Posts Tagged ‘Mona Lisa’
“Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.”*…
The remarkable tale of the Louvre’s successful efforts to protect its treasures from Nazi looting…
… With due respect to the Monuments Men (and unsung Monuments Women), before the Allies arrived to rescue many of Europe’s priceless works of art, French civil servants, students, and workmen did it themselves, saving most of the Louvre’s entire collection. The hero of the story, Jacques Jaujard, director of France’s National Museums, has gone down in history as “the man who saved the Louvre” — also the title of an award-winning French documentary (see trailer below). Mental Floss provides context for Jaujard’s heroism:
After Germany annexed Austria in March of 1938, Jaujard… lost whatever small hope he had that war might be avoided. He knew Britain’s policy of appeasement wasn’t going to keep the Nazi wolf from the door, and an invasion of France was sure to bring destruction of cultural treasures via bombings, looting, and wholesale theft. So, together with the Louvre’s curator of paintings René Huyghe, Jaujard crafted a secret plan to evacuate almost all of the Louvre’s art, which included 3600 paintings alone.
On the day Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Nonaggression Pact, August 25, 1939, Jaujard closed the Louvre for “repairs” for three days while staff, “students from the École du Louvre, and workers from the Grands Magazines du Louvre department store took paintings out of their frames… and moved statues and other objects from their displays with wooden crates.”
The statues included the three ton Winged Nike of Samothrace (see a photo of its move here), the Egyptian Old Kingdom Seated Scribe, and the Venus de Milo. All of these, like the other works of art, would be moved to chateaus in the countryside for safe keeping. On August 28, “hundreds of trucks organized into convoys carried 1000 crates of ancient and 268 crates of paintings and more” into the Loire Valley.
Included in that haul of treasures was the Mona Lisa, placed in a custom case, cushioned with velvet. Where other works received labels of yellow, green, and red dots according to their level of importance, the Mona Lisa was marked with three red dots — the only work to receive such high priority. It was transported by ambulance, gently strapped to a stretcher. After leaving the museum, the painting would be moved five times, “including to Loire Valley castles and a quiet abbey.” The Nazis would loot much of what was left in the Louvre, and force it to re-open in 1940 with most of its galleries starkly empty. But the Mona Lisa — at the top of Hitler’s list of artworks to expropriate — remained safe, as did many thousands more artworks Jaujard believed were the “heritage of all humanity”…
How France Hid the Mona Lisa & Other Louvre Masterpieces During World War II, from @openculture.
* George Bernard Shaw
###
As we say thanks for safekeeping, we might send Romantic birthday greetings to a painter whose works were among those saved by the Louvre; he was born on this date in 1798. Breaking with the neoclassical tendencies of contemporaries (like his rival Ingres), Delacroix took his inspiration from Reubens and the Venetian Renaissance, emerging from the outset of his career as a leader of the French Romantic movement. Together with Ingres, Delacroix is considered one of the last old Masters of painting, and one of the few who was ever photographed (see below).
Also a fine lithographer, Delacroix illustrated various works of Shakespeare, Walter Scott, and Goethe.
Communities of Interest…
From the World Taxidermy & Fish Carving Championships
Arthur Drooker goes to meetings…
From the annual meeting of the Association of Lincoln Presenters
From the 37th Vent Haven Convention, which bills itself as “the oldest and largest annual gathering of ventriloquists”
From BronyCon, the annual convention for fans of Hasbro’s animated television series “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic”
Conventional Wisdom
The U.S. meetings industry, according to a Convention Industry Council study, directly supports 1.7 million jobs, $263 billion in spending, and $14.3 billion in federal tax revenue. As impressive as these figures are, they don’t interest me as a photographer. I see conventions not as revenue sources but as visual treasures. To me, they’re unique expressions of community, culture and connection. That’s why over the next year I plan to attend about twenty conventions—the more unusual and photogenic the better—and document them for a proposed book, Conventional Wisdom. I will update this portfolio as the project progresses. At the same time, I will preview the work on coolhunting.com in a series of reports. To view these reports, please click on the list below.So far, the wisdom I’ve gained from this project has shown me that regardless of what they’re about, where they’re held or who attends them, all conventions satisfy a basic human urge: a longing for belonging. At conventions, people who share similar interests, even obsessions, come together to bond and to be themselves. The outside world doesn’t matter. In fact, for the weekend duration of most conventions, the outside world doesn’t even exist. The conventioneers have each other and that’s all they need. An attendee I met at the taxidermist convention put it best. “This isn’t a convention,” he said. “It’s a family reunion.”
• Coolhunting Report #1 (Lincolns)
• Coolhunting Report #2 (Taxidermists)
###
As we expedite our registrations, we might recall that it was on this date in 1911 that poet, playwright, and novelist Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested and jailed for complicity in the theft of the Mona Lisa (and a number of Egyptian statuettes) from the Louvre. Apollinaire had been working as an art critic, in which capacity he’d once called for the Louvre to be burned to the ground. And he’d sheltered the actual thief, Vincenzo Peruggia, after the heist… but he claimed ignorance of the crime and returned the few statuettes that Peruggia had left behind at his place. He was ultimately exonerated, but not before he implicated his his friend Pablo Picasso (who was also brought in for questioning, then also released).
You must be logged in to post a comment.