MBHS welcomes author Robert Edsel
While many pieces of famous art are only made by one person, Robert Edsel believes that many monuments, artworks and cultural treasures belong to everyone and shared this idea during a presentation to the Mountain Brook High School on the morning of Jan. 17.
Edsel is a historical author and is most well-known for his book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, which reveals the lives of the men and women who were Monument Men during World War II. Their job was easily defined but no so easy to execute: They were to find the pieces of art that were stolen by Nazi Germany during the second World War and return them to their rightful homes.
His talk opened with a brief history of Hitler and his fascination with art, detailing that after his rejection from art school, Hitler wanted to open a museum featuring the world’s greatest collection of sculptures and paintings. But to do so, he and his army would have to steal the works from other countries.
“The initial concern wasn’t theft, it was new technology in aerial bombing,” said Edsel, describing the fortifications that were made to the painting of The Last Supper, which later saved the ceiling from collapsing when a bomb struck only 88 feet away. As the war went on, however, Hitler began to amass a larger and larger collection of art.
“Really, you’re thinking about the most celebrated artistic achievements from Western Europe being stolen,” Edsel said. But that’s where the Monument Men come in.
Edsel introduced a few of the Monument Men, such as Mason Hammond, James Rorimer, Rose Valland and Alabama native Robert Posey, whose name was met with great applause from students and faculty.
By the end of the war, the Monuments Men, who totaled to over 300 strong from different countries, discovered and returned millions of pieces of stolen art that were tucked away in salt mines and small towns all over Germany. Edsel said that many leaders were concerned that because Germany had lost the war, they would destroy many of the artifacts, but once found, the Allies disregarded the tradition of keeping the spoils of war and returning them to their home countries.
After his lecture, Edsel went on to discuss how many significant cultural artifacts and artworks are still in danger of being lost today, especially after the destruction that has occurred in Syrian and Iraq more recently. “We have to be ever vigilant,” he said of the protection of historical and significant artwork. “These are the challenges of our time.”
During a questions and answer session with the students, Edsel said that he has now founded the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art, which works to honor the men and women who were Monument Men and “their unprecedented and heroic work protecting and safeguarding civilization’s most important artistic and cultural treasures from armed conflict during World War II.”
In addition to already having a movie, called The Monuments Men, based on one of his books, Edsel is currently working with others to create a TV series called Hunting Nazi Treasure, which follows the search for the still hundred of thousands of missing pieces of art. The series is planned to air in early 2018, although a channel has not been decided.