Modern Monuments Woman Delivers Cultural First Aid

Jihadis and other zealots around the world are destroying the cultural heritage of those they disagree with. It has happened before, during World War II and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, to name a couple instances. But today there’s a concerted new international effort to provide a kind of cultural first aid and disaster planning, in advance, to museums, archives, and archeological sites under threat.

That’s thanks in great part to Corine Wegener, who told the tale of her helping recover some of the 15,000 items lost and looted from the National Museum of Iraq during the early chaotic days of the American invasion.

An overflow crowd of more than 100 at the New Haven Museum Tuesday night gave Wegener, currently a cultural conservation officer with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, a long, appreciative ovation for her service.

Her talk, ​“From Berlin to Baghdad: When Art Historians Go To War,” was presented in conjunction with the museum’s current exhibition, ​“An Artist at War; Deane Keller, New Haven’s Monument Man,” which has been extended to June 25. As the exhibition explains, Keller and other World War II – era art historians, conservators, and scholars, including underappreciated ​“Monuments Women,” formed an ad hoc rescue and repatriation unit for art damaged or stolen by the Nazis. This unit was the subject of The Monuments Men, the clunky if useful 2014 film.

Keller and his colleagues are among Wegener’s role models, she said. She pointed in particular to Edith Standen and Rose Valland, the former a textile curator from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who worked immediately after the war ended at collection points in Munich and other cities, where art was being recovered and repatriated.

“These are monuments women. These are my heroes,” Wegener added.

Wegener’s descriptions of Keller’s personal commitment, at age 44 in 1943, to forego a comfortable life teaching at Yale University to organize European art rescues, such as at the Gothic cloister Campo Santo, badly damaged by Allied bombing, in Pisa, Italy, brought tears to her eyes.

As a five-year-old, Wegener wanted to join the army and did so at 19. That commenced a 21-year career in the Minnesota army reserve.

When she was called up as a civil affairs officer during the Iraq invasion, Wegener was already a curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Slated for deployment to Afghanistan, she lobbied successfully to change her assignment to Baghdad to help address the looting of that country’s cultural relics.

When she arrived, she found only she and one or two others in the entire U.S. deployment were assigned to the task. The job categories created in the U.S. Army after World War II to protect cultural sites were still on the books. Only there were no people with the requisite skills assigned to those jobs.

That led Wegener to found the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield.

Her group now trains other members of the military — in ours and those of other countries — as well as museum professionals worldwide in protecting cultural treasures during armed conflicts and natural disasters, such as in the earthquakes in Haiti (pictured).

The ​“blue shield” is the cultural equivalent of the ​“red cross,” Wegener said, and the workshops focus on what she termed basic ​“first aid” in securing damaged buildings and conducting emergency packaging and crating of artifacts.

Among those in Tuesday’s audience was Catherine ​“Cap” Sease, the senior conservator at the Peabody Museum of Natural History. She journeyed to Iraq in 2003 to help Wegener organize the finding of looted treasures and the securing of vandalized archeological sites. She received a shout-out from Wegener for her work.

Today the world is dealing with a non-stop cavalcade of cultural disasters, Wegener said. She pointed in particular to ISIS’s destruction of the 1200 B.C. Assyrian sites in Nimrud this past spring, and Islamists’ destruction of Sufi tombs in Mali in 2012.

Her mantra to her professional colleagues: ​“Take measures to protect your collections. Do your risk management.”

Sease said that while iconoclasm — the destruction of revered or cultural objects for political motives — is as old as religion itself, iconoclasts of the past ​“didn’t have dynamite and TNT.”

Wegener has recently conducted workshops in Haiti, Mali, Libya, and with colleagues, across the border from the Syrian civil war, in Turkey.

“I tell them, ​‘Leave before the guys with AK-47s come,’” Wegener said. ​“But my colleagues, in Libya and elsewhere, are brave, and they do stay.”