The “three graces” of art restitution

"The Graces of the Gardens of the Hesperides", Rubens, taken by the ERR
Source: Holocaust-Era Assets Portal, NARA, RG 111-SC-374665

Although they were not paragons of beauty by any Classical standard, Ardelia Hall, Evelyn Tucker, and Rose Valland, constitute a trinity of hard-nosed women who flew the standard of art restitution in the post-1945 era as high and as steadily as they possibly could with the bare means put at their disposal to do justice in their own special way.

Indeed, each one of them behaved in a unique way, faced with specific sets of challenges that on occasion may have seemed insurmountable to them. And yet, they persevered. Although Ardelia Hall and Evelyn Tucker left their respective duties with very mixed feelings, Rose Valland, in relative terms, fared far better and benefited from additional institutional support for her mission to recover items belonging to France and to individuals living in France at the time of the German occupation and the Vichy years. In true French style, Rose Valland was awarded some of the highest honors commensurate with engaging in feats of Resistance during the German occupation.

On the other hand, Ardelia Hall and Evelyn Tucker, the former at the US Department of State, the latter in the US zone of occupation in Austria, were given short shrift throughout their tenure in the US government and were forced to turn into one-woman armies with skeletal staff support in an all-male world. I emphasize this gender issue because it stands out as self-evident. The worlds of international diplomacy and Allied military occupation and civil administration were populated by men, while women, for the most part, served in auxiliary functions. Even the various Allied art recovery commissions established by France (Vaucher), Great Britain (Macmillan), and the United States (Roberts) were all-male casts of museum directors, art historians, curators, and civil servants.

While Ardelia Hall and Rose Valland were creatures of the prewar museum world, Evelyn Tucker was not. Ardelia Hall was a specialist in ancient China and began her museum career in Boston at the Museum of Fine Arts before moving on to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, from which she was tapped to serve in a small office of cultural affairs at the US Department of State in 1944. Rose Valland worked in a curatorial capacity in prewar Paris, and was referred to by a senior curator in France, as a “little mouse”[la petite souris du Louvre] at the Louvre, before she was thrust into the weird world of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) at the Jeu de Paume.  Her tenacity earned her many postwar stars as an unwitting observer of institutional plunder for four long years. Following the Liberation of France, she served at Baden-Baden in the French zone of occupation of Germany where she coordinated restitution operations on behalf of the French government.

In some strange way, based on a comparative reading of the correspondence between Ardelia Hall, Evelyn Tucker and Rose Valland, Ardelia appeared to be the one on whom they both relied for strength, inspiration, and support, especially Evelyn whose continual run-ins with the US military administration in Vienna and Salzburg and confrontations with the leadership of the Munich Central Collecting Point (MCCP) made her tasks all the more arduous. This might explain why Evelyn Tucker became increasingly an advocate of Austrian interests, sometimes setting her at odds even with official US restitution policy.

More will appear in these pages about Ardelia, Evelyn, and Rose. Suffice it to say, for now, that without their extraordinary displays of bravura and stubbornness, we would not be blessed today with hundreds of thousands of pages of invaluable information regarding thefts, investigations, and recoveries of countless cultural items purloined by the Nazis in Europe. In a corny way, I feel compelled to doff my invisible hat and say to them: thank you for sticking by your guns and handing over to us and future generations a priceless legacy of historical information documenting one of the most complex events of the last century.

Les trois muses. Fragment de décoration de la maison de Titus Dentatius Panthera à Pompéi, (54-68 ap.J.C.)
Source: Radio France Internationale (RFI) via Musée national d'archéologie de Naples

Ardelia Hall

Ardelia Hall (1899-1979) is the quintessential personification of a one-woman campaign to track down looted art and restitute thousands of these missing works to their rightful owners.  Her art restitution mission lasted for 16 years, from 1946 to 1962,while she served as a cultural affairs officer at the US Department of State.  A trained art historian she specialized in ancient Chinese art and before the war worked at the Department of Asian Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts under whose auspices she participated in archaeological digs in China during the early 1930s.  After a brief stint at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Ardelia Hall entered the government as a cultural officer of the US Department of State.  In June 1946, she received the files of the recently-disbanded Roberts Commission, a wartime American organization that laid down the framework for American attempts to locate, recover, and return looted works of art in Europe and prevent their entry into the United States.  Overnight, she became the point person on art restitution in the US government.  Ardelia Hall managed to keep the issue of art restitution alive while most politicians and career government officials joined the increasingly fractious choruses of the Cold War.  In retrospect, Ardelia Hall stands out as one of the few champions of the rights of Holocaust victims to reclaim their lost possessions and perhaps their only voice within the US government.

Her quest for missing works of art led her to France, Germany, Austria, Italy, and back to the United States which, by the 1950s, had once again become a thriving art market, a welcoming safe haven for art works wrongfully removed from their rightful owners at the hands of the Nazis only to be sold to and incorporated into leading American private and public collections by unwitting and unscrupulous art merchants alike.

The story of this unsung heroine has never been told, it has only been hinted at in a series of books and documentaries pertaining to the looting of Europe’s cultural heritage between 1933-1945.  The story of Ardelia Hall resonates today in the wake of the depredations inflicted upon the cultural institutions of the Iraqi people.  Had she been alive today, her voice would have resonated throughout the halls of the US government in protest over such devastation.

Once anointed with her new mission, Ardelia Hall’s team of art restitution experts scoured the European countryside in search of lost collections, gathered them at collecting points and ensured their safe return to the countries whence they originated.  She also investigated on her own initiative dozens of leading art dealers in Europe and the United States whom she suspected of harboring stolen works of art for profit.  Her quest for justice also led her to forge working partnerships with the US Army and its legal arm, the Provost Marshal’s Office, to flush out works of art that had been illegally brought back to the United States by returning servicemen and officers.

Ardelia Hall worked hand in hand with two other art restitution specialists, Rose Valland, in France, and Evelyn Tucker in Austria.  Together, these three women took on the postwar governments of Western and Central Europe, the senior leadership of the Allied occupation military governments in Germany and Austria and the unrepentant representatives of the international art market.