point surrounded by smaller, more detailed satellite exhibitions.44 Whilst the local Ravensbrück committee approved of the new concept overall, it severely criticised the exclusion of the Uckermark camp and the former Siemens factory. The new exhibition ‘History and Memory of the Women’s Concentration Camp’ in the main Kommandantur was opened in 2013. For the first time, a more comprehensive perspective of the under-researched female experience of a concentration camp is exhibited, based on the conditions of the camp, the various victim groups, medical experiments and forced labour. Furthermore, the marginalised victim group of the ‘asocials’ in the Uckermark camp is highlighted. As such, the curatorial team attempted to show multiple perspectives of victimhood in the exhibition. For instance, previously, the portrayal of victim groups was often based on solidarity and mutual support, yet a publication by the Austrian Victim Association in 1945 highlights that this is not a universal truth.45 The communist victims condemned the so-called ‘asocial’ women who, according to them, did not even deserve the title women. Hence, this victim group encountered an additional stigma within the camp structure and often retained it after liberation. The most challenging part of the new exhibition is the section about sex slave labour. SS commander Heinrich Himmler introduced brothel systems at ten major concentration camps as an incentive for male prisoners. Ravensbrück hosted one of those camp brothels, yet also operated as a ‘supply chain.’ For the women it was a double victimisation. Not only were they subjected to arbitrary imprisonment, but also forced to work as prostitutes. This aspect of the camp’s history is exhibited using a variety of eye witness accounts, including those of the male prisoners who used the brothel. When Ravensbrück first acquired the exhibition on sex slave labour, it collaborated with art students who identified key words that were used in the discourse about sexual violence at concentration camps. Subsequently, single German words such as ‘Schlampe’ (slut), ‘Asozial’ (asocial) and ‘Freiwillig’ (voluntarily) were projected onto a wall.46 Furthermore, comments made

184  Doreen Pastor by inmates about their perception of the women highlighted the attitude some male prisoners held. Images were not shown in order to avoid ‘sexploitation,’ i.e., the connection between Nazi institutions and sexual violence which is repeatedly shown in films about women’s prisons.47 Today’s permanent exhibition at Ravensbrück focuses almost exclusively on the victim’s perspective, thus providing a less challenging exhibition for visitors.48 In fact, Dr Matthias Heyl, head of education at Ravensbrück, explained that visitors still often leave with the impression that the brothels were introduced for SS staff.49 Similarly, the SS female guard exhibition, opened in 2004 and one of the smaller satellite exhibitions, caused controversy. Generally speaking, exhibitions at concentration camp memorials neglected the perpetrator. Ravensbrück was one of the first sites which recognised the interest in the perpetrator. The SS female guard exhibition gave extensive information about the professional background of the SS officers, their motivation and their representation in public discourse after World War II. One of the concerns of the exhibition planners was an identification of the visitor with the perpetrator. 50 Thus, although the exhibition is located in a former SS guard flat, the space is disrupted by a set of grey walls across each floor, avoiding the display of ‘domestic’ life. The perception of the SS female guards is told entirely from a victim’s perspective; for example, Edith Sparman is filmed while she walks through the derelict building recalling the furnishings and the guard’s behaviour. 51 Particularly controversial was the display of a private photograph album of an SS officer leading a seemingly ordinary life, which broke the tradition of portraying Nazi perpetrators as exceptional ‘beasts.’52 According to Eschebach, the heavily visited exhibition, however, appeared to give the impression that the entire staff team was female when, in fact, the top layer management was male. Consequently, an additional exhibition about the male staff was developed in the former Führerhaus. 53 All SS guard houses, including the Führerhaus, had been converted into officers’ accommodation during Ravensbrück’s time as a Soviet army base. Hence, the Führerhaus had to be altered to show the original layout. However, a complete reconstruction was not carried out. On entering the Führerhaus, one can initially hear the voices of liberated prisoners who were allowed into the house for the first time. The visitor can then explore the former kitchen, the bathroom and the bedrooms. The main aim of this exhibition is to display the contrast between the luxurious life style in the SS houses and the inhumane conditions in the camp only a few metres away. In addition to the biographies of the SS male management team, the wives of the officers, including the Kommandant’s wife, are displayed. These wives were often supported by maids from the camp, so the intention in the exhibition is to emphasise the collaboration of the women, hence creating again the link to the female perpetrator. However, much like the

Exhibiting Ravensbrück 185 rest of the site, this exhibition is characterised by a factual representation of the male perpetrators. Indeed, Ravensbrück’s main exhibition in the Kommandantur was designed in a documentary style interspersed by audio-visual eyewitness accounts and personal objects. It stands in stark contrast to the often emotionally charged exhibitions outside Germany such as Yad Vashem or the Holocaust Museum Washington D.C. Germany regards concentration camp memorials as key players in political education and thus adheres to the guidelines of the Beutelsbacher Konsens, a framework for political education that prohibits the overburdening of the learner, promotes independent, critical thinking and advocates the controversy of political issues, i.e., what is controversial needs to remain controversial.54 As a consequence, emotional engagement at German memorial sites is not encouraged.55 Thus, whilst the exhibitions provide ample information for visitors, their object neutrality causes dissociation and exhaustion.56 Hence, the visitor is often overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information which provides few opportunities for self-reflection. Ravensbrück places a greater emphasis on cultural objects made by the women in the camp instead of displaying typical relics (e.g. shoes or striped uniforms). Those objects are often representative of individual acts of resistance, expressions of hope or symbols of one own’s identity. 57 For instance, in the exhibition a pair of socks, forcibly made for Wehrmacht soldiers, were manipulated in such a way that they would have been uncomfortable to wear. During a guided tour, the head of education, Dr Matthias Heyl pointed out a rosary made of bread, but realised that its significance was not explained on the label, i.e., the prisoner would have needed to sacrifice her food ration in order to make the rosary. Moreover, Ryden’s study of the Ravensbrück collection at Lund University, Sweden (which houses a collection of items former prisoners donated after being rescued by the Swedish and Danish Red Cross) shows that most such objects were delicate gifts of beauty and affection which assisted in the fight for survival but also strengthened solidarity between the women.58 As such, Ravensbrück material culture differs significantly from those objects displayed at other camps such as Auschwitz or Sachsenhausen. In today’s exhibition, these often very emotional objects are embedded within a factual approach to exhibition design. As a consequence, the significance of these objects might be lost as the visitor is unable to decode the circumstances in which these objects were made. Paver highlights that the focus on Lagerkultur (daily life in the camp) signifies a caesura in exhibition design culture as planners moved away from the sole display of ‘trauma icons.’59 Yet, my empirical visitor research in 2016 suggests that visitors often arrived with a mediated Holocaust narrative in their minds (e.g. striped uniforms, hair in glass cases, barbed wire fence posts), hence this new form and focus of exhibition design can lead to the assumption that women’s experiences of

186  Doreen Pastor concentration camp imprisonment were less harsh. In fact, some visitors commented during my research that the site ‘looked too nice’ which led to the notion that the women’s experience of concentration camp imprisonment was somehow less ‘traumatic.’

Conclusion Ravensbrück concentration camp memorial is a reminder that a memorial site is often representative of the attitude to memorialisation at the time.60 After liberation, the Soviet Army appeared to take little notice of the historical significance of the site or indeed of the suffering of the women. Former barracks were dismantled to use as housing for refugees from the Eastern Territories and the entire site was adapted for military use. The former Uckermark camp was flattened for tank exercises, leaving no traces of the site where the selection procedures of the women who were destined to die in the hastily built gas chamber took place. The GDR interpreted the site in line with its overarching state narrative of communism as the victor over fascism (and ultimately capitalism). Women were portrayed as heroines who fought against fascism and paved the way for a brighter, communist future. Thus, the women’s individuality was submerged into the theme of the antifascist fighter. In order to defend this narrative, the GDR’s memorial team developed exhibitions that enforced hatred and consequently overburdened visitors. However, the visitor could find solace at The Burdened in the safe knowledge that the GDR would provide a hopeful and peaceful future. In essence, the GDR exhibitions left no room for reflective thinking and/or individual exploration of the historical context. After German reunification, a new narrative was developed which brought the individual victim back to the centre stage. This, however, required the removal of Soviet army buildings, a history that had impacted the local community for almost 50 years. Indeed, for the local community, Ravensbrück had predominantly been a Soviet army base which was strictly off-limits. The memorial site was a small area of land they often had to visit during annual anniversaries (e.g. the day of the liberation). Little is known about the local community’s relationship to the memorial site today, aside from Leo and Grätz’s publication ‘Das ist hier so’n zweischneidiges Schwert unser KZ’ (our concentration camp is a double-edged sword).61 Annette Leo conducted in-depth interviews with local residents in Fürstenberg about their memories of the concentration camp and the memorial site. It revealed a high level of guilt in people such as the woman who recalled prisoners passing by her house or the carpenter’s son who helped his father fitting the windows in the camp. The woman later became a victim of sexual assault at the hands of a Soviet soldier. Hence, for the local community the concentration camp memorial is also living reminder

Exhibiting Ravensbrück 187 of the upheaval and the crimes they have experienced during liberation. In fact, a local priest wrote in 1945 that suicides were common because of the constant sexual assaults of women.62 Returning Ravensbrück to its 1945 appearance also required the re-design of the Kommandantur to its original layout. Consequently, the handpainted wall decorations designed by GDR artists and objects which had no connection to Ravensbrück (e.g. hair from Auschwitz) were removed. Friedrich Porsdorf recalled his hurt when being informed that his artwork would no longer be part of the new exhibition and potentially be destroyed.63 Hence, changing the narrative at the museum in Ravensbrück not only erased the historiography of memorialisation in the GDR but also original artwork that formed part of the GDR’s cultural past. Ravensbrück’s memorial team has opted for a detailed description of the women’s experiences, often explained through objects that were made in the camp. Those objects differ significantly from the material culture one often encounters at other concentration camp memorial exhibitions. Hence, Ravensbrück’s exhibition is also symbolic of the under-researched nature of the female experience of concentration camp imprisonment. In contrast, the memorial rooms in the former solitary confinement block, designed in the GDR, remain as a witness to the instrumentalisation of the women’s experience of imprisonment. Yet this causes international disputes; Poland rejects the use of the German language in the current memorial room while the Ukraine demands the acknowledgment of its victims.64 Therefore, developing exhibitions at concentration camp memorials is by no means solely a negotiation between curatorial teams and victim groups, it is also a careful act in international cultural diplomacy. Moreover, for the first time, the female perpetrator, a neglected part of Holocaust historiography, has been addressed. Nevertheless, the debates surrounding the display of a private photo album showing a female SS officer enjoying an ‘ordinary’ life highlights that such exhibitions are still subject to intense controversy. Even more challenging is the exhibition on sex slave labour. It means walking a very fine line between respecting the dignity of the women and avoiding secondary victimisation whilst also explaining to visitors the historical context. A visitor to today’s Ravensbrück effectively has to negotiate two memorial complexes: the GDR’s design with its redemptive experiential path from the dark to the light, and contemporary Germany’s design with a focus on the past. Thus, Ravensbrück is also important because it shows the difficulties of managing ‘traumatic’ landscapes dominated by absence. Bormann, for instance, highlights Ravensbrück’s ghostly appearance with its vast empty spaces.65 Therein, however, also lies the challenge. How does one interpret and manage landscapes which were witnesses to past human suffering, an issue that has so far received little recognition?66 Yet with the expansion of the memorial site to include the south side (the location of the

188  Doreen Pastor tent), now a grassland, such questions will become ever more pertinent.67 Equally, in an age of visitors with no direct link to this past, exhibition design will need to be adapted again.

Notes 1. Anon., ‘Nach Buchenwald jetzt Mahnmal Ravensbrück’, Neues Deutschland, 11 April 1959. 2. Reinhard Köhler and Jan Thomas Plewe, Baugeschichte Frauen-Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück, Schriftenreihe der Stiftung Gedenkstätten (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 2001). 3. Erika Schwarz and Simone Steppan, ‘Die Entstehung der Nationalen Mahnund Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück, 1945-1959’, in die Sprache des Gedenkens. Zur Geschichte der Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück 1945-1995, ed. by Insa Eschebach, Sigrid Jacobeit, and Susann Lanwerd (Berlin: Hentrich Edition, 1999). 4. Schwarz and Steppan, ‘Die Entstehung der Nationalen Mahn-und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück, 1945–1959’. 5. Insa Eschebach, Das Frauen-Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück: Neue Beiträge zur Geschichte und Nachgeschichte, (Berlin: Metropol-Verlag, 2014). 6. Eschebach, Das Frauen-Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück. 7. Schwarz and Steppan, ‘Die Entstehung’. 8. Schwarz and Steppan, ‘der Weg von der Gedächtnisstätte zur Nationalen Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück 1948 – 1959’, in Fürstenberg / Havel, Ravensbrück. Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte einer Region zwischen Brandenburg und Mecklenburg: Band 2: Wechselnde Machtverhältnisse im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. by Wolfgang Jacobeit and Wolfgang Stegemann, 1st ed. (Teetz: Hentrich und Hentrich Verlag Berlin, 2004), pp. 341–58. 9. Schwarz and Steppan, ‘Die Entstehung’. 10. Anon., ‘Nach Buchenwald jetzt Mahnmal Ravensbrück’. 11. Schwarz and Steppan, ‘Die Entstehung’. 12. Ibid. 13. Elmar Jansen, ‘Mahnmal auf blutgetränkter Erde’, Neue Zeit, 6 September 1959, 298 edition. 14. Marlies Lammert, Will Lammert: Ravensbrück (Berlin: Deutsche Akademie der Künste zu Berlin, 1965). 15. U. Peters, ‘Zu Will Lammerts Figurenentwürfen für das Mahnmal im Ehemaligen Frauenkonzentrationslager Ravensbrück, 1957’, KulturGut : Aus der Forschung Des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, 40 (2015), pp. 19–24. 16. Günter Meier, ‘Über die künstlerische Gestaltung des Lagermuseums in Ravensbrück’, Bildende Kunst, 2 (1960), pp. 90–93. 17. Meier, ‘Über die künstlerische Gestaltung’, p. 293. 18. Meier, ‘Über die künstlerische Gestaltung’. 19 Insa Eschebach, ‘Elemente einer nationalen und religiösen Formensprache im Gedenken’ Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte, 50: 4 (1998), pp. 339–55. 20. Marchetta, Maria, Erinnerung und Demokratie. Holocaust Mahnmale und ihre Erinnerungspolitik: Das Beispiel Ravensbrück (Berlin: Metropol-Verlag, 2001). 21. Anon., ‘Rekonstruktion und Gestaltung der Mahn - und Gedenkstätte Ravens­ brück’, 530 SED BL Pdm 7312, 1982, Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv. 22. Ulrike Helwerth, ‘Gewürdigt wurden nur die Kommunistinnen’, Die Tageszeitung, 26 October 1990.

Exhibiting Ravensbrück 189 23. Egon Litschke, ‘Museum des antifaschistischen Widerstandskampfes in der nationalen Mahn-und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück’, Neue Museumskunde, 85: 2 (1985), pp. 115–19. 24. Insa Eschebach, ‘Museale Entwicklungen in ostdeutschen KZ-Gedenkstätten vor und nach dem Fall der Mauer’, in Entnazifizierte Zone?: Zum Umgang mit der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus in ostdeutschen Stadt- und Regionalmuseen, ed. by Museumsverband Brandenburg (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2015), pp. 1–24. 25. Friedrich Porsdorf, personal communication, 2019. 26. Ibid. 27. Eschebach, ‘Museale Entwicklungen’. 28. Litschke, ‘Museum des antifaschistischen Widerstandkampfes’. 29. Insa Eschebach, Ravensbrück. Der Zellenbau (Berlin: Metropol-Verlag, 2008), p. 48. 30. Egon Litschke, ‘Ehemaliger Zellenbau in der nationalen Mahn-und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück Rekonstruiert und umgestaltet.’ Neue Museumskunde, 87: 4 (1987), pp.308–10. 31. Eschebach, ‘Elemente einer nationalen und religiösen Formensprache im Gedenken’. 32. Eschebach, Ravensbrück. Der Zellenbau. 33. Ibid. 34. D. Pastor, ‘Memory tourism: visitor experiences at memorial sites in contemporary Germany’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Bristol, 2019. 35. The SED was the ruling party in the GDR. Bundesregierung Online, ‘Konzeption der künftigen Gedenkstättenförderung des Bundes’, 27 July 1999. http:// dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/14/015/1401569.pdf. 36. S. Tischer, pers. comm. 37. Philipp Oswalt and Stefan Tischer, ‘Ehemaliges Frauen-KZ Ravensbrück’, unpublished, 1998. 38. Oswalt and Tischer, ‘Ehemaliges Frauen-KZ Ravensbrück’. 39. Peter Schmalz, ‘Sogar ihre Grabsteine mußten Lügen’, Die Welt, 10 June 1997. 40. Helga Schwarz and Gerda Szepansky, Frauen-KZ Ravensbrück. ... und dennoch blühten blumen. Dokumente, Berichte, Gedichte und Zeichnungen Vom Lageralltag 1939-1945 (Potsdam: Brandenburgische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2000), p. 23. 41. Philipp Oswalt and Stephanie Oswalt, ‘Entwurf zur Gestaltung der erweiterten Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück‘, in Das Mädchenkonzentrationslager Uckermark, ed. by Katja Limbächer, Maike Merten, and Bettina Pfefferle (Münster: Unrast Verlag, 2000), pp. 280–92. 42. Patrizia Violi, ‘Trauma Site Museums and Politics of Memory: Tuol Sleng, Villa Grimaldi and the Bologna Ustica Museum’, Theory, Culture & Society, 29: 1 (2012), pp. 36–75, here p. 39. 43. Violi, ‘Trauma site museums’, p. 40. 44. Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur Brandenburg, ‘Geschichte vor Ort: Erinnerungskultur im Land Brandenburg für die Zeit von 1933 Bis 1990’, 2009. https://mwfk.brandenburg.de/media_fast/4055/Konzept_GeschichtevorOrt.pdf. 45. Toni Bruha, Maria Berner, Herma Löwenstein, Anna Poskocil, Anna Schefzik, Hermine Huber, Irma Trksak, et al., Frauen-Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück (Wien: Stern-Verl, 1945).

190  Doreen Pastor 46. Chloe E. M. Paver, Exhibiting the Nazi Past: Museum Objects Between the Material and the Immaterial (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018), p. 93. 47. I. Eschebach and K. Jedermann. ‘Sex-Zwangsarbeit in NS-Konzentrationslagern’, Feministische Studien, 25: 1 (2007), pp. 122–28, here p. 127. 48. Paver, Exhibiting the Nazi Past, p. 94. 49. See Pastor, ‘Memory tourism’. 50. Susanne Luhmann, ‘Managing Perpetrator Affect: The Female Guard Exhibition at Ravensbrück’, in Perpetrating Selves, ed. by C. Bielby and M. Stevenson (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 247–69. 51. Luhmann, ‘Managing perpetrator affect’. 52. Insa Eschebach, ‘Das Fotoalbum von Gertrud Rabenstein’, in ‘Im Gefolge der SS’: Aufseherinnen des Frauen-KZ Ravensbrück: Begleitband zur Ausstellung, ed. by Simone Erpel, Johannes Schwartz, Jeanette Toussaint, and Lavern Wolfram (Berlin: Metropol-Verlag, 2007), pp. 252–64. 53. Eschebach, ‘Das Fotoalbum von Gertrud Rabenstein’. 54. Helmut Däuble, ‘Der fruchtbare Dissens um den Beutelsbacher Konsens’, GWP – Gesellschaft. Wirtschaft. Politik, 65: 4 (2016), pp. 449–58. 55. Habbo Knoch, ‘Gedenkstätten’, ZZF - Centre for Contemporary History 2018. https://doi.org/10.14765/zzf.dok.2.1221.v1. 56. Gad Yair, ‘Neutrality, Objectivity, and Dissociation: Cultural Trauma and Educational Messages in German Holocaust Memorial Sites and Documentation Centers’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 28: 3 (2014), pp. 482–509. 57. Johanna Bergqvist Rydén, ‘When Bereaved of Everything: Objects from the Concentration Camp of Ravensbrück as Expressions of Resistance, Memory, and Identity’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 22: 3 (2018), pp. 511–30. 58. Rydén, ‘When Bereaved of Everything’. 59. Paver, Exhibiting the Nazi Past, p. 114. 60. Violi, ‘Trauma site museums’. 61. A. Leo and P. Grätz, ‘Das ist so’n zweischneidiges Schwert hier unser KZ’: Der Fürstenberger Alltag und das Frauenkonzentrationslager Ravensbrück, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Metropol-Verlag, 2008). 62. Wolfgang Stegemann, ‘Die Nachkriegszeit 1945 bis 1948 in Zeitdokümenten’, in Furstenberg/Havel, Ravensbrück, 223–258. 63. Porsdorf, personal communication, 1 July 2019. 64. Dr Matthias Heyl, personal communication, 10 July 2016. 65. Natalie Bormann, The Ethics of Teaching at Sites of Violence and Trauma Student Encounters with the Holocaust (Boston: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 66. Jessica Rapson, Topographies of Suffering: Buchenwald, Babi Yar, Lidice (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015). 67. Katrin Starke, ‘Frauen-KZ Ravensbrück: Erinnerung an die “Zone des Elends”′ Berliner Morgenpost, 8 February 2017.

9

‘Flight without feathers is not easy’ John Tanner and the development of the Royal Air Force Museum Peter Elliott

Introduction This chapter examines the protracted birth of the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force (RAF) Museum, setting out some of the difficulties encountered in establishing a new military museum in the mid-twentieth century. It discusses the roles which military museums fulfil, and the conflict between a focus on purely military aviation and the wider realm of aviation, by examining attempts in the 1950s to create a National Air Museum and the RAF Museum’s aspirations to expand into this wider role in the 1980s. A key figure in the story is Dr John Tanner, the RAF Museum’s founding director.

John Tanner John Ian Tanner (1927–2004) was born in Salisbury and his family moved to Reading in 1939. Determined to join the RAF, he subsequently lied about his age (15) and registered for service. Doubtless to his dismay, he was called up as a Bevin Boy, working in coal mines in Derbyshire. After about a year his true age was discovered, and he had to return home to Reading. It became apparent that his eyesight was so poor that he should not have been working in the mines, let alone serving in the armed forces. Tanner decided not to continue his formal education, and instead began work in Reading Public Library. During his time there he studied for, and passed, the Library Association’s examinations, which he later declared to be the hardest he had ever sat. A move to Kensington and Chelsea followed, with additional responsibility for Leyton House.1 Unable to follow a flying career, he had thrown his energy into the study of aviation. 2 In 1953, Tanner took up the post of Librarian and Tutor in English at the RAF College, Cranwell. Here he acted as secretary of the Old Cranwellian Association and compiled a list of the College’s graduates which earned him Fellowship of the Library Association.3 He also helped to raise money for the construction of a new College chapel, and obtained his MA and PhD from Nottingham University. His interest in heraldry and historical memorabilia led to his building up a collection of badges and insignia,

192  Peter Elliott which formed the basis of the College’s museum, opened in 1960 when Her Majesty the Queen visited Cranwell to present the College with a new Queen’s Colour.4 In 1963, John Tanner was appointed Director of the nascent RAF Museum, having put forward a proposal for such a museum.5 Over nearly 25 years Tanner led the Museum’s development, with an initial brief that included creating a collection, finding and acquiring a site, raising funds to build the museum and recruiting the staff needed to produce a world-class museum.6 The museum’s successful opening at Hendon in 1972 led to expansion through the foundation of museums there dedicated to the Battle of Britain and Bomber Command. The RAF Museum took over the management of the RAF’s Aerospace Museum at Cosford where Tanner, acting as an advisor to British Airways, built up a collection of airliners. His final collaboration was with Manchester City Council, creating the Manchester Air & Space Museum – now part of the Museum of Science and Industry. Tanner stated that his aim was to create not just an RAF Museum, but a national aerospace museum; discussions on this in the early 1980s failed, partly due to concerns about the reduced profile that the RAF would have in a museum covering all of aviation. Calls for an RAF Museum in the 1930s (see below) had been prompted by the Imperial War Museum (IWM)’s remit only covering RAF operations in the First World War; later RAF operations were excluded. Why was Tanner unable – despite his passion, dedication, persuasive arguments and forthright advocacy – to realise his vision of a museum that would ‘[do] for the air what the National Maritime Museum does for the sea’?7 The thread that runs through the story is funding, or rather a lack of funds. This was often due to the economic climate in the 1930s and in the 15 years after the end of the Second World War. Although the financial situation eased in the 1960s, government departments – initially the Air Ministry, Ministry of Works and Ministry of Education, and later the Ministry of Defence, Department of Education and Science (DES) and the Office of Arts and Libraries – were all reluctant to see their budgets used for a new museum, and the Treasury’s attitude seems almost disdainful. The Treasury felt that money should be spent on existing museums, rather than new ones, and other government departments seem to have felt that money for a new museum would have to be found from their existing budgets and thus reduce the money available for their own projects.8 The increasing public interest in aviation and military history was not recognised by those who held the purse strings.

Military museums’ roles and constraints Military museums have several roles to fulfil. They are the embodiment of a regiment, squadron or service’s history and traditions – arguably its soul. In that role they foster esprit de corps among its members, commemorate the

‘Flight without feathers is not easy’ 193 deeds and sacrifice of those who served, and help former members to recall their service. Today, the RAF encourages its personnel to learn about – and from – the service’s history, as part of ‘Force Development.’ As with any museum, objects and documents help to bring the story alive, providing a tangible link to those who have gone before. Museums are also an aid to recruiting, aiming to inspire the next generation. Today, when the size of Britain’s armed forces has reduced steadily (particularly since the end of the Cold War) the services do not easily draw public attention; museums help to keep their parent services in the public eye and explain their role. As will be shown later, when the RAF first campaigned for its own museum it was in this role of raising its profile, arguably to ensure that the service survived. The RAFM’s audience has changed dramatically since it opened in 1972: initially the visitors were mostly male, often former RAF personnel and their sons, but today the visitor profile is much broader and most have no family link to the service. When Tanner put forward his proposal the RAF was the youngest service, military flying having begun only 50 years previously with the formation of the Royal Flying Corps. Nevertheless, the RAF was already developing traditions and if the museum were to be established alongside the RAF College at Cranwell, it would be in an ideal place to influence the officer cadets who would move the RAF forward and add to its history. He drew parallels with the National Army Museum’s home at Sandhurst, although the NAM was hoping to move to London, and did so in 1971.9 Aviation museums such as the RAFM reflect changes in technology, whether that be aeronautics, armament, radio or other aspects of the equipment used. They show how aircraft can project power to an unfriendly state, and thus have the potential for use in education, particularly to inspire future engineers and scientists. A national air museum would have a wider brief, covering not only the use of aircraft in warfare but also commercial air transport, recreational flying and the development of aviation technology. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM) in Washington DC stemmed from a proposal by General ‘Hap’ Arnold shortly after the end of the Second World War for a military aviation museum, but the emphasis shifted to include both civil and military aviation.10 DeVorkin and Neufeld cite a thesis by London, which argues that the Smithsonian resisted the idea of military museums on the National Mall in central Washington, and that the NASM became ‘the most prominent surrogate for a military presence on the Mall.’11 There was much debate about the role of the proposed museum: national museums of technology are often showcases for a nation’s achievements. Rhees quotes a comment by the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in 1955, ‘The airplane is in many respects the product of the genius of the American people.’12 Giffard has shown how the British and German governments donated early jet engines to the Smithsonian Institution: the British engine was donated in 1949 to support the British claim that Frank Whittle invented the jet engine, but

194  Peter Elliott the (replica) jet engine donated by the Deutsches Museum in the 1970s was arguably intended to show that a German engine had in fact been the first to fly, or at least to ensure that Hans von Ohain (by then living in the USA) had an equal right to be recognised.13 The National Maritime Museum, on the other hand, was conceived in 1927 as a ‘national naval and nautical museum’ although the Royal Navy had already established a museum at Portsmouth in 1911.14 To the visitor the NMM today seems to concentrate more on commercial shipping and leisure craft, albeit with some naval history, while the National Museum of the Royal Navy is the main showcase for the Royal Navy’s history and traditions. The United Kingdom has no real equivalent for aeronautics; civil aircraft are under-represented in museum collections, not least because such aircraft can be difficult for museums to display effectively.15 Other forms of transport – such as cars, railway engines and boats – are effectively rectangular in shape and thus can be displayed close together, but even small aircraft take up a relatively large area and aircraft of different shapes and sizes may not fit together well. Tanner’s initial proposal made no suggestion that aircraft would be included – the spaces he identified were far too small for even the smaller aircraft - and he put emphasis on using modern display techniques including dioramas and working models. The reducing size of the RAF since the 1960s, however, has made space available in hangars; covered storage is essential as aircraft suffer in the British climate.

The RAF seeks its own museum Tanner frequently traced the roots of the RAF Museum to Lord Rothermere’s 1917 directive that ‘one example of each type of aircraft used during the war was to be preserved for posterity,’ to be supplemented later with specimens of aircraft introduced into the RAF.16 Rothermere had indeed directed that aircraft should be preserved, but the collection ‘should be part of the National War Museum’ which was later renamed the IWM.17 The RAF was formed on 1 April 1918, and by 1931 voices within the service were calling for the establishment of its own museum.18 The RAF was unhappy about the way it was represented in the IWM: the IWM’s remit did not extend beyond the end of the First World War, so most of the RAF’s life and work was not represented. A paper discussed by the Air Council noted that there was ‘no institution or building for the preservation of the records of the Flying Services’ and there was concern that aircraft and other apparatus and documents of much historical value ‘…[would] be lost for all time.’ The IWM and Science Museum had collections of aircraft, but it was difficult to find ‘adequate space for the air services in a “mixed” museum.’ The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) also had a museum which included some aeronautical material. The paper continued, ‘the very distinctive character of the Service requires a well-organised museum of its own, not conditioned by the

Flight without feathers is not easy 195 exhibits of the other Services.’19 Cundy includes a plan of the IWM’s galleries at the Crystal Palace: the space allocated to the Air Force is only about 20% of that allocated to the Army and Royal Navy. The IWM’s South Kensington site was smaller and dominated by heavy weaponry.20 The RAF’s desire for a dedicated museum may seem simply a question of corporate vanity, but probably has a much deeper root. For most of its life the RAF has faced calls from the Army and Navy for it to be disbanded and its resources reallocated to the services from which it was formed. Gardner has detailed the way in which the RAF, as the junior service, fought to establish its national identity in the 1920s and 1930s – this was particularly important as much of the RAF’s work was overseas in areas such as Iraq, Transjordan and the Northwest Frontier. She details various ways in which this was achieved, including air displays at Hendon, the Schneider Trophy races – in which the RAF flew the British aircraft – and the raising of the RAF Memorial on the Embankment in the relatively swift time of four years, in contrast to the Admiralty’s fruitless attempts to build a Royal Navy memorial in London.21 It seems that the creation of an Air Service museum may have been a further stage in the campaign waged by Marshal of the Royal Air Force (MRAF) Sir Hugh Trenchard and Sir Samuel Hoare. Trenchard was Chief of the Air Staff – the titular head of the service – from January to April 1918 and from March 1919 to January 1930. He is widely regarded as the ‘Father of the RAF.’ Hoare had been Secretary of State for Air from October 1922 to January 1924, and from November 1924 to June 1929. It seems likely that Trenchard, or possibly Hoare, could have set in train the process which led to the submission of Air Council Memorandum 552 calling for an RAF Museum. The Depression meant that funds could not be found, but the Air Council approved the principle of establishing a museum and steps were taken to collect suitable material. The Air Council returned to the question in 1935, but again finance was the project’s Achilles heel: the rise of Hitler and German rearmament had brought a change in defence policy, and in 1934 the first of several RAF Expansion Schemes was announced. 22 Although the Air Estimates for 1935 sought an increase in spending of nearly 48% on the £17.56 million requested for 1934, the Air Services Museum had to return to the back burner. 23 During the Second World War the Air Ministry’s Air Historical Branch (AHB) collected aircraft, smaller artefacts and documents of historical interest, while squadrons and other units took material (often items from aircraft they had captured or shot down) as trophies. After the war, some of the AHB’s aircraft were allocated to the IWM and Science Museum, and others were distributed among the many RAF stations. In due course the RAF concentrated its historic aircraft into regional collections in Shropshire, Wiltshire, Yorkshire and Wales, although these collections tended to have no discernible theme. 24 It may be that this concentration was simply a convenient use of surplus hangarage. Many RAF stations

196  Peter Elliott displayed a retired aircraft at the main gate, reflecting the Army’s tradition of displaying an artillery piece, tank or other symbolic item of equipment. 25 Some units (particularly squadrons) developed their own collections, with junior officers being allocated the ‘secondary duty’ of curator. These collections were built up in a fairly random way and typically comprised small artefacts, works of art, medals and documents which were often donated by former members and their families, or material generated by the squadron such as photograph albums and scrapbooks. They were not open to the public but helped to establish a sense of identity for personnel who would only spend a few years with a squadron before being posted to another unit. Officially these collections were known as ‘Unit Property’ rather than museums or historical collections, and official publications merely gave instructions on what should happen to the property when a unit was disbanded or re-formed. 26 No guidance was given regarding curatorial concerns. A small number of semi-official museums developed on RAF stations devoted to specific roles, such as fighter control (the Air Defence Radar Museum at Neatishead) and ground defence (the RAF Regiment Heritage Centre at Honington) and now a number of stations have heritage centres or history rooms, used for force development.27 Nevertheless, the initial concern leading to calls for a museum seems to have been the need to publicise the work and value of the RAF as an independent service.

A National Aeronautical Collection? The mid-1950s saw the RAF take a renewed interest in its historic collections. In October 1954, the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS) called a meeting to consider the creation of a National Aeronautical Collection of historical aircraft. The 17 organisations attending included government departments, national museums, and various aviation groups. 28 The meeting was chaired by Peter Masefield, evidently the driving force behind this initiative. Masefield’s career had been dominated by civil, rather than military, aviation; he was President of the RAeS from 1959 to 1960. 29 Masefield had already written to Lord Trenchard and other senior RAF officers seeking (and gaining) their support for the ‘foundation of a National Aeronautical Collection on similar lines to the National Maritime Museum and Trust’30. Masefield’s letter indicates that the prime motivation for the National Collection would be to prevent the loss of historic aircraft, particularly through sales overseas: the RAeS had purchased R. G. Nash’s collection of early aircraft after he had received an offer from an American collector.31 The meeting agreed that some form of National Collection was desirable, and Masefield suggested that it could be located at Croydon airport or RAF Hendon.32 A working party was formed to carry the project forward, but little progress was made. It is difficult to discern what role was envisaged for the museum beyond preservation, since neither Masefield’s letters nor

Flight without feathers is not easy 197 the minutes of the meetings indicate whether the aim was to commemorate British achievements in aviation, inspire young people to take up careers in the field, or some other purpose. Criticism had been voiced in 1956 regarding the condition of aircraft in the RAF’s annual Battle of Britain display on Horse Guards Parade in London, and the future of the display was in doubt.33 The annual flypast had been traditionally led by a Spitfire and Hurricane and the decision was taken in 1957 to form a Historic Aircraft Flight, with one Hurricane and three Spitfires, following the withdrawal of the last Spitfires from RAF service.34 It later became the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight; a Lancaster was added to its strength in 1973 and a Dakota in 1993.35 The Flight performs displays and flypasts at a wide range of events around the United Kingdom and Europe, helping to raise the RAF’s public profile and keep alive the memory of its wartime operations – some of the functions that museums fulfil. There was little enthusiasm in the Ministry of Works (responsible for the national museums’ premises) for another museum. Its officials were sceptical about the appeal of an aviation museum, since aviation had a relatively brief history; moreover, they were concerned that the creation of an ‘air museum’ would encourage the Army to demand similar treatment, and feared that the Ministry’s funding would suffer.36 It was acknowledged, however, that Britain was ‘playing a leading part in aeronautics and it may be that eventually there ought to be some sort of museum of this kind.’37 Although the Air Ministry supported the project, there were dissenting voices: Air Vice Marshal R. B. Jordan drew attention to the need for hangar space, which would grow as more aircraft joined the collection, and suggested that using models and photographs would be more attractive than aircraft, concluding that ‘a hangar in the winter… is a cold, damp and draughty place, and I cannot see crowds of people trooping out to this kind of hangar at Hendon to see a National Collection of Historic Aircraft.’38 Dismissing the appeal of aviation seems hard to understand. ‘Airmindedness’ had been carefully fostered during the 1930s, with large crowds ‘trooping out… to Hendon’ for the annual RAF and Empire Air Day displays.39 ‘Aircraft spotting’ to recognise and report enemy and friendly aircraft had become a necessity during the Second World War, and Masefield had played a key role in training spotters.40 From the late 1940s, large numbers attended the annual Farnborough displays where the British aircraft industry showed its latest products. The National Air Museum project was eventually shelved when the Financial Secretary to the Treasury made it clear that the necessary financial backing would not be forthcoming, citing ‘pressure to spend considerably more on existing national institutions’ and explaining that aviation was already represented in the IWM and Science Museum’s collections.41 Masefield’s committee did, however, produce lists of aircraft and engines that could become part of a national collection.42 Many of the aircraft listed survive; some are in museums and some are still flying.

198  Peter Elliott

Renewed interest in an RAF Museum Around this time, the Air Ministry was preparing to move into new accommodation in Whitehall, now the Ministry of Defence Main Building. The Ministry’s Historic Aircraft Working Party, set up in 1957, proposed in 1959 that displays should be set up in the reception hall of the new building and the Air Council Suite.43 The former would be open to the public at weekends, but this was ruled out in 1960 as it would be too small and objections were raised about ‘turning part of the Air Ministry into a peepshow’ together with concerns over ‘small boy trouble.’44 It seems that the Air Ministry and RAF perceived the museum as something to be kept private, for those who were serving in the RAF and the civil servants who dealt with policy and administration. Members of the public, and young men who might one day join the RAF, were – at best – to be tolerated. The Working Party was succeeded in 1962 by a Historical Advisory Committee, chaired by Marshal of the RAF Sir Dermot Boyle. He, together with colleagues from the Royal Navy and Army, had recently served on a committee reviewing the RUSI’s museum collection, as the museum was closing and new homes had to be found for the collection. Boyle’s Air Ministry committee’s terms of reference were ‘to advise the Air Council on the identification, acquisition, preservation and display of articles of historic interest to the RAF and to the nation.’45 Their First Interim Report highlighted ‘the lack of an official museum in the RAF as compared with the Army and Navy’ and urged the formation of an RAF Museum.46 Tanner, having created the museum at Cranwell, had written to Boyle regarding the RUSI closure, and in May 1962 sent him a paper setting out a case for the formation of an RAF Museum.47 He pointed out that there was much public interest in the RAF and that ‘a Royal Air Force Museum would in time be a major public attraction, and one that could yield benefits to the Service disproportionate to its cost.’ These benefits would include nurturing an RAF ethos and a sense of its history: the RAF would reach its 50th anniversary in 1968 and ‘the time to start a Service museum is when the service is young, not when much of the material has been given time to disappear.’ He argued that the best place for the museum would be Cranwell – ‘the officer cadets at the college were perhaps the most important group of young people in the Service’ – and pointed out that the Army had its own museum at Sandhurst. He implied that the RAF’s future leaders – Cranwell prepared men for long-term commissioned service – would be inspired by the deeds of their predecessors and go on to make further RAF history. A museum at Cranwell would have recruiting power, as visitors included large numbers of air cadets and ‘parties of influential headmasters’ who were presumably encouraged to recommend the RAF as a career. Exhibits might include personalia, documents, uniforms and decorations but not actual aircraft given the logstical issues. Instead, emphasis was placed on modern interpretive

Flight without feathers is not easy 199 methods to engage the visitor. He pointed out that his museum at Cranwell ‘already sets high standards’ and this had been recognised by his recent appointment by the Museums Association as an examiner – a subtle hint that he would like to be the curator of the larger museum. His paper closed with the suggestion that the museum at Cranwell could be expanded to gain ‘its Royal Charter and National status as part of the Royal Air Force’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations.’ Just after this, a formal paper proposing the formation of the RAF Museum was submitted to the Treasury by the Air Ministry in September 1962.48 The Treasury staff were wary, describing the request as ‘a shrewd move… for it makes it a little more difficult to reject out of hand’ and expressing concern about both the requirement for hangar space and the danger that the project might be used as a means of keeping open an airfield which could otherwise be disposed of, thereby depriving the Treasury of both savings and the income from the sale.49 A further indication of the Treasury’s attitude to military museums is given in a letter from the Financial Secretary, which stated that the National Army Museum’s appeal ‘would be almost entirely to Army people’ and indicated that the running costs would depend on savings in other War Office budgets: ‘If you are prepared to make room for it in the Army’s share of the Defence Budget, we should be sympathetic towards providing a modest measure of assistance from the Exchequer in maintaining it.’50 Nevertheless, Treasury approval in principle was granted. Boyle became the first Chairman of the Museum’s trustees and his committee searched for a site; Tanner was appointed Director. Sites in Wiltshire and the London area were considered; RAF Henlow in Bedfordshire seemed more acceptable, although the Treasury expressed concern that the cost had risen from £13,000 to £151,000.51 In 1964, it was announced in Parliament that a RAF Museum would be established at Henlow (see Figure 9.1).52 The RAFM was still hopeful of obtaining a site in London, although government policy preferred siting major national institutions in the provinces ‘not only to relieve congestion in London but also to stimulate the cultural life of the regions.’53 Much energy was expended on campaigning for a prestigious site on the Mall, (now occupied by the Institute of Contemporary Arts) despite the fact that it would not be capable of accommodating aircraft; these would be available at Henlow for research by ‘serious students.’54 Tanner, whilst stating ‘it is not my intention to denigrate the work of the ICA,’ wrote a vitriolic paper (apparently sent to the Minister for the RAF) which leaves no doubt regarding his opinions.55 Peter Masefield also contributed to the search for a site, suggesting a South Kensington location; and in 1965 a plan was drawn up for a museum building on the South Bank, on the site of the current National Theatre (see Figure 9.2).56 Finally, in May 1967 the Treasury agreed that the Museum would be sited at RAF Hendon, which had a rich history dating from its foundation

200  Peter Elliott

Figure 9.1  Part of an artist’s impression of the proposed RAF Museum at Henlow, 1963. (Crown Copyright, RAF Museum T214688)

Flight without feathers is not easy 201

Figure 9.2  Layout plan for an RAF Museum on the South Bank (Crown Copyright, RAF Museum T214682)

as the London Aerodrome in 1910.57 The site would be made over to the Trustees for 99 years by deed of gift, the construction of the museum funded by an appeal and the running costs paid from Ministry of Defence votes; the Air Ministry had been absorbed into the MOD in 1964. 58 The RAF Museum was opened by Her Majesty the Queen on 15 November 1972 and immediately proved very popular (see Figure 9.3). The central Aircraft Hall displayed a range of aircraft in chronological order, while 11 galleries told the story of military flying and included dioramas, models, artefacts and uniforms, with one gallery devoted to winners of the George Cross and Victoria Cross. Gallery XI, ‘The RAF Today,’ was funded by the RAF’s Inspector of Recruiting. In January 1972, before the RAFM opened, the Ministry of Defence had raised with the DES the possible transfer of the RAFM and National Army Museum to the DES, as the MOD felt that it was ‘not naturally organised to look after museums.’59 Such a change would have removed the MOD’s control over the Museum and made it easier for Tanner to broaden its scope to cover all forms of aviation. The idea was rejected, partly because the two museums and ‘some scattered naval museums’ were too small and specialised, and there were ‘important effects upon the Imperial War Museum’ which was one of the museums funded by the DES.60 Once the RAF Museum had opened in November 1972, with large numbers of visitors confirming that there was indeed interest in historic aircraft, Tanner set about planning its enlargement. There is some evidence to suggest that

202  Peter Elliott

Figure 9.3  Her Majesty the Queen with Dr John Tanner at the opening of the RAF Museum (Crown Copyright, RAF Museum PRB 2603-23)

he had used the RAF Museum as the thin end of a wedge through which he could move towards a museum with a broader view of aviation.

Tanner expands towards a National Aviation Museum In the early 1970s Tanner campaigned more openly for a National Aviation Museum, emphasising the major contribution that the RAF had made to British aviation. A significant number of aircraft in the RAF’s historic collection were not on public display and expanding the RAFM’s estate and remit would enable him to create further exhibitions. The DES held a meeting in September 1974 between the RAFM, Science Museum, IWM and MOD to discuss future acquisition policy, the relationships between the museums and the museums’ management and funding structures. It also addressed the question of whether civil aircraft should be displayed at airports or alongside military aircraft. Options included ‘a federal structure with [a] coordinating board [or] a unitary structure: a National Aviation Museum, with various sub sites.’61 In 1975, the DES expressed concerns that the Treasury would want the MOD’s other major museums to be transferred to it; the DES might then insist on amalgamating all the Service museums with the IWM, under a single body of trustees.62 Tanner had written a lengthy paper outlining a plan for the RAFM’s future, calling for

Flight without feathers is not easy 203 the establishment of the National Air Museum; the RAFM would retain its name, with the sub-heading ‘The National Air Museum.’ It would expand using sites at Biggin Hill and Gaydon, to which aircraft from the RAF’s regional collections would be moved. There would be no expansion at Hendon until the 1980s, when the RAF was scheduled to leave; the museum could then take over some of the buildings.63 The announcement in the 1975 Defence Review that the RAF would leave Biggin Hill, one of the most famous airfields involved in the Battle of Britain, led to a proposal by Tanner to set up a Battle of Britain Museum there.64 In a 12-page paper, he stated, ‘what this country needs and will have is a National Air Museum’ and warned that the RAFM was in danger of being outstripped: ‘other institutions – and one great one in particular – will quite properly try to assume the task.’65 This seems to allude to the IWM’s expansion of its Duxford site. In April 1974, he had written to the Greater London Council outlining a scheme for a Battle of Britain display at Alexandra Palace.66 Neither Biggin Hill nor the Alexandra Palace scheme went ahead, but the RAF Museum’s Trustees approved the creation of a building at Hendon dedicated to the Battle of Britain. The MOD refused to fund either the construction or running costs, so it became a separate organisation – the Battle of Britain Museum – with the same trustees as the RAFM; it opened in 1978. An appeal raised money for the new museum; the running costs were covered by admission charges, but entry to the RAFM remained free.67 Tanner’s 1975 Aide Memoire for the new Chairman of Trustees states that the Trustees had agreed that the museum should tell ‘the story of the flying Services as they, and the RAF in particular, [emphasis added] created most aviation history.’68 This indicates a change of emphasis in the museum’s scope. Tanner said that his 1962 paper was on ‘the need for a national air museum and how it could be started’ (but his paper is only about an RAF museum) and ‘this paper was adopted as basic policy.’69 The Aide Memoire continued, The name was a problem: logically it should be ‘The National Aviation Museum’ but the bulk of air history is linked closely with the Royal Air Force; it became clear that the best site was in the hands of the RAF, as were the majority of those items needed for the initial displays; furthermore, the Service’s emotive appeal would make it easier for the necessary capital of one million pounds to be raised by public subscription.70 The appeal leaflet issued in 1964 to raise funds for the RAFM had stated that the museum was ‘the only national museum concerned solely with aviation. The many aspects covered include the military and civil …The emphasis is naturally on the unique great achievements, in peace and war, of the Royal Air Force.’71 This dictum that the museum should cover all of aviation is reflected in some of its acquisitions. Amongst the groups of papers

204  Peter Elliott added to the archive collection in the early 1970s are several which have little or no connection with the RAF: these include the papers of the aviatrices Amy Johnson, Jean Batten and Sheila Scott, and the extensive archive of the Royal Aero Club (RAeC), which coordinates air sports within the United Kingdom.72 When these records were acquired, many of the senior officers from the Second World War – most of whom had also served in the First World War – were coming to the end of their lives and significant groups of records were acquired from them or their families. It was evidently not difficult to fill the shelves with RAF-related material, so the acquisition of material from the wider world of aviation must have been done through choice, rather than a shortage of suitable donors. The Standing Commission on Museums and Galleries identified a possible need to ‘rationalise the collecting policies of the national and departmental museums with a legitimate interest in aviation’ and convened a meeting in November 1978. It was agreed to compile a census of historic aircraft in national and departmental museums, and those in private hands; it recommended export controls on historic aircraft, and encouraged the development of a museum in the North of England.73 A senior MOD official who attended the meeting, later expressed his view that ‘there is no prospect of the [RAFM] becoming the national aviation museum. There will be a national collection …in which the [RAFM] can play a significant part.’74 Tanner nevertheless continued to expand the RAF Museum over the next five years: the suggestion of a museum in the North of England led to a joint venture between the RAFM and Manchester City Council – the Manchester Air and Space Museum – which opened in 1983.75 It is now the Air and Space Gallery of the Museum of Science and Industry, part of the Science Museum Group, with many aircraft on loan from the RAFM.76 In 1979, the RAFM took over the running of the RAF’s Aerospace Museum at Cosford, one of the service’s regional collections, under a management agreement. Tanner was an honorary museum adviser to British Airways; some of the company’s retired airliners were displayed at Cosford, and there was a small British Airways exhibition at Hendon.77 In 1980, the RAFM trustees agreed to set up a National Air Museum Trust, probably in reaction to advice from the Treasury Solicitor that the RAFM’s deed of trust could not be changed, but it could cooperate with another charity.78 Around the same time Tanner had argued, unsuccessfully, that the name of the main Museum remains a problem; it does not define the Trust’s intended role, and sounds purely military in context; [which] makes giving difficult for many companies and impossible for numerous Trusts…. I think the answer is to extend the name to: Royal Air Force Museum of Aviation History.79 The National Heritage Act 1983 changed the way in which UK national museums (including some armed forces museums) were managed and

Flight without feathers is not easy 205 governed. The passage of the Bill revived discussions between MOD and the Office of Arts & Libraries (OAL) regarding the possible transfer of the three Service museums. Tanner had argued for such a change; the Air Force Board were apparently content to consider any proposal from the Trustees, while the MOD saw devolution under the Act as a welcome reduction in the number of MOD civil servants.80 Devolved museums would receive Grantin-Aid from their parenting departments and would have more freedom in how it was spent. The MOD’s intention was to devolve the RAFM and consider transferring it to the OAL after a few years.81 A devolved RAFM, it was felt, would need to have a broader remit than just the RAF. Tanner was in favour of this development which he believed would allow the RAFM to achieve parity with the NMM and to enjoy considerable benefits. While others, such as the Minister for the Arts, also expressed a view that the RAFM should broaden its remit in a way analogous to the NMM, the OAL itself was aware that its management did not bring significant financial or other benefits. On 1 August 1984, the RAFM was devolved from the MOD under the Act and became a Non-Departmental Public Body, sponsored by the MOD.82 Grant-in-Aid is supplemented by the museum’s own fundraising programmes.83 The final expansion at Hendon during Tanner’s directorship was to have been a National Air Museum building, which would include a Bomber Command Hall.84 Pressure from the Bomber Command Association (a veterans’ group) persuaded the trustees to give precedence to the ‘Bomber Command Museum.’85 This opened in 1983 and – like the Battle of Britain Museum – relied on an appeal for its construction costs and admission fees for income, and was the subject of a separate trust. In the economic climate of the 1980s, it proved impossible to pay off the loans raised to cover its construction and in 1987 the MOD agreed a rescue package. The Ministry provided some £1.8 million to clear the debt, to be recovered via reductions in the Museum’s Grant-in-Aid over five years. A single admission fee was introduced to cover the original RAF Museum (previously free) and the Battle of Britain and Bomber Command Museums, and work began to amalgamate the three trusts. The reduced Grant-in-Aid was not restored at the end of the five-year period.86 Tanner retired at the end of 1987, after fighting for some 25 years to establish a national air museum by expanding the RAF Museum. He died in May 2004, a few months after the opening of the new Milestones of Flight building at Hendon.

Conclusion Few people have had the opportunity to set up and develop a new national museum. Most of those set up in the last 100 years (such as Tate Modern and the National Railway Museum) have been outstations of existing

206  Peter Elliott museums, while other museums whose titles include ‘National’ are not funded by the government. Tanner recalled that while those galleries and museums recognised as being ‘national’ in the full accepted sense started either with a collection, a bequest, or a building …[his] new museum was to start without a collection, site, money or buildings.87 He achieved much in his 24 years as Director of the RAF Museum, and the RAFM is still counted as one of the world’s leading aviation museums. His work was formally recognised when he was appointed CBE in the 1979 New Year Honours.88 He led a dedicated team who held him in high regard, and he reportedly regarded his staff as being his family.89 His boundless imagination and persuasiveness brought many achievements, but not everyone was won over. Tanner’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography mentions his ‘buccaneering spirit’; this brought conflicts with some of the senior civil servants who fought to restrain his plans.90 Two – Sir Arthur Drew and Sir Ewen Broadbent – later became trustees, appointed by the Secretary of State for Defence presumably to curtail Tanner’s expansion plans, which would have increased the burden on the public purse. He seems to have had virtually unlimited energy and a wealth of ideas, but his work took its toll on his health. John Tanner clearly had intense devotion to the RAF, and to aviation in general. His vision centred on a museum comparable in range and status to the National Maritime Museum. It is impossible to know how the RAF Museum would have developed if Tanner had not been appointed; the project had certainly been given the green light, but it may have remained a relatively small-scale institution. He understood the potential scope and attraction of the museum in ways few other people could or did – his expansive vision contrasts with the more limited views of nearly everyone else involved. The aircraft collection, which in 1965 might be made ‘available for research by serious students,’ is now the museum’s greatest attraction. In the Museum’s formative years many more offers of donations were received than the staff could cope with. He insisted on the museum having research facilities, which were similarly swamped by enquiries from the public. This influx, and the priority given to creating exhibitions in the new buildings at Hendon, Cosford and Manchester meant that cataloguing the collections suffered, and there are still cataloguing backlogs, although the RAFM is almost certainly not unique in this regard. Nevertheless, some of the aircraft, artefacts and archives that were collected by the RAF Museum during Tanner’s directorship might not have survived, perhaps being sold abroad or deteriorating beyond repair. The crucial factors in the failure of Tanner’s bid to develop the RAF Museum into the National Air Museum are funding and the scope of the museum, together with the question of who should administer it. Who should pay for it and what would they want from it in return? The OAL was unwilling to run

Flight without feathers is not easy 207 a purely RAF Museum, while the MOD did not want to broaden the RAFM’s remit – not least because any expansion of the museum would result in extra costs, to be met from the Defence budget. The MOD repeatedly argued that the RAFM’s Trust Deed restricted its operations to RAF history and the RAF was concerned that if it lost direct control of the museum it would impact on recruitment, which had been an important driver for the museum since it was first conceived in the 1930s.91 Other parties such as the OAL and DES, who would have been interested in a wider remit for the museum, were concerned about taking on extra liabilities without guarantees from the MOD. The debt incurred through the Bomber Command Museum project was a concern for both parties. Kasia Tomasiewicz points out in her chapter that the IWM is now ‘a social history, not a military history, museum’ reflecting a change in emphasis, from battles and weaponry to the experiences of those who were involved. In a similar way the RAFM’s stated purpose is now ‘to share the story of the Royal Air Force, past, present and future – using the stories of its people and our collections in order to engage, inspire and encourage learning.’92This change in emphasis, responding to demographic changes across the nation, has widened the RAF Museum’s appeal from the dwindling number of veterans and aircraft enthusiasts, attracting families and individuals who have no prior knowledge of the RAF. The aircraft are still a major attraction, but the men and women without whom they could not fly and fight are much more visible. Tanner was an authority on heraldry and designed the Museum’s arms.93 The motto Per Ardua Alis is a variation on the RAF motto Per Ardua Ad Astra and was probably inspired by his struggle to set up and expand the Museum. One translation is ‘Through difficulties on wings’ which may reflect a quotation from Plautus (chosen by Tanner) that greeted visitors to the newly opened RAF Museum: ‘Flight without feathers is not easy.’

Notes 1. Details of Tanner’s early life come from the author’s interview with Tanner’s widow Andrea, 21 May 2019. 2. Andrea Tanner, Interview. 3. Donald Adamson, ‘Tanner, John Benedict Ian’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 4. ‘The College Museum’, The Royal Air Force College Journal, 32: 1 (1960), p. 227; E. B. Haslam, The history of Royal Air Force Cranwell (London: HMSO, 1982), p. 96. 5. RAF Museum (Henceforth RAFM) File headed ‘Director’, ‘A museum for the Royal Air Force’, 1962. 6. RAFM [Uncatalogued], ‘Chairman’s aide memoire’, 1975. 7. , ‘Chairman’s aide memoire’, 1975, p. 3. 8. The National Archives (Henceforth TNA) T218/57, Note by K E Couzens, c. October 1958. 9. ‘A museum for the Royal Air Force’, 1962, paragraph 8.

208  Peter Elliott 10. Dominick A Pisaro, ‘The long road to a new museum’ in National Air and Space Museum: An autobiography, ed. by Michael J Neufeld and Alex M Spencer (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2010), pp. 182–+246. 11. David H. DeVorkin and Michael J. Neufeld, ‘Space artifact or Nazi weapon? Displaying the Smithsonian’s V-2 missile, 1976–2011’, Endeavour, 35: 4 (2011), p. 187; Joanne M Gernstein London, ‘A modest show of arms: exhibiting the armed forces and the Smithsonian Institution, 1945–1976’. PhD Thesis, George Washington University, 2000. 12. David J. Rhees, ‘Celebration or Education? The Goals of the U.S. National Air and Space Museum’, in Industrial Society & its Museums 1890-1990: Social Aspirations and Cultural Politics, ed. by Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus and Alex Roland (Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993), p. 82; Leonard Carmichael, Smithsonian Annual Report (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1955), p. 3. 13. Hermione Giffard, ‘The politics of donating technological artifacts: Techno-nationalism and the donations of the world’s first jet engines’, History and Technology, 30: 1 (2014), pp. 61–82. 14. History of the National Maritime Museum [online]. National Maritime Museum [cited 22 November 2018] Available from: https://www.rmg.co.uk/national-maritime-museum/history.About the National Museum of the Royal Navy [online]. National Museum of the Royal Navy [cited 22 November 2018] Available from: https://www.nmrn.org.uk/about-national-museum-royal-navy-0. 15. Interview with Ken Ellis, 29 August 2019. 16. John Tanner, ‘The Royal Air Force Museum’, The Aeronautical Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, 72 (1968), p. 287. 17. TNA AIR 2/132/D22707, Letter from the Air Board to the Committee of the National War Museum, 19 December 1917. 18. TNA AIR 6/22, Air Council Memorandum 552 ‘The institution of an Aeronautical Museum’, November 1931. 19. Air Council Memorandum 552 ‘The institution of an Aeronautical Museum’. 20. Alys Cundy, ‘Thresholds of Memory: Representing Function through Space and Object at the Imperial War Museum, London, 1918–2014’, Museum History Journal, 8: 2 (2015), pp 255–59. 21. Sophy Gardner, ‘The prophet’s interpreter: Sir Samuel Hoare, Hugh Trenchard and their campaign for influence’, Air Power Review, 21: 1 (2018), pp. 48–72; Sophy Gardner, The early years of the RAF: a cautionary tale of history in the making, RAF Museum Trenchard Lecture, 15 February 2018, [cited 5 November 2018]. Podcast available from: https://www.aerosociety. com/news/audio-the-early-years-of-the-raf-a-cautionary-tale-of-history-inthe-making-raf-museum-trenchard-lectures/. 22. TNA AIR 6/22, Air Council Memorandum 570, ‘The museum interests of the Air Ministry and Royal Air Force’, 1935; Statement on the Air Estimates for 1935 (London: HMSO, 1935), p. 3; Supplementary Estimate, Air Services 1935 (London: HMSO, 1935), p. 9. 23. TNA AIR 2/2470, Enclosure 4A, Extract from the minutes of the 154th meeting of the Air Council, 4 March 1935. 24. Ken Ellis, Lost Aviation Collections of Britain (Manchester: Crécy Publishing, 2011). 25. Jim Simpson & Kev Darling, RAF Gate Guards (Shrewsbury: Airlife, 1992). 26. TNA AIR 2/14625, Air Ministry Order A.11/1962, ‘Disposal of non-public silver and plate, Church Property and items of historical interest’, 17 January 1962; RAFM PR02323, Defence Council Instruction S. 194/68, ‘Disposal of non-public silver and plate, Church Property and items of historical interest’, 18 December 1968.

Flight without feathers is not easy 209 27. RAF Radar Museum, [online] cited 23 August 2019, available from: https:// www.radarmuseum.co.uk/index.htm; The RAF Regiment Heritage Centre [online] cited 23 August 2019, available from: https://rafregimentheritagecentre.org.uk/; Royal Air Force Marham Aviation Heritage Centre, [online], cited 23 August 2019, Available from: https://www.explorewestnorfolk. co.uk/venues/royal-air-force-marham-aviation-heritage-centre-74/. 28. TNA AIR 2/14352, Minute 1; AIR 20/12053, ‘Interim report on the formation of a National Aeronautical Collection’, February 1956. 29. ‘President 1959-60’, Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, 63 (581), May 1959, pp. xxiv–xxv. 30. TNA AIR 2/14352 ‘Historic Aircraft Collection: minutes of meeting’, letters dated 17 May and 4 August 1954, respectively. 31. ‘Nash Collection for R.Ae.S.’, Flight, 15 January 1954, p. 58. 32. TNA AIR 2/14352, Minute 1, paragraph 4. 33. AIR 2/14625, Enclosure 13A, ‘A meagre RAF Exhibition’, Daily Telegraph, 11 September 1956; Enclosure 1A, ‘Historical Aircraft – policy’, Letter from Maintenance Command, 20 October 1956. 34. ‘Honourable retirement’, Flight, 19 July 1957, p. 66. 35. R E Leach, A Lancaster at Peace (PA474) (Lincoln, Lincolnshire Lancaster Committee, c.1982); ‘Dakota joins BBMF’, RAF News, (829) 6 August 1993, p. 3. 36. TNA WORK 17/336, Enclosure 4, A W Cunliffe to F J Root, 14 October 1958. 37. TNA WORK 17/336, Enclosure 5, F J Root to Sir Eric Seal, 15 October 1958. 38. TNA AIR 2/14352, Minute 2, 29 October 1954. 39. Andrew Renwick, RAF Hendon. The Birthplace of Aerial Power (Manchester: Crécy Publishing, 2012), pp. 66–81. 40. Peter Masefield & Bill Gunston, Flight Path (Shrewsbury: Airlife, 2002), pp. 53–54. 41. TNA AIR 20/11199 Enclosure 27A, letter from J. E. S. Simon (Financial Secretary) to C. I. Orr-Ewing (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Air Ministry), 20 November 1958. 42. TNA AIR 2/14352 Enclosure 9A, ‘National Air Museum. List of historic aircraft still in existence’ ‘Historical Group’, Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, (63), August 1959, pp. 479–82; ‘Registering the famous’, Flight, 21 August 1959, p. 42. 43. TNA AIR 20/11682 Working Party on Historic Aircraft: Final Report. 44. TNA AIR 20/12073 Enclosure 2A, Note on the proposed exhibition in the new Whitehall Building, 4 August 1960. 45. TNA 20/12073 Enclosure 9A, Extract from conclusions of Air Council Standing Committee Meeting, 21(61), 4 December 1961. Slightly different wording appears in the Committee’s First Interim Report. 46. TNA 20/12073 Enclosure 28B, Air Ministry Historical Advisory Committee: First Interim Report, July 1962. 47. ‘A museum for the Royal Air Force’, paragraph 2. 48. TNA T 225/2799, Letter from Sir Henry T Smith (Deputy Under-Secretary, Air Ministry) to Sir Burke Trend, Treasury, 17 September 1962. 49. TNA 225/2799, Note by R C Griffiths, 20 September 1962; TNA 225/2799, Note by DMK, 25 September 1962. 50. TNA T 225/1105, Letter from J E S Simon (Financial Secretary) to Hugh Fraser (Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for War), 1 September 1959. 51. AIR 20/12073 Enclosure 85A, Air Council Paper AC(64)16, The Royal Air Force Museum: note by Permanent Under-Secretary; TNA T 225/2799 Paper by W A Allman, 13 May 1964.

210  Peter Elliott 52. Hansard, Official Report, Commons, 9 March 1964 Volume 691, Column 160. 53. TNA T 225/2673 Enclosure 108, Letter from George Brown (First Secretary of State, Department of Economic Affairs) to Denis Healey (Secretary of State for Defence), 25 November 1965. 54. TNA AIR 20/12075 Enclosure 39B, Minutes from Minister (RAF) to the Chief Secretary of the Treasury, 3 June 1965. 55. TNA AIR 20/11494, ‘Confidential notes on the Federation of British Artists and the Institute of Contemporary Arts’, 7 May 1965. 56. Peter G Masefield, ‘Royal Air Force Museum’, Times, 1 March 1966, p. 13. 57. Andrew Renwick, RAF Hendon. The Birthplace of Aerial Power, (Manchester: Crécy Publishing, 2012), p. 20. 58. TNA AIR 20/12077 Enclosure 148, Draft answers to Parliamentary Question and supplementary questions, 24 October 1967; TNA T225/3339, ‘Copy of a Treasury Minute dated 16 October 1969 concerning the conditional gift of land and buildings to the Trustees of the Royal Air Force Museum.’ 59. TNA ED 245/30, Letter from Sir Arthur Drew to C W Wright, 17 January 1972. 60. TNA ED 245/30, Loose Minute, G J Spence to Mr MacDowall,12 July 1973. 61. TNA AIR 20/13344, DUS(Air) to Head of S4(Air), 13 September 1974. 62. TNA ED 245/30, Letter from C W Wright to Ewen Broadbent (Deputy Under-Secretary of State (AIR)), 25 July 1975. 63. TNA AIR 20/13344 Enclosure 10, ‘The Royal Air Force Museum – Its Future’, pp. 3–6. 64. TNA ED 245/30 ‘RAF Museum – Battle of Britain extension’, 3 February 1977. 65. TNA AIR 20/12664, ‘The Battle of Britain Museum, the future of Biggin Hill and the Diamond Jubilee of the RAF’, c. June 1975. 66. TNA AIR 20/13345 Enclosure 3, Letter to the Chairman, GLC Arts and Recreation Committee, 8 April 1974. 67. RAFM KE 2/1 Minutes of the Trustees’ meeting 29 March 1977, paragraph 10. 68. ‘Chairman’s aide memoire’, p. 3. 69. Ibid, p. 1. 70. Ibid, p. 3. 71. RAFM KE 2/1, Minutes of Trustees meeting, 12 September 1974, paragraph 6; RAFM T834579, Royal Air Force Museum, Hendon, London NW9. 72. RAFM AC77/30, AC72/25, AC77/27 & AC75/21, respectively. 73. Standing Commission on Museums and Galleries, 10th report, 1973–1977 (London: HMSO, 1977), p. 63.TNA AIR 20/13345, ‘Record of a meeting on Aviation Museums’, 30 November 1978. 74. TNA AIR 20/13345, Loose minute from Head of S4(Air), 30 November 1978. 75. RAFM R014708, Manchester Air & Space Museum pocket guide, c.1983. 76. Ken Ellis, Wrecks & relics, 26th edition (Manchester: Crécy Publishing, 2018), p. 169. 77. RAFM file 17/1, ‘The future of the RAF Museum’, 14 April 1976, paragraph 3. 78. RAFM KE 2/1, Minutes of Trustees meeting, 11 April 1980, paragraphs 12–28; TNA AIR 20/13345, Letter from the Treasury Solicitor to Head of S4(Air), 16 March 1979. 79. TNA AIR 20/13345, Letter from Tanner to all Trustees, February 1979.

Flight without feathers is not easy 211 80. TNA ED 245/30 Letter from the Permanent Under-Secretary of State MOD, to the Permanent Secretary, DES, 12 November 1982, paragraph 2; Jonathan Lynn & Antony Jay, Yes, Prime Minister, Volume 1 (London: BBC Enterprises, 1986), p. 154. 81. TNA ED 245/30, Letter from OAL to Treasury Solicitor 25 November 1983, paragraph 7 82. Statutory Instrument 1984 No 422, The Armed Forces Museums (Designation of Institutions) Order 1984, 27 April 1984. 83. RAF Museum Annual Review 2017-18 [online] [Cited 1 September 2019] Available from: https://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/about-us/policy-performance/annual-review/annual-report-2017-2018.aspx. 84. RAFM KE2/1, Minutes of Trustees meeting, 14 January 1981, paragraphs 25–26. 85. RAFM KE2/1, Minutes of Trustees meeting, 8 April 1981, paragraphs 19–22. 86. RAFM KE2/1, Minutes of Trustees meeting, 14 September 1987, paragraphs 5.1-5.14. 87. ‘Chairman’s aide memoire’, p. 2. 88. https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/47723/supplement/9. 89. Andrea Tanner, Interview. 90. Donald Adamson, ‘Tanner, John Benedict Ian’. 91. TNA AIR 20/13344 Enclosure 107, Record of a meeting to consider the establishment of a national air museum, 25 November 1978. 92. RAFM, Our purpose and vision, [online] Cited 9 September 2019, Available from: https://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/about-us/. 93. Andrea Tanner, Interview.

10 ‘We are a social history, not a military history museum’ Large objects and the ‘peopling’ of galleries in the Imperial War Museum, London Kasia Tomasiewicz Introduction This chapter look closely at two different components within the Imperial War Museum (IWM) – large objects and the ‘peopling’ of galleries.1 Both perform slightly different roles in the Museum, and this performance is culturally and historically defined and mediated. Since the 1960s, large objects have appeared to align the Museum with the image of military history, whereas more recently ‘peopling’ has been an attempt to reframe the war museum space to that of social history. These components are often framed as oppositional or competitive, best summarised in the Museum by the phrase ‘we are a social history, not a military history museum.’2 Rather than taking this oppositional relation for granted, this chapter interrogates the ways in which drawing a sharp distinction between these historical approaches within the Museum can limit an understanding of the nuanced ways in which war museums represent a sense of the past. In museum practitioner terms, a large object might be considered as such if it cannot easily be moved, mounted or transported. Ironically, the most immovable objects are often acquisitioned to highlight the geographical expanse and movement of war, for example, tanks, ships and planes, or the guns that are attached to them. By conveying a sense of the size and scale of war, large objects are vital pedagogic tools, and yet they have also become synonymous with a pleasurable association with war because in their size and scale they are also objects of intense fascination for some visitors. Large objects, therefore, not only can come to dominate certain parts of museum space due to their size, but can also define and limit the imaginative possibilities afforded by war museums in making them appear as sites of specialised interest. On the other hand, the ‘peopling’ of galleries is the frequently heard solution to the ways in which the Museum can reorient towards ‘social history.’ Put simply, ‘peopling’ is the engendering of a sense of historical or contemporary people into museum spaces.3 In some form or another, this has been attempted in the IWM since its inception. ‘Peopling’ may range from the use of non-human and human ‘people,’ such as effigies, mannequins

214  Kasia Tomasiewicz or actors representing veterans, to the use of material culture and personal ephemera such as film and photographs, or through design techniques such as recreated ‘experiences.’ ‘Peopling’ does not have to take any particular form, although it is most commonly enacted through a coupling of material culture with a narrative of a personal experience. How then can we think about the relationship between these two aspects – the display of large objects and the peopling of galleries? Clearly, they are not neat dichotomies in terms of their materiality, and only make up part of the materialities present within a museum.4 The colour of the walls, the items sold in the gift shop and the presence of other people, all contribute to an impression of a museum of ‘military’ or ‘social’ history.5 They both also play – historically and in the present – a vital role in the museum ecosystem, creating what we might think of as a sense of atmosphere.6 One way to approach the relation between large objects and peopling, however, might be by thinking through the phrase ‘we are a social history, not a military history museum,’ which can be heard in many corners of the IWM. It rolls from the tongues of museum practitioners and senior management, punctuating public press conferences, internal meetings, corridors, and kitchens. Behind the ‘common sense’ obviousness in which this phrase is uttered, however, lies a deep sense of pressure. These terms are not entirely reflective of disciplinary divisions in historical scholarship. Instead, ‘social history’ and ‘military history’ act as culturally loaded terms, dependent on an understanding of a particular museumspeak. The widespread repetition of this phrase in the IWM illustrates a tension that can prove useful in thinking about war museums in two ways. First, in being repeated both internally and externally, it reminds us that although the Museum appears to speak in representations with one ‘voice,’ it is actually made up of numerous individual human and non-human actors with different levels of agency within an institutional hierarchy.7 In representing the past, it is often forgotten that museums have complex histories of their own and that they are home to museum practitioners and objects that also have relationships with war inside and outside of the Museum’s walls. The use of such a phrase also acts as a reminder, as much as a genuine expression of intent, of, to use Handler and Gable’s evocative phrase, the ‘company line’ – the mantras and messages used by senior management to shape workplace practices, and the nuanced ways in which members of staff can both simultaneously internalise and resist institutional changes.8 Second, the phrase demonstrates a concern about the purpose of war museums, which ultimately asks ‘what do they do, how do they do it, and for whom?.’ Since their widespread development following the first and second world wars, there has been a deep-rooted questioning of representations of conflict in war museums.9 They are unable to show, at least in any comprehensive way, what war was actually like. Instead, they can offer only a heavily constructed and highly subjective glimpse into which aspects

‘We are a social history’ 215 of the past present society deems the most valuable. Therefore, the tension between ‘military history’ and ‘social history’ lies in the different ways they facilitate the shaping of wider engagements with war. The former is essentially a means of pedagogic practice, a placing of value on educating about the historical, political and cultural specificities of war with the intention of engendering a better knowledge of the nature of conflict. The latter, on the other hand, is to invite participation from audiences to make more emotional and affective meanings from selective aspects of conflict. Despite a commonly held assumption by those external to museums that they are static monoliths or mausoleums, the repetition of this phrase crucially both highlights the porosity of museums to wider social changes and marks a moment of transition, in which the tensions in how a national museum makes sense of the past are most visible.10 To explore the interplay between large objects as military history and peopling galleries as social history, this chapter will give a broad overview of the ways in which large objects and a sense of ‘people’ have historically featured in the war museum space. It will do this predominantly by focusing on two of the most identifiable aspects of large objects and ‘peopling,’ namely, the 1968 installation of the 15-inch naval guns that adorn the museums forecourt as the large objects that have come to define the museum space, and the Blitz Experience (1989) exhibition that could be thought of as the beginning of a trend in the Museum towards ‘peopling.’ Both large objects and ‘peopling’ engender particular emotional resonances in audiences, albeit in slightly different ways, and each come with benefits and drawbacks. By way of conclusion then, this chapter will frame how both might be seen to work in tandem for the museum of war for the twenty-first century. Before we look more closely at these two aspects of war museum space, however, it would first be useful to give some historical and contextual background to the IWM. Studies on museums are often separated into historical approaches on museum practice and display, or contemporary analyses of current working practice. Rarely are past and present situated alongside each other. This chapter aims to do just that, as previous practices and collecting policies have much to offer contemporary analysis and, as ethnographic and universal museums have been discovering recently, objects have resounding political afterlives long after they have been accessioned into museum collections.11 Looking at the museum from the year it was established until the present gives us not only an overview of the institution, but can also highlight processes of change and continuity more profoundly.

Historicising the Imperial War Museum Although the Museum was created during, and as a result of, the First World War, we can see how its development is clearly marked by the use of a well-established framework of museum practice and space, that had

216  Kasia Tomasiewicz already been determined by earlier museological developments in the nineteenth century. This can be seen most clearly in the architecture and housing of the Museum. In its initial years, finding a building to house the collections was fraught with difficulties and plans to construct a custom-made site were rejected by the War Cabinet due to their financial cost.12 To avoid stagnation, soon after being established the Museum staged a temporary exhibition in Burlington House, a well-known Royal Academy-run art space. It then found more permanent lodgings in the Crystal Palace, a former remnant of the Great Exhibition, the space in which it was officially inaugurated by King George V in June 1920. The propensity of the dilapidated metal-and-glass Crystal Palace to both expand and contract, leak and furnish tropical heat, meant that the Museum was soon temporarily set up in the Imperial Institute, a move which led to a reduction in space and therefore the disposal of many invaluable objects.13 This move also angered some Dominion governments, in New Zealand for example, who saw the site as a questionable ‘white elephant’ for representing relations between Empire and Dominions.14 It was not until 1936, almost 21 years after it was first proposed and established, that the Museum found its permanent lodging in the former psychiatric asylum St Bethlem in the Fields, or colloquially, Bedlam. The irony of a museum of war being housed in a former asylum was not lost at the time.15 However, the design of the building, with its acropolis-style columns and inscription about Henry VIII, also puts one in mind of the image of a temple, in many ways mirroring the grandeur of the other, earlier-established national museums.16 And yet, the Museum was also an unprecedented venture in terms of content, scope and collecting practices.17 At the heart of this was a dual sense of purpose. It was created both as a cynical ‘propaganda move’ to boost morale during the First World War, but also as a ‘sincere attempt to record the war.’18 This duality in its aims has led to a perennial uncertainty in the Museum as to the societal function it performs. Does it legitimise and perpetuate past, present and future wars, or provide context and frameworks for how and what was won and lost? For Winter, war museums must create balance between an educational role as ‘the profane,’ and their role as memorial spaces as ‘the sacred.’19 To add to this, however, they are also places of – for lack of a better word – the sublime. They contain the material culture of the past that, in coming from a long Victorian tradition of museum practice, has always intended to shock, awe, and, above all, entertain. 20 Nevertheless, representations of war are always politicised and political. How war museums represent war matters because war – and especially the ‘total wars’ of the twentieth century – is the cornerstones of British national identity. Narratives of war provide spaces for belonging and are a key aspects of national identity forming practices.21 War museums play

We are a social history 217 a crucial role in framing those stories. As Noakes makes clear, museums are ‘powerful sites of cultural transmission and public education; they are an embodiment of knowledge and power, important hegemonic instruments.’22 As a national museum, however, visitors also have to ‘buy into’ the messages that it conveys. Museum messages therefore have to also reflect wider conversations about the appropriate ways to represent and commemorate past conflicts. For Esben Kjeldbæk, war museums do not remain static in terms of their approach, and instead can broadly be categorised into three generational types from which they ‘speak.’23 The first generation is marked by Ethos or tradition, which is often driven by veterans and has ‘strong roots in the history of the special interest that created it.’ This can be seen in the strong veteran-centred narratives and workforce in the IWM, and particularly the ways in which its approach to the Second World War destroyed many of the veterans’ hopes that the Museum would remain a site dedicated to the ‘war to end all wars.’ The second generation is characterised by Logos or learning, and is world of the professional, marked by a ‘dedication to teaching and rationality.’24 It was not until 1960 that the Museum significantly began this phase under the new Director-General, Noble Frankland. A military historian by training, he began a process of professionalisation by employing university graduates, conserving collections, expanding and redesigned the Museum’s galleries, and endeavouring to turn the Museum into a site of historical research. 25 The third generation museum is marked by Pathos, in which emotion is engendered through an ‘emphasis on design, the wish to follow trends and its focus on the needs of its visitors.’ The approaches undertaken by the subsequent Director-Generals, Alan Borg, Robert Crawford and Diane Lees, have further moved the Museum significantly away from the technical specifications of objects and lengthy narratives, towards more emotive, diverse and visitor-centred representations of the past. These terms act as a temporal short-hand, a way of denoting which part of the Museum’s life cycle we are ‘speaking’ from and about. As categories, they are far from neat boundaries and show significant overlap. They are also not entirely fixed in terms of what they represent, and each generation provides spaces for multiple forms of representation. Crucially, however, they highlight the ways in which war museums realise and rearticulate a sense of purpose. This articulation can be enacted in fundamental ways, and we can see this process of transition between the Logos and Pathos generations in the phrase ‘we are a social history, not a military history museum.’ These are positioned as antithetical to one another, not because the Museum doesn’t represent aspects of both (it does), but because ‘military history’ appears synonymous with the Museum’s actual or perceived past, and ‘social history’ with the Museum’s present and aspirational future.

218  Kasia Tomasiewicz Staff feel the need to distance themselves from this ‘military history’ past because, although relevant enough to reference, it is increasingly seen as outdated. It symbolises the war museums of old, with their grey, lofty interiors, musty smell, and ‘book on walls’ approach. In this context, military history is seen as exclusionary because a high level of a particular type of technical knowledge is needed to fully engage with it. It is also seen as exclusivist, as it represents geopolitical strategies enacted by ‘Great Men’ rather than the experiences of ‘ordinary’ contemporaries. Additionally, it is thought to be representative of, and appeal to, one specific type of visitor – assumed to be white, male and middle-aged. In short, military history is not sexy. It’s niche. As the Museum develops its own personal brand, as all museums now must, how it appeals to existing and new audiences has become of paramount concern, even if this means moving away from what could be thought of as a primary community or stakeholder group. ‘Social history,’ on the other hand, is used in this instance as an aspirational statement of approach for solving, or at least addressing, some of the longstanding concerns about public access to museums and the types of representation within them.26 Social history is framed as ‘history from below,’ in a move away from ‘Great Men.’ As such, it appears more representative of, and may appeal to, a range of historically marginalised or minority groups who previously felt under- or misrepresented. Widening access to museums has become a sector-wide aim in England since developments in critical museology. 27 This has happened alongside changes to guidelines for museum funding, introduced by the Department of Culture, Media, and Sport under the New Labour government, which encouraged museums to appeal to children, the working classes and visitors from ethnic minority backgrounds. 28 Whereas a ‘military history’ orientation might fail to secure new visitor interest and competitive funding, ‘social history’ might just succeed. In this typology, the IWM’s more distant memorial function would represent the Ethos generation, ‘military history’ would represent the Logos generation, and ‘social history’ the Pathos generation. As each Director seeks to carve a new path for the Museum and respond to changing social and culture pressures, these generational iterations are marked as much by profound change as they are by continuity. With the contextual groundwork laid, it would now be useful to turn to an exploration of the features of large objects within the museum space before looking at attempts to ‘people’ galleries.

Large objects In order to understand the role performed by large objects in the war museum space, it is useful here to consider another typology alongside that of Kjeldbæk’s Ethos, Logos and Pathos. For Scott, objects of all sizes in

We are a social history 219 military museums are also often displayed in three different ways: celebratory, sanitised and realistic. The ‘celebratory’ approach ‘creates a largely positive view of war by extolling the achievements of the military.’ The ‘sanitary’ approach entails a more ‘neutral display by placing objects in alternative contexts.’ In contrast, the ‘realistic’ approach displays war ‘in a “warts and all” manner, in an overt attempt to remind visitors of the horrors of war.’29 War museums can often do all three simultaneously in different parts of the same building. Following Kjeldbæk’s initial typology, however, shifting emphases on the celebratory, the sanitary and the realistic can appear to follow the generational approaches to displaying war. In the Museum’s earliest years, its ‘Ethos’ generation, the Museum displayed many of its large objects in a ‘celebratory’ way. For Scott, this ‘celebratory’ form can encapsulate display of the memorial function of objects. From the Museum’s temporary exhibition at Burlington House in 1918, large objects featured prominently and acted as ‘war trophies’ within the transitional spaces of the entrance hall.30 Although some large weapons acted as pedagogic tools, others were incorporated more fully into memorial displays. For example, some of these objects were draped, for example, with wreaths to contextualise and imbue them with a memorial significance. From thereon, large objects of war such as artillery guns held a prominent position in the Museum’s central spaces, as the designs of the earlier exhibitions were incorporated into the Museum when it moved to Lambeth Road. As Cornish notes, however, this was also partly down to necessity, as the Museum’s smaller collections became the targets of thieves and larger objects were harder to steal.31 Large objects were additionally a central point of imaginative play and, ironically, some had to be guarded by barbed wire to stop visitors physically damaging displays.32 From the Museum’s first temporary iteration, the display of large objects remained fairly consistent until the Logos generation of the Museum. For Noble Frankland, who was the Museum’s Director-General from 1960 until 1982, the Museum had a ‘dingy and neglected air’ prior to his arrival.33 He undertook a process of turning the collection and display practices from apparent random assemblages of things into more coherently structured narrative-based designs. It was also under Frankland that the two large objects that are most synonymous with the Museum came to be displayed – the two 15-inch naval guns that adorn the Museum’s forecourt (see Figure 10.1). The guns were unveiled on 8 August 1968 by the former Chairman of Trustees, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Algernon Willis, who was instrumental in their acquisition. One of the guns had been mounted on the Royal Navy’s HMS Ramillies and the other on both HMS Resolution and HMS Roberts. Plans for the installation of these weapons dated back to 1965, when the majority of large naval guns was being melted down for scrap metal.34 Behind their veneer of indestructability, large objects are ironically very much at risk, both before they enter and within museum collections because

220  Kasia Tomasiewicz

Figure 10.1  The installation of the 15-inch naval guns outside the Imperial War Museum, 1968. © IWM (MH10356)

of the difficulties of maintaining them. Due to their imminent destruction, Southwark council, to whom the park surrounding the Museum belongs, agreed that they could be installed in the forecourt. For Frankland, his primary objective was to create a better historical understanding of conflict. As he made clear in his autobiography, ‘seeing the whole length of a 15-inch naval gun enables one to understand better the complexities of the Battle of Jutland.’35 It is impossible to fully or comprehensively represent war in a museum, but highlighting the magnitude of conflict is particularly difficult. Large objects, however, can engender a powerful sense of the scale of war. As Cornish notes, large objects provide ‘the opportunity for the visitor to engage their sense of touch, coupled with the realness of the objects that are not sequestered behind glass gives them great impact and immediacy.’36 This means that they can reach visitors in

We are a social history 221 profound ways, complementing the use of two-dimensional material, such as maps. This is particularly poignant in the case of ‘total wars,’ which are often described as ‘unimaginable’ in terms of size and scale. These objects therefore can powerfully aid understandings of the past, providing some answers to how, why and where wars progressed and changed. In war museums, these large objects have often been displayed for the technical qualities they offer. In doing so, however, they are framed using what Scott might term a ‘sanitised approach.’ They appear as no more than pedagogic tools. Their gleaming paintwork gives no indication of their war service, and no traces can be found on their material form of the horrors of war, or indeed what such an object might do to human bodies. Such objects tie strongly into debates around object fetishism, in the ways that they obscure the presence of people or the context in which they were used. As Knell summarises, ‘museums are implicitly sites of object fetishism,’ because ‘thought and flesh – the ghosts of people – become implicitly and objectively embodied in object and architecture, the material things can now be made to speak for them.’37 In such a positioning, material culture appears as the lens through which to access the particular world view on display in a national museum, whilst obstructing the presence of humans within this. This takes on a specific charge in war museums, as the large objects on display have often been used in the killing of people. As Raths notes, ‘military vehicles and weaponry, are often the focus of serious object fetishism.’ Indeed, for him: the technical aura of the objects … is so dominating that people tend to be overwhelmed by it. The technical character of the objects often fills the mind of visitors and employees alike, leaving no mental space to come up with questions regarding historical contexts.38 In this way, large objects appear to relate directly to the trepidation within the Museum about ‘military history,’ because it is the representation of machines that becomes the primary focus, rather than the consequences of war on people. The physical dominance of these machines can obscure their relationship with humans, but crucially they are also often enjoyed by visitors for their technical and physical prowess. They can engender a powerful emotional resonance – a sense of excitement, and by extension, a pleasurable association with war. As Graham Dawson and Michael Paris have gone some ways to show, a ‘pleasure culture of war’ – the ways in which the image of war is perpetuated, legitimised and, crucially, enjoyed primarily by males – is deeply embedded in British culture.39 This can be through a wide range of cultural products, including toys, games, comics, films and novels. The large objects of war on display in the IWM therefore are easily identified and enjoyed by a particular type of visitor – the men

222  Kasia Tomasiewicz and boys who are often the targets and main audiences of these coded cultural products. Crucially, despite their pedagogic grounding, during the military history orientation of the Logos generation, the naval guns were also recognised for the particular sense of excitement and pleasure they generated. Indeed, Frankland openly acknowledged the attractive potential of these objects for visitors. He received a letter stating: I was sitting next to … the other day, and he said I ought to have chains put round the 15” guns at your place, as small boys were scrambling all over them. I said it was nothing to do with me, but perhaps the small boys enjoyed it.40 In his reply, Frankland agreed, stating: ‘My own opinion, for what it is worth, is that the guns were put there as much for small boys as anyone else.’41 Clearly, alongside their pedagogic framing, these objects were also understood as visually exciting, authentic objects – part of the pull, a drawing factor for visitors to the Museum. And yet, they were also a source of contention for other visitors. In 1968, for example, the year in which these guns were unveiled, there was a series of protests and demonstrations at the Museum. Protestors surrounded the guns, holding hands in a symbolic reframing of the museum forecourt and a powerful gesture of unity. In addition, taking a stance against what he saw as an institution that glorified war for children, arsonist Timothy Daley set fire to the Museum’s dome a few months after the unveiling of the guns. The fire had a long-lasting effect on the museum and staff, and the damage took many years fully to repair. The different readings of these objects goes to show how large objects, as with all objects, do not ‘speak’ but embody the social and subjective meanings placed on them. They can take on new meanings as those who have seen active war experience die and technologies change. Most recently then, the Museum has begun to move towards what Scott might term a ‘realistic’ representation, in which the active effects of war on objects are not obscured but valued components of their materiality. Following the Museum’s regeneration in 2014, the ‘Witness to War’ atrium display, along with the usual array of tanks and planes, also included a crushed car from Baghdad. This object highlights how the materiality of violence can be represented through the visual impact of war on machinery and which, by extension begs the visitor to ask – if weapons can cause such destruction to a car, what can they do to a human body? A ‘realistic’ representation of machinery is not always possible, of course. A crushed car from a modern conflict may be found and accessioned into the Museum’s collections to fit modern display criteria, whereas the partially

We are a social history 223 destroyed material culture from the ‘total wars’ of the twentieth century would have been recycled soon after. The potential for older collections could be seen therefore to be limited within modern framings of the impact of war. And yet, such large objects can still define and limit the imaginative possibilities offered by the Museum. The Museum has, however, a made conscious effort to reframe such objects, including the iconic 15-inch naval guns. Due to their size and the immediate impact they have on visitors, the topography of objects around them has been more consciously considered. One such object is a piece of the Berlin Wall, with ‘Change your life’ emblazoned on it. This piece of Berlin Wall could be seen as a move in the Museum away from ‘military’ to wider historical changes and ‘social’ history in the twentieth century. The wall, however, is significantly overshadowed by the guns, a powerful reminder that despite moves to reorient the Museum, it will always be shaped by its collections from earlier iterations that had different questions, aims and motivations driving representations. In addition, in a bid to speak to new audiences, the IWM has more recently tried to position the guns as subversive sites in their own right. These large objects set and define the imaginative possibilities of what you might find in the Museum before even entering. In order to publicise its temporary exhibition People Power (2017), the Museum very temporarily installed large flowers in the gun barrels.42 This act could be thought of cynically as a publicity stunt, or more generously as an acknowledgment by the Museum of the sanitised violence that these objects embody. Either way, such a move appears to demonstrate a recognition within the Museum of the need to reframe large objects and the ‘military history’ approach they appear to symbolise. With this in mind, whilst large objects continue to be central to the imagination of the past within the IWM, new generational approaches to the construction of war narratives and displays have seen a turn toward the ‘peopling’ of galleries.

The ‘peopling’ of galleries Although museums are primarily associated with the collection and display of authentic objects, since its inception the IWM has always strived to feature human and non-human ‘people.’ Just as Kjeldbæk distinguishes between three museum generations and Scott frames three approaches to objects in war museums, we might equally think of three approaches to peopling. The first might be termed the corporeal, in which people are framed as integral bodies of the nation state at war. The second approach can be termed the ghostly, in which people function as secondary to objects in the telling of the events of war. In contrast, the third can be thought of as the storied approach, in which people act as important conveyors of

224  Kasia Tomasiewicz emotive narratives about specific wartime experiences. Again, most war museums can and do all three approaches, and yet they also can be seen to neatly mirror Kjeldbæk’s generational framework of war museums. The Museum’s original remit during its Ethos phase was to include the experiences of all who had been mobilised during the war. As the First World War was the first ‘total’ war, the Museum became an ‘ethnographic museum to the nation at arms.’43 During these early years, it had a high democratic potential in the items it collected and displayed. Crucially, however, despite the purpose of objects being obvious – most visitors, for example, would recognise a wartime ration book – people were still included in order to contextualise displays. Peopling in the corporeal approach takes its most literal form, in the use of effigies, mannequins, actors or veterans. For example, the 1918 exhibition at Burlington House for example featured the ghostly presence of cut-out style silhouettes of figures alongside guns, flags and propaganda posters in the Museum’s central space.44 The direct positioning of these figures next to the large objects that they would have used, or that may have been used on them, could be thought of an as early example of an integrated display of museum materialities. Whilst these would provide a visual prompt, in this exhibition the use of real life actors was also considered by the Women’s Voluntary Service.45 Although the plan never went ahead, the suggestion of the staging of a ‘live’ exhibit highlights not only the ongoing investment in war as an institution, but the use of people – both men and women – as a recognised component of war. The Museum’s aim of incorporating ‘people’ into early displays was very much focused on people in relation to the nation state at war. As a museum that could be ‘situated within the long line of Imperial exhibitions that were crucial in the creation of a particular “world view”,’ which people were represented and how was a pressing concern to IWM in this period.46 Shortly after the First World War, the War Cabinet believed that if all contributions by members of society were to be represented, the Museum would become ‘a vast heterogeneous collection of models and memorials, [. .] of munitions workers, Boy Scouts and Girl Guides [that] would in a few years interest nobody and merely encumber space.’47 There clearly were, then, ideological limits to who was deemed worthy enough of representation. Similarly, the ‘Imperial’ in the Museum’s name (previously the National War Museum) was made at the recommendation of the India and Dominions subcommittee in 1918, and could be thought of as an early attempt to more fully integrate the contributions of troops from around the Empire into representations in metropole museums. As Cooke and Jenkins note, however, the lack of representation of the contribution of troops from elsewhere in the Empire – for example the omission of West Indian troops in First World War victory parades in contrast to the inclusion of their white Dominion compatriots – highlights the acute tension of and racialised limits to who was considered ‘part of the nation.’48

We are a social history 225 It was not only the ideological but also the practical implications of including representations of people that came with challenges. Representations of people through non-human material forms are often uncanny. In his study of nineteenth-century Scandinavian folk museums, Sandberg highlights how the integration of people in the form of effigies and mannequins was partially due to a fascination with ‘moving pictures’ at the time. From about 1880, mannequins dominated public life and space in European cultural venues, often asking onlookers to ‘sift through the mannequins sometimes inconspicuous, finely nuanced ontological distinctions between the living and the dead.’49 Mannequins can also appear as a gaudy copy of human experience, solidified in an unnatural stillness. However, the display of everyday items, such as uniforms, is challenging without mannequins as they appear eerily empty when not ‘fleshed out’ by the human form.50 Nevertheless, the use of mannequins was particularly contested because they were seen to trivialise the Museum’s serious subject matter. For example, the Museum’s first general secretary Charles ffoulkes initially resisted the inclusion of a group of British and Imperial figures, furnished by Madame Tussauds, as he thought that ‘the whole exhibition would lose dignity.’51 As wax figures were used for entertainment purposes, in a war museum created to represent a war that had killed millions, such a use of effigy may have seemed a step too far. However, the alternative, which was that experiences go unrepresented, would limit the Museum’s popular appeal. Museums engender some sense of ‘accessing the past’ even if, as in the IWM’s initial years, it was representing a war that occurred in very recent history, in which most if not all visitors would have taken part and which would have been a transformative life event. Whilst the Museum had a number of memorial spaces to convey both the seriousness of the conflict and connect visitors as members of the same ‘imagined community,’ they also used non-human people to highlight the connections between visitors and wartime experience. This meant that ‘the glow in the cheek’ of non-human forms had to be ‘added by the museum visitor’s imaginative participation.’52 In the Museum’s Logos phase, however, imaginative participation was sidelined, in favour of detailed narratives of war. During this phase, the Director-General Noble Frankland was primarily concerned with transforming the Museum into an institution of historical study and approach. The history Frankland favoured, however, was not history in broad terms, but ‘objective’ military history of the Museum’s two key terms of reference – the First World War and the Second World War. Following the Korean War, the Museum’s remit for collections and acquisitions was extended to all wars after 1945. The approach to display remained primarily focused on narratives of war that explained in detail ‘what really happened.’ This meant that ‘people’ as conveyors of messy, inaccurate and highly personalised histories were secondary to objects in the telling of narratives

226  Kasia Tomasiewicz of war. An internal memorandum by Frankland in 1961 used an example to illustrate the renewed focus on objects as being illustrative of a type rather than their people-related provenance: ‘the Hess engine should be shown as the engine of the Messerschmitt110, a very important aircraft in the Second World War, and it could be pointed out that incidentally it was the engine used by Hess on his famous flight.’53 Whilst this could be seen as an example of a move away from objects with quirky provenance in favour of more focused overarching narratives of war, we can see that as objects became secondary in importance to narrative, the presence of people was further obscured; they became little more than ghosts. Peopling in this ghostly approach was at its most implicit, with people featuring only in photographs and films that were used to show overarching narratives of war. At the same time, the liminal memorial spaces that intrinsically signified the actual ghosts of war increasingly began to disappear. Emotive objects such as the flags flown on the original Whitehall monument and dried flowers from Flanders fields were increasingly removed or replaced, marking a move away from the Museum’s earliest principles of standing a testament to everyday experience. 54 The one area where the trend of the obfuscation of people was bucked, however, was in the appearance of memorial displays dedicated to ‘Great Men.’ These were often staged in the Museum entrance hall, and for Cundy, this was part of a new approach to gain support from people of influence; visitors would be confronted upon their entrance with ‘great men’ and their ‘great acts’ and would carry this perception around during their visit. 55 Whilst this undeniably has much grounding, what is crucial here is that first, these ‘great men’ were considered for display as they were deemed narrative-worthy and second, their entire lives were condensed into prescriptive narratives. Even here, then, broader narrative frames took precedence over individual lived experience. The Winston Churchill memorial display in 1965, for example, showcased photographs from the Museum’s ‘extensive photographic library’ and a few of Churchill’s personal items.56 The display captions follow a broadly chronological pattern and recount a clear narrative – stretching from the beginning of Churchill’s life until celebrations of his 90th birthday in 1964. A total of 14 photographs, the majority of the exhibition, relate to his life after the war, depicting him engaging in hobbies, leisure and politics. For a figure so associated with Britain at war, and with some of the photographic collection coming from IWM archives, there is no real emphasis on any military tactics or battles during his life– no failures, few victories, and only two brief mentions of Empire. The overall intention, then, was to represent these men of power without courting significant controversy with regard to their war record, controversies that as a military historian Frankland would have been only too familiar with.57

We are a social history 227 The move from commemorating national sacrifice to the personal sacrifice of men of power could be seen as having the effect of positioning selective narratives about particularly powerful people at the heart of national stories about war. However, such a display however highlights a key issue in representing people in gallery spaces, in that very complex, nuanced figures are reduced to easily navigable, potentially misleading, or simply evasive narratives.58 Whilst all narratives, to a degree, are partial and incomplete, the use of people-centred narratives has particular consequences when ‘historical objectivity’ is emphasised as a foundational approach, and yet key figures within historical events are represented in ‘neutral’ rather than political terms. In the Museum’s Pathos generation, the charge of misleading narratives took on a renewed vigour. In a bid to broaden the Museum’s appeal, partially due to the introduction of entrance fees under the Margaret Thatcher government from the 1980s, in the Pathos generation the experiences of contemporary ‘common’ people have taken more prominent positions in the Museum’s representations of the past. Whilst peopling has been undertaken in a trial and error way, using a range of approaches including, for example, a swimwear competition in 1996 to mark the testing of nuclear bombs on the Bikini Atoll, a key approach in the Museum has been to use people as conveyors of emotional stories of wartime experience. Engendering a sense of emotional resonance has become of paramount concern because this approach both enables new ways of looking at the past, and often proves popular. Peopling in the Pathos generation therefore entails a storied approach, which uses innovative design and technologies to use people as conveyors of meaningful stories. One of the clearest and earliest examples of this storied approach to peopling galleries is the recreated ‘experience’ of one night during the London Blitz for an East End family in the Blitz Experience (1989).59 Growing out of the significant developments within the heritage sector in the mid-1980s, the Blitz was chosen as it could best reflect the ‘everyman experience’ of the war.60 Rather than displaying objects in glass cases or text-based wall panels, the exhibition coupled a fictional narrative conveyed through an audio-track with innovative design techniques. In the exhibition, visitors were led around a recreated bombed-out street by their air raid warden guide, a voice on an audio-track (see Figure 10.2). Along with their ‘guide,’ the audio-track also introduced a series of other characters, multiplying the voices and experiences that visitors could engage with. In addition, design techniques included musty smells and a bench inside a mock bomb shelter that vibrated at the supposed impact of bombs outside. Whist the Blitz Experience did attempt to introduce a dynamic people-focused way of understanding a key moment in the British cultural memory of war, such ‘experiences’ have predictably been criticised for their false representation of the past.61 They are, after all, acted works of fiction.

228  Kasia Tomasiewicz

Figure 10.2  The Blitz Experience. © IWM (IWM_SITE_LAM_000027)

They therefore tell us more about present society’s use of the past than they do about the actual past. With no objects to be interpreted in subversive ways, the meaning of the past in these spaces is closely prescribed by the Museum, which uses human characteristics to imbue the exhibition with authenticity. Often this can create misleading representations of historical events, particularly as in the Blitz Experience, which suggested the Blitz was endured by cheerful cockneys (voiced, coincidentally, by EastEnders soap actors), who would break into song after their homes and neighbourhoods had been destroyed. In spite of these occasional criticisms, the exhibition however was hugely popular. Whilst its design features proved crucial to this success, it is hard to ignore the egalitarian approach to wartime experience, no matter how problematically this was framed. Such an exhibition was a clear move towards ‘social history,’ even if that specific term was not introduced fully into the Museum until year later. So successful was the exhibition, that it lasted until 2013. Its removal was and continued to be mourned, at times aggressively, by disappointed visitors.62 The exhibitions limited ability to engender a historical ‘sense’ of the past however has proved a concern to later generations of museum practitioners. Crucially, however, what can be seen here is an approach heavily invested in the idea that modern technologies and design techniques can solve an age old problem – how to recontextualise museums and their objects as being intrinsically connected to the people that have used them.

We are a social history 229 Developments in approaches to peopling in the IWM grew directly out the Blitz Experience, but were adapted significantly during the creation of the Museum’s Holocaust Galleries (2000). The seriousness of the subject matter, coupled with the high value placed on survivor testimony as witness to the Holocaust, meant that the Museum’s approach to people had to reflect the multiplicity of complex real-life experiences. The exhibition featured 12 contemporary oral histories, not just heard but also shown though video screens. For James Taylor, Head of Narrative and Content at the Museum, these acted ‘almost like guides’ in which to convey the personal stories that nuance the exhibition. For him, ‘personal stories, often emotive… connect us and give us insights into often complex episodes in history where a Museum historian’s ‘objective’ voice would fail.’63 Such stories therefore can foster a personal connection between visitors, objects, museum narratives and spaces, reframing interactions in powerful ways. Whilst the exhibition received little popular criticism, some historians observed its shortcomings. Although the reliability of survivor’s memory might be queried, more notably, when oral histories were used, these were cut and moulded to fit the overarching exhibition narrative.64 The stories of survivors were therefore partial and mediated, reducing a person’s experiences into an emotive snapshot of just a few seconds long in order to support a heavily constructed exhibition narrative. Most recently, however, there has also been a move towards engendering a sense of ‘historical empathy’ in museums.65 This museum practice often attempts to reintroduce perpetrators into wartime narratives in order to ask deeper questions about the historical, social and cultural contexts of indoctrination, bullying and genocide. Whilst controversial, these moves highlight the implicit limits that underpin representation, particularly when representing emotive histories as people stories. People stories then, are an attempt to rehumanise a war museum space, but the problem of who gets ‘rehumanised’ (even after 75 years) is still fraught with tensions.66 Clearly, whilst a storied approach to peoples’ experiences provides an opportunity for rich emotional engagement with source material, peopling still adheres to the politics and poetics of museum exhibition display. Interestingly, the IWM’s Academic Advisory Group, who advised in the planning of the Holocaust galleries in the 1990s, explicitly queried the appropriateness of the exhibition being held in the IWM.67 For them, there was a disconnect between the emotive stories displayed in the exhibition and immediate confrontation upon leaving the exhibition with the war machines that hung in the central atrium of the museum. As Taylor remarked: ‘The effect of this array of industrial weaponry in the Atrium is without doubt striking. But at the same time it can disorientate the visitor. It is almost like a sculpture park .[.]. One of my colleagues described the Atrium as ‘the biggest boys’ bedroom in London.’68

230  Kasia Tomasiewicz It is telling that the central space of the Museum with its planes, tanks and bombs has been described both inside and outside of the Museum as ‘the biggest boys’ bedroom in London.’69 However, the antithetical positioning of these objects with the more serious and sombre aspects of war however highlights the implicit meanings that are placed on large objects, and on peopling. Both are central to the war museum space, and so by way of conclusion it is to the relations between these aspects that we now turn.

Conclusion In 2017, the IWM marked 100 years of endeavouring to represent the numerous wars that have taken place since 1914. This historical trajectory implies a smooth progressive linearity and inevitability to the life of the Museum. In doing so, it obscures the many ways in which the Museum has been, and continues to be, contested, shaped and transformed. The initial years of the Museum’s life, for example were fraught with challenges. It is nevertheless significant that whereas the IWM ‘struggled to survive, other museums completely failed.’70 For Taylor, one of the key reasons the Museum did survive was its propensity to adapt to changing tastes, interests and expectations.71 The phrase ‘we are a social history museum, not a military history museum’ is symptomatic of the framing of those changes. It denotes a moment of transition, from one form of representation within a particular historical and cultural context to another. And yet, by looking at two components of the war museum space that symbolise these two aspects most fittingly – large objects and the ‘peopling’ of galleries, we can see how both can engender different senses of the past. Indeed, drawing a clear distinction between ‘social’ history and ‘military’ history can limit a more nuanced understanding of ways museums shape the past for visitors. Instead, we should think co-productively about the war museum space, and about innovative approaches to objects and peopling that can engender new, powerful senses of the past. In order to do this, it might be useful to think about the pitfalls of these two features. A primary pitfall of the display of large objects of war is that in their size and scale, they often appear silent in the pedagogic lessons they can convey, and yet simultaneously a whole host of assumptions about their symbolic meanings are often made. Conversely, a pitfall in peopling is that inherently complex lives are reduced to conveyors of ‘snapshots’ of emotive stories. One solution therefore might be to bring peopling into closer proximity to large objects, so as to both inscribe large objects with alternative meanings, and to demonstrate the multiplicity of peoples experiences of the objects that were used by them or on them. Such a co-productive use of peopling and large objects can be seen in the D-Day Museum in Portsmouth.72 Their 2018 redesigned galleries feature a

We are a social history 231 LCVP or ‘Higgins Boat’ used on D-Day by American and British troops, although only the former used the vehicle for assault troops. In the boat sits a pain of glass, onto which a projection of actors dressed as soldiers recounting their experience of the D-Day landings is reflected. This design technique, called ‘peppers ghost,’ allows for a reframing of the object without damaging its material form. Each actor contributes a script, roughly four minutes in length, which means that whilst the script is just long enough to keep visitors engaged, after the projection visitors can look at and think about the object in different ways. Such a framing therefore can engender a strong emotional resonance in audiences, and helps to reframe sanitised war machines and the use of people in exhibitions through a co-productive framework. Such a projection of an acted script on to a large object would undeniably draw criticisms of historical inaccuracy, in a similar way to those directed at the IWM’s Blitz Experience. Indeed, such techniques are far from new. At the same time however, although the example at the D-Day Museum uses actors, museums could take such an approach and instead project oral history testimonies, audio-visual material or contemporaneous photographs onto large objects, which would create a similar affect whilst utilising historical sources in powerful ways.73 Undeniably, it could not be guaranteed that such objects were used in the same way as those in photographs and films, and yet such projections do allow for a reframing of the objects that most visibly define the war museum space. Whilst such a design technique is only one of the many ways in which museums can display aspects of war, such a technique does allow for the breaking of the often static, entrenched thinking that so often underpins the phase ‘we are a social history, not a military history museum.’

Notes 1. IWM is used here to refer to the Museum’s flagship site on the Lambeth Road, rather than Imperial War Museums, the rebrand of the Museum in 2014 to include its previous ‘outstations’ – HMS Belfast, Duxford Airfield, the Churchill War Rooms, and IWM North. 2. This chapter is based on ethnographic research conducted between 2016 and 2019 for my PhD thesis ‘Representing the Second World War in The Imperial War Museum, London’. My thanks to Paul Cornish, Lucy Newby, Garikoitz Gomez Alfaro, Melayna Lamb, Diya Gupta, and Lars Cornelissen for the additional information and support in producing this chapter. My thanks also to the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories for funding the licensing of the images included. 3. The ways in which the term ‘peopling’ is used often denotes an egalitarian representation of people. The 1993 Museum of London ‘Peopling of London’ exhibition, for example, attempted to introduce different groups to the museum through displaying the experiences of a wide variety of Londoners. See The Peopling of London: Fifteen Thousand Years of Settlement from Overseas, ed. by Nick Merriman (London: Museum of London, Reaktion Books, 1993); Ellie Miles, ‘Peopling the Galleries of Modern London,’ Museological Review, 19 (2015), pp. 22–32.

232  Kasia Tomasiewicz 4. This has been explored elsewhere. See Paul Cornish, ‘Extremes of Collecting At The Imperial War Museum 1917-2009: Struggles with the Large and Ephemeral,’ in Extreme Collecting: Challenging Practices for 21st Century Museums, ed. by Graeme Were and J. C. H. King (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), pp. 157–67; Andrew Whitmarsh, ‘“We Will Remember Them”: Memory and Commemoration in War Museums,’ Journal of Conservation and Museum Studies, 7 (2001), pp. 11–15. 5. See Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations, ed. by Sandra H. Dudley (London: Routledge, 2010). 6. The museum as ‘ecosystem’ has been used in a number of ways. E. Edwards and S. Lein, Uncertain Images: Museums and the Work of Photographs (London: Routledge, 2016) uses it to describe the role of photographs in museum spaces. See also Peter Bjerregaard, ‘Dissolving Objects: Museums, Atmosphere and the Creation of Presence,’ Emotion, Space and Society, 15 (May 2015), pp. 74–81. 7. Actor Network Theory has facilitated new ways of thinking about museum spaces and collections. See Unpacking the Collection: Networks of Material and Social Agency in the Museum, ed. by Sarah Byrne, Anne Clark, Rodney Harrison and Robin Torrence (New York: Springer, 2011). 8. Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 162–68. 9. See the contributions in Does War Belong in Museums? The Representation of Violence in Exhibitions, ed. by Wolfgang Muchitsch (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013). 10. For debates on museums as mausoleums, see Andrea Witcomb, Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum (London: Routledge, 2003). 11. There have been numerous controversies about ownership of objects and efforts to address contested objects in collections in museums across Europe. See Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics (Paris: Ministère de la Culture, 2018). 12. Gaynor Kavanagh, ‘Museum as Memorial: The Origins of the Imperial War Museum,’ Contemporary History, 23: 1 (January 1988), pp. 77–97. 13. Cornish, ‘Extremes of Collecting,’ 159. 14. Steven Cooke and Lloyd Jenkins, ‘Discourses of Regeneration in Early Twentieth‐century Britain: From Bedlam to the Imperial War Museum,’ Area, 33: 4 (December 2001), pp. 382–90. 15. Ibid. 16. For early debates on museum architecture see Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, ‘The Universal Survey Museum,’ Art History, 3: 4 (1989), pp. 448–69. 17. Paul Cornish, ‘Sacred Relics: Objects in the Imperial War Museum 1917– 1939,’ in Matters of Conflict: Material Culture, Memory and the First World War, ed. by Nicholas J. Saunders (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 37. 18. Kavanagh, ‘Museum as Memorial,’ p. 94. 19. Jay Winter, ‘Museums and the Representation of War,’ Museum and Society, 10: 3 (November 2012), pp. 150–63. 20. See Paul Greenhalgh, ‘Education, Entertainment and Politics: Lessons from the Great International Exhibitions,’ in The New Museology, ed. by Peter Vergo (London: Reaktion Books, 1989), pp. 74–98. 21. The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration, ed. by T. G Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper (London: Routledge, 2000). 22. Lucy Noakes, ‘Making Histories: Experiencing the Blitz in London’s Museums in the 1990s,’ in: War and Memory in the Twentieth Century, ed. by M. Evans & K. Lunn (Oxford: Berg, 1997), pp. 89–104.

We are a social history 233 23. Esben Kjeldbæk, ‘How museums speak,’ in The Power of the Object: Museums and World War II, ed. by. Esben Kjeldbæk (Edinburgh: MuseumsEtc, 2009), pp. 362–92. 24. Ibid. 25. Noble Frankland, History of War: The Campaigns of an Historian (London: Giles de la Mare, 1998), pp. 160–78. 26. See Museums, Society, Inequality, ed. by Richard Sandell (London: Routledge, 2002). 27. The new museology has been underlined with rising questions of access and representation for almost 30 years. See Nick Merriman, Beyond the Glass Case: The Past, the Heritage and the Public (London: University College London, 2000). 28. Fiona Candlin, ‘Independent Museums, Heritage, and the Shape of Museum Studies,’ Museums and Society, 10: 1 (2012), pp. 28–41. 29. James Scott, ‘Objects and the Representation of War in Military Museums,’ Museum & Society, 13: 4 (November 2015), pp. 489–502. 30. Alys Cundy, ‘Thresholds of Memory: Representing Function through Space and Object at the Imperial War Museum, London, 1918–2014,’ Museum History Journal, 8: 2 (July 2015), pp. 247–68. 31. Cornish, ‘Sacred Relics,’ 47. 32. Ibid. 33. Frankland, History of War: The Campaigns of an Historian, 162. 34. IWM Central Files, EN3/2/3/5. 35. Frankland, History of War: The Campaigns of an Historian, 176. 36. Paul Cornish, ‘Sensing War: Concept and Space and the Imperial War Museums First World War Galleries,’ in Killer Instincts? Modern Conflict and the Senses, ed. by Nicholas J Saunders and Paul Cornish (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), pp. 13–28. 37. National Museums: New Studies from around the World, ed. by Simon Knell et al (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 22. This argument has also been articulated in more depth in Susan Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections: A Cultural Study (New York: Smithsonian Books, 1994), p. 203. 38. R. Raths, ‘From Technical Showroom to Full-Fledged Museum: The German Tank Museum Munster,’ in Does War Belong in Museums?, ed. by W. Muchitsch (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag,. 2013), pp. 85–86. 39. Graham Dawson. Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994); Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 (London: Reaktion, 2000). 40. IWM Central Files, EN3/2/3/5. 41. ibid. 42. For more on the exhibition, see https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/people-powerprotest-at-iwm-london. 43. Sue Malvern, ‘War, Memory and Museums: Art and Artefact in the Imperial War Museum,’ History Workshop Journal, 49 (2000), pp. 177–203. 44. Cundy, ‘Thresholds of Memory.’ 45. Alyson Mercer, ‘The Changing Face of Exhibiting Women’s Wartime Work at the Imperial War Museum’. Women’s History Review, 22: 2 (April 2013), pp. 330–44. 46. Cooke and Jenkins, ‘Discourses of Regeneration,’ pp. 382–90. 47. Mercer, ‘The Changing Face of Exhibiting Women’s Wartime Work,’ p. 334. 48. Cooke and Jenkins, ‘Discourses of Regeneration’. 49. Mark B Sandberg, Living Pictures, Missing Persons: Mannequins, Museums, and Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 181.

234  Kasia Tomasiewicz 50. Ingrid Mida, ‘Animating the Body in Museum Exhibitions of Fashion and Dress,’ Dress, 41: 1 (2015), pp. 37–51. 51. Cornish, ‘Sacred Relics.’ 52. Sandberg, Living Pictures, 5. 53. IWM Central Files, EN3/1/24/1. 54. A Cundy, ‘Thresholds of memory’ 55. ibid. 56. IWM central files EN3/2/27, and CAP/09/005. 57. Frankland, History at War, pp. 97–98. 58. For critiques of the framing of narratives see G. Strawson, ‘Against Narrativity,’ Ratio, 17 (2004), pp. 428–52. 59. Noakes, ‘Making Histories,’ pp. 89–104. 60. IWM Central Files, EXPA 0175 61. Such exhibitions were formed in relation to the ‘Heritage Debates’ of the 1980s see R. Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a climate of decline (London: Methuen, 1987); Candlin, ‘Independent Museums,’ pp. 28–41. 62. For disappointed visitor reviews see the ‘terrible’ and ‘poor’ categories for the IWM on TripAdvisor: https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Attraction_Reviewg186338-d187674-Reviews-Imperial_War_Museums-London_England. html 63. J. Taylor, ‘Interpreting the Second World War,’ in The Power of the Object: Museums and World War II, ed. by Esben, Kjeldbæk (Edinburgh: MuseumsEtc, 2009), pp. 52–81. 64. See Tom Lawson, ‘Ideology in a Museum of Memory: A Review of the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum,’ Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 4: 2 (2003), pp. 174–75; Tony Kushner ‘The holocaust and the museum world in Britain: A study of ethnography,’ Immigrants & Minorities, 21:1–2 (2002), pp. 13–40. 65. For ways in which museums engender a sense of historical empathy see Geerte M Savenije and Pieter de Bruijn, ‘Historical Empathy in a Museum: Uniting Contextualisation and Emotional Engagement,’ International Journal of Heritage Studies, 23: 9 (21 October 2017), pp. 832–45. 66. M. Evans makes the point that in Eastern Europe battles over the legacies of the conflict are still on-going in M. Evans, ‘Memories, Monuments, Histories: The Re-thinking of the Second World War since 1989,’ National Identities, 8: 4 (2006), pp. 317–48. 67. IWM Central Files, EN4/CF/3/22. 68. Taylor, ‘Interpreting the Second World War,’ pp. 52–81. 69. See for example, Anne Karpf ‘Bearing Witness’ The Guardian (2 June 2000). 70. Gaynor Kavanagh, ‘Museum as Memorial: The Origins of the Imperial War Museum,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 23: 1 (January 1988), pp. 77–97. 71. Taylor ‘Interpreting the Second World War.’ 72. My thanks for the additional information on the exhibits from museum practitioners James Daly and Andrew Whitmarsh of the D-Day Museum, Portsmouth. 73. Incidentally, whilst the script is acted, it is based on memoirs and oral histories of veterans, which somewhat surpasses critiques of historical inaccuracies; as documented in email exchanges between the author, James Daly and Andrew Whitmarsh.

11 War stories The art and memorials collection at the Canadian War Museum Sarafina Pagnotta

Introduction Although remembrance of and curiosity for the Great War has ebbed and flowed over time and has been shaped and reshaped by each subsequent generation, there is something about this conflict that causes Canadians to return to it, especially around significant anniversary years. In Canada, the events of 1914 to 1918 have been framed as a coming of age moment and nation-building events. Defying the odds as a barely 50-year-old dominion and as newcomers to the battlefield, it was often the collective contributions of the members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) at major battles that have been emphasized and were preserved for posterity in the visual and written record. Artworks that document the sacrifices at the Second Battle of Ypres and at the Somme, or the victories at Vimy Ridge and throughout the Last Hundred Days Campaign, are easily called to mind when contemplating Canadian war art.1 The repository of remembrance for this conflict, and each preceding and subsequent one, is the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, Ontario. The museum has its origin in 1880 as a local collection of militia artefacts, though lack of proper accommodation resulted in its closure in 1896. It was not until mid-way through the Second World War, with Canadian soldiers once again fighting far from home, that the museum was re-opened to the public in 1942. As time passed, the collections outgrew the location at 350 Sussex St., and a plan was developed to build a new museum. The current building opened on 8 May 2005, the institution’s 125th anniversary and the 60th anniversary of VE Day. 2 The Canadian War Museum (CWM) is now one of the world’s most respected military museums. It aims to communicate the human experience of war, and how war has shaped Canada and all Canadians. In the museum’s holdings are more than three million artefacts, works of art, photographs and archival documents. The collections have been shaped by the conflicts in which Canadians have participated, notably those throughout the twentieth century. Nowhere is this better reflected than the Art and Memorials Collection, also known as the Beaverbrook Collection

236  Sarafina Pagnotta of War Art. The collection features art created by officially commissioned war artists, the first of these commissions began with the establishment of the Canadian War Memorials Fund in November 1916.3 The collection now has over 13,000 artworks, which have been instrumental in the making of memory, meaning and the construction of a ‘Canadian’ identity as it relates to the world wars and beyond.4 Laura Brandon, Canada’s foremost authority on Canadian war art, researched this collection extensively during her tenure at the Canadian War Museum, and curated over forty exhibitions, published several articles, exhibition catalogues and books detailing the artworks and their artists. Her studies analyse the construction of a Canadian canon, of both art, photography and literature, and how they emerged in relation to a nation’s political and public needs. 5 The CWM also extensively travelled the massive war art collection, creating exhibitions like Canvas of War: Masterpieces from the Canadian War Museum and Witness: Fields of Battle through Canadian Eyes, curated in 2000 and 2014, respectively. Both travelled nationally and internationally. This, combined with ever increasing online content and exhibitions, means that Brandon has effectively restored this collection from what she once called the ‘neglected treasures’6 of the national collection into one that is more accessible, understood and appreciated. However, there is also a modest collection of unofficial artworks created by soldiers, civilians and prisoners of war that is often left in the shadows of the large-scale oil paintings, drawings, bronze sculptures and the vast collection of official photographs.7 Metal trench art has thus far been largely left out of Canadian First World War historiography; there are many possible reasons for this. These objects often remained with families in private collections until the 1960s and 1970s, cultural historians have focused on the many other soldier pastimes in the trenches and behind the lines, and material culture as a field of study only recently entered the mainstream. Most significantly, the wealth of officially commissioned war art, and the intense interest in it in the immediate post-war years, meant that trench art was considered, if at all, only as trinkets or souvenirs. Canadian academics have focused mainly on the commissioned artworks and the significant Canadian War Records Office official photography collection that was deposited at Library and Archives Canada.8 It was not until material culture studies emerged as a field of inquiry within cultural history that trench art resurfaced and became the subject of further research. In the museum’s holdings are just shy of 200 trench art objects, some as small as a penny, others as large as howitzer shells. Where the official war art collection was created with the intent of public commemoration, meant for exhibition and display for future generations, trench art objects were just the opposite. They were created by individuals for themselves and their families, meant for private commemoration and contemplation. Trench art

War stories 237 objects hold fascinating war stories yet to be told. Much of this material has lost provenance information, having spent the last several decades on family mantelpieces, in attics, or in some cases, remained buried in the former battlefields of northern France and Belgium. However, there are cases where an unusual amount of provenance information is preserved; one case in particular remains in the art vault at the Canadian War Museum, where the voice of the soldier-artist himself is preserved and will be discussed later in this chapter. With its vast and varied Art and Memorials Collection, the Canadian War Museum holds many war stories told through oil, watercolours and spent ammunition. However, as art historian James Fox writes, for several decades, cultural historians have described how the arts memorialized the disastrous consequences of the First World War … [But] not all memorials were monumental and not all remembrance was public. Millions of men and women lost relatives between 1914 and 1918 and most of them preferred to confront their losses in private ways.9 The First World War saw significant artistic production by Canadian artists, but also by ordinary people who would not necessarily identify themselves as artists. This chapter will first discuss the official Canadian war art collection, then juxtapose it with soldier-made trench art pieces to understand how they might fit into the narrative that has been shaped by the collection and exhibition history of war art at the Canadian War Museum.

The Canadian War Memorials Fund and official war art The First Canadian Division arrived at the front in early 1915; by August 1916, all 48 battalions of the first four divisions of the Canadian Corps were in France.10 Those who remained on the home front were left wondering and waiting for news. Max Aitken, a Canadian-born newspaper baron who had made his fortune in Britain, recognized this need, and with his power serving in the British Parliament, created the Canadian War Records Office in February 1916. Several publications detailing Canadian involvement in the war had begun dispersal both in Europe and abroad, however, Aitken wanted the public to have a chance to visualize what their sweethearts, brothers and sons were doing on the front lines. He once wrote, ‘we must see our men climbing out of the trenches to the assault before we can realize the patience, the exhaustion and the courage which are assets and the trials of modern fighting men.’11 As casualty lists and honour rolls grew, so too did the demand for better information and images. From the beginning of the war, there were photographs taken by soldiers. This was the first time handheld cameras were widely available; however, a

238  Sarafina Pagnotta March 1915 order forbade their use for security reasons, though there were soldiers who ignored this.12 This meant that Canadian involvement in the battles of Second Ypres in April 1915, and those that followed in early 1916 were left visually undocumented.13 People wanted pictorial proof of what would become the epoch-making events of their generation. Max Aitken (later made Lord Beaverbrook), on behalf of the Canadian War Records Office, petitioned for the right to allow official photographers, and later cinematographers, to accompany troops and document their efforts.14 The CWRO granted permission, with the condition that a censor screen all photographs before they could be viewed by the general public. The restrictions were clear; images of dead British and Allied soldiers were forbidden, as they would be demoralizing to both those on the home front and the front lines. The first photography exhibition opened in December 1916 at the Grafton Galleries in London; it was followed by an exhibition of enlarged official war photographs. A July 1917 exhibition in London was attended by 80,000 people.15 These exhibitions were subsequently shown elsewhere in the United Kingdom before being sent to North America until late 1919. Prints and exhibition catalogues of the official War Records Office photographs were available for sale until the mid-1920s. However, these photographs did not fully satisfy the public’s desire for a complete picture of the fighting on the front lines. Often blurry, picturing nothing except empty landscapes before or immediately after a battle, the majority were shrouded in a cloud of fog.16 James Fox discusses how this war did not look like the wars that had come before it: ‘it was vast, diverse and deadlocked. When combat occurred [it was] either after dark or at a great distance. Conflict was somehow invisible.’17 To combat this invisibility, Beaverbrook decided to commission war artists and send them to the front lines to paint what they saw and experienced. This resulted in the establishment of the Canadian War Memorials Fund on 17 November 1916. For many Canadian artists, this was the opportunity they had been waiting for. Similar programs were established in other dominion countries, however, only Great Britain had a fully developed war artist scheme – the British War Memorials Committee – also established by Lord Beaverbrook, in February 1918. Australia had a war art program run by the Australian High Commission in London, based on the Canadian and British models. France also developed a program to authorize artists to visit the front lines and paint what they saw. While there was no official state sponsored war art scheme in Germany, artists did visit the front as members of press units to create visual records of the war.18 The position of art and artists in Canada was thrown into question at the outbreak of hostilities in 1914 and was reconfigured by the end of 1918. In four years, the landscape of Canadian art would thoroughly change. This was not a Canadian phenomenon alone. Fox writes that ‘Britain’s

War stories 239 mobilization for war had marginalized “non-essential” activities such as the arts’19 when a recently established parliamentary committee to revamp policies regarding the arts was dissolved. Museums and galleries all over Europe either lost their funding, saw significant reductions, or even closed their doors for the duration of the war.20 Maria Tippett writes in her seminal book on Canadian war artists and the war art program that ‘most artists as a result had little choice but to seek their livelihood through the force that had disrupted it: the war.’21 For some, this meant seeking employment through official war art schemes that were developed. For many others, it meant enlisting and continuing their artistic practice and craft on a much smaller scale with whatever materials that were available, including battlefield debris. The Canadian War Memorials Fund was registered under the War Charities Act and was funded by the sales of Canadian War Records Office publications, souvenir catalogues, photographs and exhibition admissions. When needed, Aitken supplemented the Fund with his own wealth. 22 He did so because he felt that it was through painting and sculpture, rather than photography or the written word alone, that a raw and ‘true’ human experience of the war could be recorded for posterity. The Fund employed over 100 artists, eventually a third of them were Canadian born. They were tasked with creating monumental artworks that would become the visual representations of Canadian involvement, both victories and sacrifices, early on in the war. As the war continued and the Canadians began to secure victories at major battles, further paintings and sculptures were commissioned, and the collection grew. This scheme resulted in artworks from a variety of artistic styles both traditionalist and modernist. For the first time, both in Canada and abroad, dramatically different styles of art were considered as possible approaches to documenting and responding to conflict. As the war marched on, became more entrenched and morale weakened, works by younger artists, many of whom had already served at the front, became available. Avant garde movements in Europe that had been interrupted by the war found a place in war art. It was argued that traditional treatments of battle paintings could not depict this new mechanized and modern war. These new works were no longer illustrative in style, but modern, jagged, and fragmented to reflect the artists’ feelings and experiences of the war. Subjects included ‘desolate views of ruined trenches… [and] soldiers reduced to mechanized robots in an anonymous war machine.’23 After 1916, it became increasingly difficult to appreciate the rhetoric of traditionally styled artworks that emphasized duty to king, country and empire, and the purely celebratory themes for those who gave the ultimate sacrifice. Not all war art was redemptive;24 there was a stylistic and psychological shift in much of the war art produced as a result. Modernist interpretations emerged. Landscapes, though initially part of the traditional canon, were taken up by modernist painters to realize a

240  Sarafina Pagnotta different meaning: ‘nothing came to symbolize the war for the artist and the combatant as much as the land upon which it was fought… No artist who visited the front could resist painting the landscape.’25 This is especially reflected in the work of Paul Nash, and several of the Canadian artists who would later form the Group of Seven in 1920. 26 During the war and in its aftermath between 1919 and 1924, the artworks created for the CWMF travelled widely. The messaging of the exhibitions shifted depending on their location and timing: during the war, they were meant to boost morale, encourage enlistment, and to remind people that they were ‘fighting the good fight.’ Immediately post-war the exhibitions became places where former soldiers could bring their families to show them their experience, without ever having to say a word. It was also an opportunity to remind Canadians of the values for which they had gone to war and prove that it had been a ‘just war.’27 Once the exhibitions came to an end, the collection was entrusted to the National Gallery of Canada for conservation and storage. Beaverbrook had planned to have a memorial gallery built to house the collection, though the project never came to fruition. 28 During the 1920s, the Canadian public became increasingly antiwar. By the 1930s with the Great Depression in full swing, this collection no longer seemed appropriate or necessary for exhibition. While the CWMF closed with the Armistice, it has continued to exist in various forms ever since. A profound visual legacy of the First World War, the Art and Memorials Collection continued to grow during each subsequent conflict. The outbreak of the Second World War once again threw museums, art institutions and the position of artists into disarray. Government funding that once supported museums and galleries decreased again in order to support the war effort. After recognizing the successes of the First World War art program, Canada established a Second World War art program: the Canadian War Records (CWR), though not formally until January of 1943. Figure 11.1 pictures the official war artists hired by the CWR; Molly Lamb Bobak, Canada’s first female official war artist, stands at the centre. They are standing in front of Wyndham Lewis’ 1918 painting, Gun Pit. The artworks that came of the CWR were different than their First World War predecessors. No longer were there large-scale monumental commemorative paintings, detailing urban destruction and ruined landscapes. Instead, over five thousand small paintings were created that emphasize various locations, events, machinery and personnel on all fronts. 29 Canada commissioned no war artists to record military activities in the Korean War, but that did not stop individual soldiers, such as Ted Zuber (1932–2018) whose paintings currently hang in the post-1945 gallery at the CWM, from creating an artistic record of their front-line service when they returned to Canada. In 1968, the establishment of the Canadian Armed Forces Civilian Artists Program (CAFCAP) carried on the tradition of

War stories 241

Figure 11.1 Portrait of Second World War official Canadian war artists standing in front of Wyndham Lewis’ 1918 painting Canadian Gunpit. George Metcalf Archival Collection, Canadian War Museum 19940072-004

visually recording Canada’s war effort in an official capacity. Nearly three hundred works would be completed and record the Canadian military experience in Canada and abroad. That version of the program came to an end in 1995. Finally, in the summer of 2001, the Department of National Defence inaugurated the Canadian Forces Artists Program (CFAP).30 The program continues today, and a recent exhibition of the program’s artworks at the Canadian War Museum was The Canadian Forces Artists Program – Group 7 in the winter of 2018. As discussed throughout this section, the status of Canadian art was completely revolutionized and, arguably, revitalized during the First World War. The Canadian War Memorials Fund created a Canadian war art collection that included over a thousand works of art in both traditional and modernist styles. Exhibitions were mounted and travelled widely, offering artists and the public the chance to engage with these works and to remember; a chance that they would not necessarily have had otherwise. The works in the collection were meant to bolster national sentiment and pride, and to commemorate what had been lost. Brandon concludes that ‘since the founding of the first Canadian war art program; shows of war art … have helped construct the memory of war in Canada.’31 The Fund offered unprecedented opportunities to artists. But what of those artists who were not selected to participate in an official war art program? It is to them that the remainder of this chapter is dedicated.

242  Sarafina Pagnotta

Unofficial war art, trench art and souveniring At the CWM, there is an assortment of unofficial artworks created quietly and simultaneously with the official war art collection: metal trench art. 32 These curious artworks or bits of ephemera were not the result of an official war art program; they were made by individuals for different reasons. Whether kept as fragments of war, personal mementos, traded for a pack of cigarettes or crafted into trench art, spent artillery shells and other bits of battlefield debris and war materiel are representative of individual lived experience, and are demonstrative of the altered relationship between human and material during the first fully mechanized war in history. In 2003, British conflict archaeologist Nicholas J. Saunders published Trench Art: Materialities and Memories of War, a landmark publication in the study of trench art. He established the standing definition of trench art as ‘any item made by soldiers, prisoners of war, and civilians from war materiel directly, or any other material, as long as it and they are associated temporally and/or spatially with armed conflict or its consequences.’33 Although quite broad, this definition has been essential in the development of the field. The term ‘trench art’ itself can be misleading, as much of it was produced away from the trenches, behind the lines in traveling workshops by soldiers and skilled artisans while they were on leave and had the time for artistic production. This is not to say, however, that trench art was never created in the trenches: there are in fact several examples of these in the CWM’s collection; this chapter will discuss three of them. The history of trench art predates the First World War;34 however, it flourished during the conflict because of the sheer volume of raw materials available. The artillery shell dominated the First World War battlefield and caused the majority of casualties on the Western Front. By the end of the war, approximately one thousand shells had fallen per square metre.35 The barrage of artillery fire was a significant fear, though not constant. After a battle, the land was ‘strewn with spent shells, shrapnel and smashed artillery – the definitive artefacts of industrialized war.’36 Artillery shells themselves were direct representatives of modernism – new technological innovation that was part of an increasingly modern world. The irony is that many spent artillery shell casings were decorated with foliate designs that had their roots in the Art Nouveau and other styles that had flourished in the 1890s.37 Officially, spent shells were not considered scrap, they were meant to be collected and sent back to England for recycling and reuse. To facilitate collection, soldiers were expected to gather the discharged artillery shells and stack them in discard piles. Sometimes, soldiers would find spent casings still in relatively good shape and keep them to use them for their trench art. Paul Williams writes, ‘piles of objects contribute to a homology of absent bodies.’38 With this idea in mind, photographs of the spent ammunition

War stories 243 piles that lined the roads after a battle become even more unsettling. Battlefield debris were a stark reminder of the mass casualties, on both sides of the conflict, throughout the war. Yet, soldiers continued to use this as raw material for trench art production. This resulted in incredibly complex and layered artefacts, heavy in both the literal and metaphorical sense. Not every second on the Western Front was wracked with fear, there were many moments of quiet, anxious waiting. It was in these moments, the lulls between battles and firefights, that soldiers were expected to remain stoic and find ways to cope. One way they did this was to seek out spent artillery shells and other bits of battlefield debris. Many knew they were living through history-making events; for some it became crucial to acquire a piece of the conflict, to prove they had been part of it, that they were there. This pastime became known as ‘souveniring,’ a term coined during the war. Soldiers frequently took life-threatening risks to acquire battlefield debris and other especially prized souvenirs. According to Saunders, ‘so commonplace was it for a soldier to be killed or wounded while searching for souvenirs that such deaths were reported nonchalantly.’39 Soldiers had a strange relationship with tragedy, treating it with both derision and a healthy respect for the dead.40 The best materials for trench art production, such as the ever-present spent artillery shell, were to be found in No Man’s Land, and Canadian soldiers became well-known for running out into the field to collect them, despite the danger. In his article on souveniring, Canadian historian Tim Cook suggests that this is because ‘no doubt soldiers already believed they lived in a perilous world, and that fate would claim them when it was ready.’41 Because of the constant reminder of the inevitability of death, soldiers were forced to face their own mortality; many participated in reckless pastimes, such as souveniring. For some, it was because they wanted to own a piece of the war, to have some sort of affirmation of identity and experience, a physical marker which would serve as proof of their service on the front lines. In 1917, Pte. E. H. McKinnon from Waterford, Ontario, wrote a letter to his mother which was subsequently published in their local newspaper: Well mother, I have a few souvenirs to bring home with me … I got them on the battlefield after the battle … The Germans certainly don’t like us. One prisoner said, ‘England fights for King, France fights for country and the Canadians fight for souvenirs.’ I guess he was right. Our lads are great for souvenirs.42 Though clearly an exaggeration and a dig at the Canadians, the statement caught on. It is written in several letters home and was even published in a trench newspaper. However, there were those who felt that souveniring was stupid and reckless, and other even condemned those who partook in

244  Sarafina Pagnotta the activity. In a 1915 letter home to his sister, serviceman William Howard Curtis denounced souveniring as reckless and foolish behaviour: Dear Sister, I received your welcome letter to-night. Glad to know that you have already heard at home that I am alright … Just the same, I don’t believe in taking foolish risks. Getting souvenirs does not occupy my mind. It’s myself I want to bring home as a souvenir… It’s a game of chance living in this land of war – whole body one minute and the next in a thousand pieces. Let’s keep hoping the war will soon be over and there will be peace on earth once again.43 That peace was still over three years away, and unfortunately Pte. Curtis would not be alive to see it. He was killed in action at the age of twenty-four on 8 October 1916, during the final stages of the Battle of the Somme. Trench art objects are souvenirs, but not in a conventional, trivial sense, because they often contain multiple deeper connective layers of meaning.44 Current literature written about souvenirs tends to focus on tourism and tourists themselves, writes Andrea Witcomb. However, both she and Susan Stewart argue that souvenirs are often more than a trinket purchased on holiday; they are objects that become material memories of events, experiences and places. However, Stewart writes that ‘the souvenir is destined to be forgotten; its tragedy lies in the death of memory, the tragedy of all autobiography and the simultaneous erasure of the autograph.’45 It is the fear of forgetting that results in the creation of a collection. Within a collection, the object is given the potential to carry on the narrative of the experience at its origin, rather than being forgotten in an old box. The irony is that the collection can be understood as institutional forgetting: the categorisation of objects that end up packed away in storage boxes anyway. Of course, collections face limitations based on mandate, acquisition procedures, funding and scope. It is only by engaging with a collection, while understanding the framework in which it was formed that a narrative can be uncovered, while still asking questions about what is missing.46 Many trench art objects were donated to the Canadian War Museum as early as the 1960s, though most were acquired from the late 1970s onward. Often, the name of the soldier/creator is lost, and the works have little to no known provenance information. First World War trench art has ‘uniquely resisted institutional classification, challenged conventional curatorial wisdom, and has seldom been exhibited in public displays,’47 writes Claire Whittingham. Her article suggests that trench art is the missing link between private and public memory in Canadian First World War historiography. This is arguably the case with the collection’s exhibition history at the CWM. Only rarely are these works put on display, though they do sometimes appear in exhibitions on trench and soldier culture of the First World War.48 As I will show in the remainder of this section, these bits of

War stories 245 battlefield debris turned trench art became mementos of the Great War, and those who endured it. One of the most detailed war stories that remains in the collection belongs to three pieces of trench art created and owned by Private Arthur Frederick Lee. Lee was born in Hythe, Kent, where he lived for twenty-nine years before the First World War began in August 1914. He attended elementary school and then worked as an errand boy from the time he was 16, eventually pursuing further formal training to become an artist, musician and decorator. He married Florence Newman in the summer of 1905.49 It is possible that Lee decided to enlist after hearing the news of the casualties from the Second Battle of Ypres in April of 1915, and the sinking of the civilian passenger-ship Lusitania a month later, combined with increasing difficulty to continue a fruitful artistic career during wartime. He enlisted with the CEF at Shorncliffe Army Camp at St. Martin’s Plains in June 1915. Chris Sharpe explains that there were many British citizens who enlisted with the CEF, in order to fill the ranks as the authorized number of soldiers required increased more rapidly than was possible to reinforce and maintain.50 Many British soldiers who served in the CEF immigrated to Canada at the end of the war and Lee was among them. Like others who fought in the CEF, Lee served in various battalions and went wherever the support was needed. He initially enlisted as a bandsman and played the trombone, in the 12th battalion, serving with them until May of 1917. When the 12th was dissolved, it was absorbed by the 124th, the Governor General’s Body Guard in the Royal Regiment of Canada. His final months of the war were spent as part of the 3rd Canadian Engineers in the tunnelling company.51 His personnel record describes a man with a dark complexion, jet-black hair and brown eyes, standing five feet and five and a half inches tall. On his left arm were two vaccination scars and an anchor tattoo. He was able to return home on a short leave in February 1917, but after this, he would not see his wife and their newborn daughter, Betty, until the end of the war. Beyond these details taken from Lee’s personnel record, and a studio portrait taken when he enlisted, his story remained unknown outside his immediate family. In 1966, Lee decided to gift his trench art to his grandson, Leonard St. Marie, whom he affectionately called ‘Lenny.’ With each piece came a handwritten postcard detailing the way he created the objects, where he was when he made them, and he emphasizes the importance of remembering. This is an especially rare case where a detailed record of trench art provenance is available, and the voice of the soldier himself is preserved. In the nearly three and a half years that Lee was on the front lines, he made three pieces of trench art, each served both utilitarian and commemorative purposes. They are pictured in Figure 11.2. The first piece was a matchbox. Matchboxes were an extremely popular form of trench art. Most soldiers took up smoking during their service, as

246  Sarafina Pagnotta

Figure 11.2  Three pieces of trench art made ‘somewhere in France’ by Pte. Arthur Frederick Lee. Photographed by author

it was both a way to pass the time and steady their nerves.52 Because of this, matchboxes were things soldiers would have carried anyway, but the trench art versions allowed for a bit of individuality. They could be made from brass ammunition clips or other bits of scrap metal such as the readily available empty artillery shell casing. They were easy to personalize, and by the end of the war, these matchboxes had become a commodity in the trenches. In the first of his postcards, Lee explains both the practicality and importance of his matchbox. He writes that matches could explode in your pocket, it was important to replace the cardboard box with these brass ones. He mentions that he made this matchbox from a German shell case while on the Lens front.53 Because he took the time to specify that the shell case had been German, perhaps he was communicating that this was a symbol of survival and victory over the enemy. On one side of the matchbox is a humorous caricature of a German soldier, likely the Kaiser, running away: an image etched by Lee himself with a needle. The image was a common one that appeared in trench newspapers, cartoons and in propaganda. In the winter of 1916, it was widely distributed on a Christmas card designed by the Bamforth Postcards Company in England. The image was meant to boost morale among the Allies. Perhaps for Lee, it was a small way to find some humour in his situation. On the other side of the matchbox there is a badge associated with the Royal Flying Corps. It remains unclear where he acquired it, perhaps out on a souveniring expedition, or it was gifted to him.

War stories 247 It was extremely important to many of the soldiers on the front lines to somehow leave their mark in order to be remembered. These affirmations of identity were left behind as if to say I was here, I mattered. Above all, trench artworks were created because of an arguably basic human need and desire to leave a mark. Pte. Lee was no different. He made himself a make-shift identification bracelet in early 1916. Identification tags were not standardized in the CEF until later in 1916, and even then, some soldiers did not receive their formal tags until nearly the end of the war. 54 Because of the frequent lack of formal identification, many of the soldiers who died in action remained unidentified, or were unidentifiable. To avoid this fate, many soldiers, Lee among them, created their own forms of identification. Lee’s postcard explains the making of his bracelet: This identification disk and bracelet was made by me in France in 1916. It is made from French bullets which are of solid metal. To flatten them, I used a freight train and engine. The only tools I had were a small hammer, a couple of files, a small piece of steel for a chisel and several large needles. I used the wheel of a wagon to hammer and shape the links, file for cutting, the writing is done with a needle. It took a lot of time and patience. I was never at Ypres. I made the bracelet while on the Vimy Front.55 Clearly, the bracelet was not made in an afternoon. It was something he worked on whenever he had the time and felt safe enough to do so. Lee’s company was stationed at the Vimy front for several months in 1917, to hold the captured location. By providing his grandson with such detail, it is clear that Lee felt it important that Lenny know exactly where he had and had not served. Finally, Lee created a watch fob. He described the experience in his final postcard: I printed my name, regimental number, also GGBG which means Governor General’s Body Guard, and CEF which means Canadian Expeditionary Force, on an English penny. Years later, I pressed the penny into a brass watch fob in Winnipeg. I did it to test my eyesight, while sitting at the entrance to a large German dugout at Vimy Ridge. I was blind from cooking in an open trench in view of the Germans. The smoke had to travel up a long pipe and into some bushes, but the smoke was too much for me and I suddenly went totally blind but regained my sight and in a few days was sent back to HQ.56 In his personnel file, there is a record of when Lee was transferred to the cookery: 28 July 1917. There is also an official medical record of his temporary blindness and return to duty after a month’s convalescence on 18 August 1917.57 This is an extremely rare case where it is possible to

248  Sarafina Pagnotta pinpoint exactly when and where a trench art object was created, and have it corroborated in the official record. While the penny itself had little significance to Lee during the war, as he said, he only engraved his information on it to test his eyesight, the fact that he kept it, and then pressed it into a watch fob once the war was over, and held onto it until the 1960s, makes it significant. What was once just a way to keep his hands busy and test his eyesight, became a cherished memento of his service on the Western Front. Private Lee was one of the lucky ones. He returned home to his wife and daughter after the war ended. However, he had endured over three years of mechanized warfare. He returned home, though likely with scars, both visible and invisible. He was discharged on 26 August 1919 when his battalion was dissolved. Lee and his family immigrated to Canada with their young daughter aboard the SS Melita arriving in late August of that year.58 He and Florence made a new life in Winnipeg and together they had four more children. In 1966, Lee decided to gift the pieces to his grandson. After Lee’s death a year later in 1967, their meaning shifted, becoming treasured mementos of a grandfather, as well as a man who had survived the Great War. Beyond that however, Lee’s trench art is significant in its power to evoke memory. What that memory is changes with each subsequent generation. For Lee himself, perhaps the pieces evoked memories of his time on the front lines, and the things he endured while he was there. For his grandson, the memories would be different; they would be of his grandfather. Once the pieces were donated to the CWM, they became commemorative objects, the material placeholders to tell Pt. Lee’s story. While the full extent of Lee’s experiences can never be known, as there are gaps in the personnel files, and he did not write a day to day diary or publish a memoir, it is with the help of his trench art that his story can be pieced together. Although the trench art pieces can speak for themselves, there is added weight and detail in this case. Obviously, Lee felt it important enough to explain in detail and in writing, what he had experienced ensuring that someone, somewhere would remember him long after his death. When Leonard St. Marie donated the pieces to the Canadian War Museum in 2007, he fulfilled his grandfather’s wish.

Conclusion It was only with the First World War that such a conscious, methodological approach to collecting and exhibiting visual records of war and conflict began in Canada. This artistic production occurred on both the national and international scale and, as this chapter has demonstrated, at individual level as well. While officially sponsored organizations commissioned war art, photographs, films, and sculptures, as well as collected war trophies, it is not often recognized or seriously considered that there were ordinary

War stories 249 soldiers and civilians creating artworks simultaneously. Laura Brandon has argued, ‘a work of art, regardless of medium, that deals with war is undoubtedly war art.’59 Not only does the CWMF collection leave a powerful visual legacy of Canada’s involvement in the conflict, it also helped to shape the development of Canadian art and artists as distinct and separate from their British counterparts. Brandon continues, ‘much of the familiar landscape art of the celebrated Group of Seven, for example, owes its genesis to what members saw and recorded in the mud and trenches of the Western Front in France and Belgium.’60 The success of the CWMF led to the creation of subsequent initiatives during the conflicts during the remainder of the twentieth century and now into the twenty-first. Clearly, art has an impact on those who create and view it, and the Canadian government has continued to find it important enough to continue documenting Canadians’ war experiences. Furthermore, the fact that more individual artistic expressions are increasingly making their way into the national collections and gaining exposure reflects the desire to understand on a personal level and to remember. According to Saunders, trench art objects are ‘rich in symbolism and irony, their variety bearing more than a silent witness to war. Individually and collectively they possess a value beyond their common status as… collectables.’61 Though not official works commissioned by governments, trench art has significant cultural and historical value, in addition to often being aesthetically pleasing and psychologically intriguing. The material from which trench art is made was on the front line, just as the soldier had been, and could stand in for the experience for an individual, while official war art is about the experience of war for the collective Canadian public.62 The practice of collecting and creating trench art from the battlefield debris they collected was no doubt a coping mechanism for soldiers in the trenches, a way to distract themselves from their circumstances, though a morbid and ironic one. They very materials they collected and objects they created were directly related to and representative of death, loss and the horrors of war. But they are also examples of resilience, agency and the will to live. It is exemplary of how humans experience and survive modern warfare. This modest trench art collection is extremely complementary to the large-scale oil paintings and bronze sculptures in the official war art collection. The Canadian War Museum has undoubtedly contributed to the social memory of Canadian involvement in the world wars and does so through its research, collections and exhibitions. Caroline Winters writes, ‘social memories are dynamic and are updated in response to different generational needs.’63 This is reflected in the selections that are made in terms of acquisitions to the collections, exhibition planning and execution and the publications that are distributed by the museum. The museum’s website and online exhibition content continues to grow, making the Art and

250  Sarafina Pagnotta Memorials Collection more accessible worldwide. A potential next step for the CWM would be to mount an exhibition, whether physical or online, that juxtaposes the official war art with the trench art, and to explore the experiences of official war artists alongside the very soldiers they painted. This would present an opportunity to close the gap between the official and the unofficial, public versus private memorialization, and to explore the experiences of more Canadians who endured the Great War on a more personal level. Trench art objects were pieces of the ‘war to end all wars’ but they were also more than this; they became symbols of hope. They were the material evidence of a soldier’s hope that he would return home and reclaim his trench art once the war was over. If he did not make it, the meaning of trench art and its significance changed: the object would become a memento, often the only remaining physical link between bereaved family members and their fallen soldier buried an ocean away. Soldier-made trench art objects have the potential to provide a glimpse into individual lived experiences of those on the front lines, in prisoner of war camps, and in the villages and towns just next to the fighting fields. The irony of trench art pieces is that once they have been removed from their context, once cherished memory objects revert into spent artillery shell casings and bullets.64 It is through a study of these objects, and more serious consideration and exhibition that more Canadian war stories can be preserved and interpreted for new generations learning about the ‘war to end all wars.’

Notes 1. For example, see Richard Jack’s Second Battle of Ypres 22 April to 25 May 1915, or his The Taking of Vimy Ridge, Easter Monday 1917. See also Captain William Longstaff’s Ghosts of Vimy Ridge and Cyril Henry Barraud’s Stretcher Bearer Party. 2. Lloyd Bennett, The Canadian War Memorials Exhibition, Burlington House, London, 1919 (New York: Linus Publishing Ltd. 2015), p. 171. 3. The thousand works that resulted from that initiative were trusted to the National Gallery of Canada in 1921, however, in 1971, most of the works were transferred to the Canadian War Museum. Some of the more ‘modern’ paintings remained at the Gallery, where the more ‘traditional’ history paintings or ‘military artworks’ ended up at the Canadian War Museum. 4. Laura Brandon, Art or Memorial? The Forgotten History of Canada’s War Art (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2006), p. 87. 5. Brandon, Art or Memorial?, p. 23. 6. Laura Brandon, ‘The Canadian War Memorial That Never Was,’ Canadian Military History, 7 (2012), p. 45. 7. The George Metcalf Archival Collection holds archival documents and photographic materials. The photograph collection holds approximately 90,000 items including original photographic prints, negatives, glass slides and more. 8. See for example, Maria Tippett, Art at the Service of War: Canada, Art and the Great War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), Tim Cook ‘Documenting War and Forging Reputations Sir Max Aitken and the Canadian War Records Office in the First World War,’ War in History, 10 (2003), pp.

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265–95, and Laura Brandon ‘Words and Pictures: Writing Atrocities into Canada’s First World War Official Photographs,’ Journal of Canadian Art History, 31 (2010), pp. 110–26, among others. 9. James Fox, ‘Conflict and Consolation: British Art and the First World War 1914–1919,’ Art History & Theory, 31 (2012), p. 818. 10. Chris Sharpe, ‘Enlistment in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-1918,’ Canadian Military History, 24 (2015), p. 23. 11. Records of the Department of Militia and Defence (hereafter RG 9), v 4746, 175/1, CWRO, ‘Report Submitted by the Officer in Charge to the Right Honourable Sir Robert L. Borden’, 11 January 1917. Quoted in Tim Cook, ‘Documenting the War and Forging Reputations: Sir Max Aitken and the Canadian War Records Office in the First World War,’ in War in History, 3 (2003), p. 282. 12. For example, Private George Bell carried a camera and took many photographs: portraits of the men in his platoon, and some detailing life in the trenches. He left a valuable photographic record. See Tim Cook, At the Sharp End: Canadians Fighting the Great War 1914–1916 (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2007), p. 398. 13. Cook, ‘Documenting War,’ p. 266, 282. 14. Laura Brandon, ‘Words and Pictures: Writing Atrocity into Canada’s First World War Official Photographs,’ Journal of Canadian Art History, 31 (2010), p. 114. 15. Maria Tippett, Art at the Service of War: Canada, Art and the Great War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), p. 68. 16. Sue Malvern, Modern Art, Britain and the Great War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 48. 17. James Fox, British Art and the First World War, 1914-1924 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 75. 18. Sue Malvern, ‘Art’, in 1914–1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. By Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2016-11-10, p. 2. Malvern has pointed out that there is a need for a comparative analysis of the different official war art programs, this however remains out of the scope of this chapter. 19. James Fox, ‘Fiddling While Rome is Burning: Hostility to Art During the First World War, 1914–18,’ Visual Culture in Britain, 18 (2010), pp. 49–50. 20. It should be noted, however, some war museums were established during the war (such as the Imperial War Museum in 1917) and funding to museums and galleries merely changed. It became imperative that the institutions be mandated to document and preserve the war effort. 21. Fox, British Art and the First World War, p. 75. 22. Bennett, Canadian War Memorials Exhibition, p. xvii, 2. 23. Malvern, Art, p. 7. 24. See Frederick Varley, For What? This painting defied censorship rules, displaying Allied corpses collected from the battlefield, piled one on top of the other in a cart, openly questioning the war’s purpose. 25. Tippett, Art at the Service of War, p. 58. 26. Four of the seven members of the Group of Seven served during the First World War, both on the front lines and as war artists: A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, Frederick Varley, and Lawren Harris. 27. Susan Butlin, ‘Women Making Shells: Marking Women’s Presence in the Munitions Work 1914–1918: The Art of Frances Loring, Florence Wyle, Mabel May and Dorothy Stevens,’ Canadian Military History, 5 (2012), p. 41. 28. See Laura Brandon, ‘The Canadian War Memorial that Never Was,’ Canadian Military History, 7 (2012), p. 45–54.

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29. Brandon, Art and War, p. 68. 30. Bennett, The Canadian War Memorials Exhibition, p. 171. 31. Brandon, Art or Memorial?, p. 49. 32. There are currently 194 pieces of trench art in the vault. A few select objects are on permanent display. Trench art objects do feature in Supply Line, the museum’s First World War education discovery box that is sent to schools across the country. There, they are used to tell personal stories, and communicate the human experience of war. It is my argument that these should be included in art exhibitions alongside the official war art. 33. Nicholas J. Saunders, ‘Bodies of Metal, Shells of Memory,’ Journal of Material Culture, (2000), 5(1), pp. 43–44. 34. See Laura Brandon, Art and War (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007) for a survey of the history of war art. 35. Nicholas J. Saunders, ‘People in Objects: Individuality and the Quotidian in the Material Culture of War,’ in The Materiality of Individuality: Archaeological Studies of Individual Lives, ed. Carolyn L. White (New York: Springer, 2009), p. 39. 36. Clare Whittingham, ‘Mnemonics for War: Trench Art and the Reconciliation of Public and Private Memory,’ Past Imperfect (2008), p. 88. 37. Nicholas J. Saunders, Trench Art: A Brief History and Guide, 1914–1939 (Barnsley: Penn & Sword Books Ltd., 2001), p. 57. 38. Paul Williams, Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities (New York: Berg, 2007), p. 29. 39. Saunders, ‘People in Objects,’ p. 43. 40. Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War 1914-1918: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France During the First World War (Oxford: Berg Publishers Limited, 1992), pp. 90–91. 41. Tim Cook, ‘“Tokens of Fritz’: Canadian Soldiers and the Art of Souveneering in the Great War.” The Great War & Society, 31 (2012), p. 215. 42. ‘Pte. E.H. McKinnon to Mother,’ The Waterford Star, 26 April 1917. Waterford, Ontario. 43. Canadian Letters and Images Project, William Curtis Howard papers, letter to sister, 18 June 1915. 44. Heather Smith, Keepsakes of Conflict: Trench Art and Other Canadian War-Related Craft (Moose Jaw: Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery, 2016), p. 39. 45. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1984), pp. 150–51. 46. See Susan Stewart, On Longing, and Andrea Witcomb ‘Using souvenirs to rethink how we tell histories of migration: some thoughts,’ in Narrating Objects, Collecting Stories, ed. Sandra H. Dudley, et. al. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), pp. 36–50. 47. Whittingham, ‘Mnemonics for War,’ pp. 86–87. 48. Trench Life: A Survival Guide opened at the Canadian War Museum in 2008. The exhibition dealt with the distinct soldier culture created by those on the front lines, and Tim Cook recently published The Secret History of Soldiers: How Canadians Survived the Great War (Toronto: Penguin Random House, 2018) which includes a short chapter on soldier art. 49. General Register Office. England and Wales Civil Registration Index, 1837– 1915. London, England: General Register Office, p. 212. 50. Sharpe, ‘Enlistment in the Canadian Expeditionary Force,’ p. 20. 51. Library and Archives Canada, RG 150, Accessioned 1992-93/166. Box 55205. Attestation papers and chronological service record.

War stories 253 52. Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War, pp. 90–91. 53. Canadian War Museum. Arthur Frederick Lee papers. 20070132-003, postcard to his grandson, 1966. 54. Cook, Shock Troops, p. 225. 55. Canadian War Museum, Arthur Frederick Lee Papers, 20070132-002, postcard to his grandson, 1966. 56. Canadian War Museum. Arthur Frederick Lee papers. 20070132-001, postcard to his grandson, 1966. 57. LAC RG 150. Accessioned 1992-93/166, Box 5520-5. 58. Canadian War Museum. Arthur Frederick Lee artefact file, artist biography, 20070132. 59. Brandon, Art and War, p. 5. 60. Brandon, Art and War, p. 45. 61. Saunders, Trench Art, p. 20. 62. Smith, Keepsakes of Conflict, p. 25. 63. Caroline Winter, ‘Tourism, Social Memory and the Great War,’ Annals of Tourism Research 36 (2009), p. 613. 64. Saunders, ‘Bodies of Metal,’ p. 62.

Index

Bold page numbers refer to figures. Abetz, Otto 69 Agnew’s 19, 22, 27 Air Ministry, UK 192, 195, 197, 198, 201; Historic Aircraft Working Party of 198; proposal for an RAF museum by 199 Aitken, Max (Lord Beaverbrook) 237–239 art dealers 3, 19–20, 22, 25, 31; Belgian 20; see also Agnew’s; Christie’s; Durand-Ruel Ashcroft, Philip 105, 106, 119–122, 120, 122–123; books read by 109–111; death of 121–122; health of 114, 115; local collecting focus of 112–113, 116; military career of 114–115; talks given by 117 Athens 39, 41 aviation museums 193–194 Barcelona 79, 80, 85–86, 89–90; see also Catalonia Berlin 39; and Russian advance on of 1945 43; Wall, fall of (see German reunification); see also Neues Museum Boyle, Sir Dermot 198, 199 Brandon, Laura 236, 249 Brussels 20 Burdened, The 175–176, 178, 182, 186; see also Lammert, Will Canada: involvement in First World War battles of 235, 237–238; Trench art from 243–244, 249 Canadian Armed Forces Civilian Artists Program 240–241

Canadian War Memorials Fund 236, 237–239, 241, 249; post-war exhibitions by 240 Canadian War Museum 235; art exhibitions by 236; official war art in 235–236, 237, 249–250; trench art in 236, 242, 244–248, 246, 249–250 Canadian War Records program 240, 241 Catalonia 79; Government of 80–81, 82, 83, 88, 94; national identity of 83, 85–86, 90 Christie’s 15, 19, 20, 23, 27 Code of Hammurabi 67, 73, 73 Country Life 118, 119 Country Relics (Massingham) 109–110 Dame d’Elche 70 D-Day Museum, UK 230–231 ‘degenerate art’ exhibition, Munich 68, 152, 162 Department of Information, UK 5 Durand-Ruel, Paul 18–22, 28 East Germany 171, 173, 179, 182, 187 Eindhoven: allied bombing of 161; liberation of 164 Entartete Kunst exhibition see ‘degenerate art’ exhibition, Munich Eugénie, Empress of France 25–26 Exhibition of Ancient Art, Barcelona 85 Fichtner, Franz 133, 134–135, 142–143 First International Congress for the Protection of Works of Art and Monuments (1899) 85

256  Index First World War 153, 192, 215–216, 224; photography exhibition of 238 Folch i Torres, Josep 82, 85, 87–89, 91 Franco regime, Spain 86, 89; exchange of objects with Vichy France 70, 74 Franco-Prussian war 2, 3, 4, 15–16, 19, 30; effect on art of 30–31; effect on heritage of 32; London re-enactment of 17–8, 18 Frankland, Noble 219, 226 GDR see East Germany German reunification 171, 180 Goebbels, Joseph 130, 143 Grünes Gewölbe, Dresden 136, 140; exhibition of photographs in 140, 141 Gudiol, Josep 80 Guerzoni, Guido 15–16, 30 Hendon airfield, UK 192, 195–197, 199–201, 203, 205 Heritage: protection of in Catalonia 83–85 Héron de Villefosse, baron AntoineMarie 23–24 Hissarlik see Troy Historisches Museum, Dresden 140–142 History in schools 106–107 Hitler, Adolf 130–131, 133, 158 Hours, Magdeleine 61, 67 Hunterian Museum, London 4 Imperial War Museum 6–7, 192, 194, 195, 197, 201, 202, 203; Blitz Experience display at 215, 227–229, 228, 231; centenary of 230; First World War Galleries 1; history of 215–217; Holocaust Gallery at 229; large objects in 213–214, 218–223; nature of historical displays in 213–215, 218, 230; Naval guns at 219–220, 220, 222–223; ‘Peopling’ of galleries in 213–214, 223–230 Impressionist painters in London 18–19 International Museums Office 82, 87–89, 93–95 Istanbul Archaeological Museum 40, 43, 45–52 Jaujard, Jacques 63, 65, 67, 68–69, 71, 74–75, 94

Kesting, Edmund 140, 141, 144 Kjeldbæk, Esben 217, 218, 223–224 Kommittee der Ravensbrückerinnen 175–176 Kultuurkamer, Dutch 150, 156–157, 160–161, 162, 165 Kunstschutz, French 63, 68, 71, 74 ‘L’Art Catalan’ exhibition 90–93, 91, 92, 93 Lammert, Will 174–176 Lau d’Allemans, Alfred du 21, 21, 23 Lee, Arthur Frederick 245–8, 246 Litschke, Egon 179 Liverpool Museums 4 London 26; art market in 17, 23, 30; French exiles in 15, 18–19; nineteenth-century growth of 15–6; shopping areas in 20 Louvre Museum, the 31; and Paris uprising of 1944 72; defensive militia for 72; evacuation during First World War 63; evacuation during Second World War 66–67, 66, 94; evacuation plans for 62, 64–65, 68, 74; inventories of 62, 74; near Eastern Antiquities department of 61–73, 74; reopening of 72–73; under German occupation 68 MacDonald, Sharon 116 Masefield, Peter 196, 197, 199 Military museums 194, 199; scope of 193 Modernity 2 Mouseion 82, 87, 95 Musée Cernuschi 17 Musée de la Libération de Paris 1 Museu d’Art de Catalunya 81–82, 84, 86–87; evacuation of 88–90 Museum für Tierkunde, Dresden 130, 131, 132, 138–139, 143 Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester 192, 204 Museums and aerial bombardment 4, 135, 136 Napoléon-Jérome, Prince 26; sale of goods of 27–30, 29 Napoleonic Wars 3, 15 narratives of war 7 National Archaeological Museum, Athens 40, 42, 45–52

Index 257 National Gallery of Norway 86 National Maritime Museum, UK 194, 205 National Trust, UK 106, 107, 111, 119–121, 122 Natural History Museum, London 4, 5 Nazism: Museum Week under 139; role of museums under 138, 143–144 Netherlands, German occupation of 149: arts policy under 150 Neues Museum, Berlin 40, 42, 46–52 NS Frauenschaft 161 Old English Household Life (Jekyll and Jones) 109, 110–111 Oswalt-Tischler, architects 181, 181 Palais-Royal, Paris 27–9, 28, 30 Paris: 1940 German occupation of 61; Commune 16, 27–28, 31, 33; liberation of 72; see also Louvre Museum, the Peeters, Piet 158–159, 162, 164 Porzellansammlung, Dresden 134, 137, 138–139; contemporary porcelain exhibition at 142–143, 144 Posse, Hans 130–131, 142 Prado Museum, the 67, 86–87, 94 ‘Priam’s treasure’: audio guides to 51–52; discovery of 40–42; display of 44–45 (see also Istanbul Archaeological Museum; National Archaeological Museum, Athens; Neues Museum, Berlin; Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow); legal ownership of 49; nature of 39–40, 42; object labels of 50–51; Russian seizure of part of 43–44 Pulles, Hub 158–60, 159, 165 Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow 40, 43, 45–52 Ravensbrück concentration camp site 171; current exhibitions at 183–6, 187; first memorial and exhibition at 173–8, 177, 178; history as concentration camp 172–173; Lagermuseum at 176, 178; memorial landscape at 182; national rooms in 179–180; objects made in 185–186, 187; redisplay following German reunification 180–182,

181; redisplay in 1980 178–180; representations of female experience at 183–184, 187; Soviet uses of 173, 174, 178, 181, 186; Uckermark youth camp at 173, 177, 181, 182, 186 Röell, David 151–154, 164–165 Royal Aeronautical Society 196; proposal for a national aeronautical collection by 196–197 Royal Air Force, UK: as a military service 193, 195; attitude towards museum of 198; Battle of Britain Memorial Flight of 196; Cranwell, College of 192, 193, 198–199; historic aircraft held by 195–196 Royal Air Force (RAF) Museum, UK 191, 192, 202; audience of 193, 207; controlling department of 201–2, 205; financial structure of 205; need for 194–195; opening of 201, 202; plans for 199, 200, 201; scope of 203–204 Royal Pavilion, Brighton 5 Royal United Services Institute, UK 194, 198 Rufford Old Hall 106, 107, 122; see also Rufford Village Museum Rufford Village Museum 105, 106, 119; setting up of 108–113; displays in 116; arrangements with National Trust of 119–121; see also Rufford Old Hall Rural England, interest in 107; museums of during war 117–118 Sandberg, Willem 149, 150, 151–156, 164–166 Saunders, Nicholas J. 242–243, 249 Schliemann, Heinrich 41–42, 48; as thief or hero 45 Schliemann, Sophia 41, 48 Science Museum, UK 194, 195, 197, 202 Seghers, Anna 174–175, 177 Sluijters, Jan 152, 164–165 South Kensington Museum 31, 32, 33, 42 Spanish Civil War 79–80, 84, 86–87, 95; see also Franco regime Staatliche Sammlungen für Kunst und Wissenchaft, Dresden 129; Anti-Semitism in 133; closures and

258  Index evacuation of 136–8, 137; declining staff numbers of 129–130; effect of Dresden bombardment on 143; Nazi party membership among staff of 130–132, 134; protection planning for 135–136; purging of staff of 132–133 Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 149, 150, 151–157, 164–166; ‘150 jaar mode’ exhibition at 153–154; ‘In Holland staat een huis’ exhibition at 152–154; ‘Kunstenaars zien den Arbeidsdienst’ exhibition at 156– 157, 165; Purges of Jewish employees and artists at 151; ‘Stad en land’ exhibition at 154–156, 155, 165 Tanner, John: as director of RAF Museum 192; campaign for Battle of Britain Museum of 203; campaign for National Aviation Museum of 202–203; campaign to found RAF Museum of 198–199; early life 191; expansion plans for RAF Museum of 203–205; legacy of 205–206; retirement of 205 Tate Gallery, London 5 Total War 2 Trench art 236, 242–243, 250 Trenchard, Sir Hugh 195, 196

Troy 40–41; see also ‘Priam’s Treasure’ UNESCO 75 V&A Museum, London 5; see also South Kensington Museum Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven 149, 150, 158, 164–165; organisational changes in following occupation 158; ‘Huisvlijttentoonstelling’ exhibition at 159–160, 165; ‘Huisvrouwen worden vindingrijk’ exhibition at 161–162; ‘Volkstentoonstelling Nederlansche Kunst van de provincies Brabant en Zeeland’ exhibition at 160–161, 165; ‘Wansmaak en Gezonde Kunst’ exhibition at 162–164, 163, 165 Veit Stoss exhibition, Dresden and touring 140–142, 144; propaganda character of 141–142 Verne, Henri 64–65 Village museums 108, 122–123 Visser, Wouter 158, 164, 165 Voss, Hermann 130–131 Wallace, Richard 17, 32 West Germany 171 Winter, Jay 1, 216 Wolff-Metternich, Count Franz 63, 68–69, 74–75