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Jacksonville’s Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens' permanent collection of almost 5,000 objects has been on display at its Riverside Avenue facility since 1961.
A delicate porcelain coffee pot and teapot were donated to Cummer in 1965 by art collectors Ralph and Constance Wark. As it turns out these pieces were part of loot plundered by the Nazis in World War II from prominent German banker and collector, Gustav Von Klemperer and thought to be gone for good. (Jacksonville museum pieces actually Nazi loot; owner to get them back)
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In order to help others learn more about how art was stolen by the Nazis during the war, the family has agreed to let the pots remain on display in the Cummer Museum through next September.
“Too often museums who do the right thing may quietly take a piece off the wall and don’t tell the story, and that was very important to us,” Cummer chief curator Holly Keris said. “This in no way damages the quality of the collection he [Wark] assembled or calls into question his own scruples in collecting. This was something that was happening at the time, and this is an important story people were not aware of.”
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Thousands of stolen artworks have been recovered, but at least 100,000 were still missing as of the late 1990s, according to the National Archives. Museums and collectors’ descendants are still seeking them, and that’s what happened at the Cummer.
The pieces will get a separate display with information on their history, theft and recovery. The museum will host a free seminar on Nazi looting on November 6 and more educational sessions are planned.
I took some time to look into looted Nazi artifacts and discovered that a unit of American and British troops had been formed during the war to initially mitigate combat damage to structures - churches, museums and other important monuments. However, as the war progressed and the German border was breached, their focus then shifted to locating movable works of art and other items stolen or otherwise missing.
The unit consisted of about 400 service members and civilians working in conjunction with military forces and was formally known as the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section (MFAA), but commonly called "Monuments Men". They mostly worked behind enemy lines and were often completely unarmed.
At the Merkers salt mines in central Germany, American GIs admire Édouard Manet’s In the Conservatory, one of the thousands of rare works and documents stored there by the Nazi regime late in World War II. Monuments Man George Stout, a Fogg Museum conservator turned U.S. Army lieutenant, supervised the rescue of 40 tons of art from the site in April 1945. (National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD)
Robert M. Edsel wrote
The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History which is an account of the exploits of six Monument Men during eleven months between D-Day and V-E Day as they set about their misson to save the world's great art from the Nazis.
If you think this would make a great movie, then you aren't the only one. George Clooney to Direct, Star in "Monuments Men" About Stolen Nazi Art. Clooney is co-writing this piece with his producing partner Grant Heslov. The two have teamed up often to make political or socially-oriented movies such as "Ides of March" which is about a corrupt political campaign and "Good Night and Good Luck" which examines the limits of freedom of the press.
Further reading if you have an interest:
The Monuments Men Foundation
The National WWII Museum Tours/In the Footsteps of the Monuments Men
The Art Army: Harvard's Monuments Men At War