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Abstract
After the Great War, the League of Nations worked to foster international cooperation among museum curators, focusing first on professionalising the sector itself. As an affiliate of the League’s International Committee of Intellectual Cooperation, the International Museums Office moved decisively to standardise curators’ practice, boost the role’s stature, and build professional networks that transcended national borders. This particular initiative of the oft-maligned League proved unassumingly effective from 1926, but it did so ultimately to the detriment of the most idealistic internationalism. As extreme nationalism, civil war, and then the threat of another world war overtook Europe in the 1930s, curators began turning their improved skills and prestige to assisting their own countries’ war efforts, revealing the unexpected outcomes of international initiatives like the League’s Museums Office.
Acknowledgements
The author extends her sincere thanks to Robert Griswold, Herrick Chapman, John Kinder, Eva Muschik, Jessica Pearson, and Arianne Urus for feedback on early drafts, as well as to the two anonymous peer reviewers.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 La Protection des monuments et oeuvres d’art en temps de guerre (Paris: International Museums Office, 1939).
2 Euripide Foundoukidis, ‘Le project de Convention élaboré par l’Office international des Musées’, Mouseion 47–48, no. 3–4 (1939), 205.
3 Quoted in Christina Kott, ‘The German Museum Curators and the International Museums Office, 1926–1937’, in The Museum is Open: Towards a Transnational History of Museums, 1750-1940, ed. Andrea Meyer and Benedicte Savoy (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 206.
4 Much scholarship on museums has focused on national sectors. An important outlier is the edited volume referenced above, which aims to destabilise the idea that ‘museums since the nineteenth century have [only] been loci for the construction of identity, mirrors of completing national cultures, products of national affirmation’: Andrea Meyer and Benedicte Savoy, ‘Towards a Transnational History of Museums: An Introduction’, in The Museum is Open, 1.
5 The Board’s composition shifted with time, but not in terms of gender. The all-male board in 1931, for example, included Francisco Javier Sánchez Cantón of the Prado, Richard Graul, director emeritus of the art museums of Leipzig, Jean Guiffrey of the Louvre, and seven other male colleagues of equally senior status. The Board was dominated by European nationals from League member states, with two key exceptions: the United States and Japan. Laurence Coleman of the American Association of Museums executive, Herbert Winlock of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and George Edgell of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston served one after the other while Eisaburo Sugi, director of the Imperial Household Museum in Tokyo, joined the board in 1936, despite Japan having withdrawn from the League in 1933. The International Museums Office was not the only League organisation to allow non-League members’ participation. Japan remained active in the International Labour Organization (ILO) well after 1933, while the United States itself joined the ILO in 1934. American banks and financiers, for that matter, were active in the League’s economic section: Kathryn C. Lavelle, ‘Exit, voice, and loyalty in international organizations: US involvement in the League of Nations’, The Review of International Organizations 2 (2007), 371–393.
6 Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 157.
7 Gisèle Sapiro, ‘L’internationalisation des champs intellectuels dans l’entre-deux-guerres: facteurs professionels et politiques’ in L’espace intellectuel en Europe: De la formation des États-nations à la mondialisation, XIXe–XXIe siècle, edited by Gisèle Sapiro (Paris: La Découverte, 2009), 125; Jean-Jacques Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée: La Société des Nations et la coopération intellectuelle (1919–1946) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999), 310–11.
8 Meyer and Savoy, 1.
9 Catherine Pearson, Museums in the Second World War: Curators, Culture and Change (London and New York: Routledge, 2017); Clarissa Ceglio, A Cultural Arsenal for Democracy: The World War II Work of US Museums (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2022). See also the 2010–13 EU-funded project overseen by the European Commission: ‘European National Museums (EuNaMus)’, <https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/244305> [accessed July 18, 2022].
10 Kott, ‘The German Museum Curators’, 206.
11 Susan Pedersen, ‘Back to the League of Nations’, American Historical Review 112. no. 4 (October 2007), 1091–1117.
12 Ibid, 1109–10. See also Patricia Clavin’s work on the League’s Economic and Financial Organization in Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920–1946 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), as well as her analysis of the League’s labour organisation, social welfare projects, and transportation committee in ‘Europe and the League of Nations’, in Twisted Paths: Europe 1914–1945, edited by Robert Gerwarth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 339–50. Clavin notably emphasises the limits of technical bodies as well.
13 ‘Les Travaux de l’Office international des Musées’, Coopération intellectuelle 1, no. 1 (January 1929), 42–3.
14 Waldemar George, ‘Art in France: Art and the League of Nations’, Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 51, no. 296 (November 1927), 246.
15 Sapiro, 112.
16 According to Christina Kott, the professionalisation of Germany’s museum sector outpaced its neighbours before the First World War, led by the strength of its museum associations: Kott, 207.
17 Jules Destrée, President of the Board of Directors of the Museums Office, ‘Rapport présenté à la XIIIème Session de la Commission internationale de la Coopération internationale’, reprinted in Mouseion 16, no. 4 (1931), 102–7.
18 Ibid., 106.
19 Chaired by Jules Destrée of Belgium until his death in 1936, the Museums Office’s board of directors featured heads and senior curators from across Europe. The board notably sought out Italian and German participation, including Attilio Rossi, Italy’s inspector general of fine arts, and Max Friedländer, renowned art historian and director of Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett. The Office’s desire to keep American presence on the board is also notable, with Euripide Foundoukidis viewing U.S. museums as powerful players due both to their purchasing power and to their innovations in modern pedagogy and scenography: UNESCO Archives online, AG01/IICI-OIM-XI/File 5 (Conférence d’experts au sujet du role éducatif des musées), <https://atom.archives.unesco.org/conference-dexperts-au-sujet-du-role-educatif-des-musees-g-xxiii-8> [accessed 19 January 2024].
20 The Office, which was part of the League’s International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, merged claims coming out of Geneva on the power of experts, technical organisations, and internationalism with a longstanding belief in the power of culture that French intellectuals and politicians actively promoted: Annamaria Ducci, ‘Europe and the Artistic Patrimony of the Interwar Period: The International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations’, in Europe in Crisis: Intellectuals and the European Idea, 1917–1957 edited by Mark Hewitson and Matthew D’Auria (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012), 230–2.
21 UNESCO Archives online, AG01/IICI-A-IV/File 28.66 (Service administrative de l’Institut – Foundoukidis), <https://atom.archives.unesco.org/personnel-de-linstitut-foundoukidis-euripide> [accessed 19 May 2023]. See also Marie Caillot, ‘La revue Mouseion (1927–1946). Les musées et la coopération culturelle internationale’ (PhD diss, École nationale des chartes, 2011), 190–2.
22 On the Genevan ideal of the ‘new class of international civil servants’: Sluga, 57–8.
23 UNESCO Archives online, AG01/IICI-A-IV/File 28.66. See his personnel note in the file, dated October 1929.
24 Michela Passini has noted how research on the Paris-based IIIC tends to focus on its intellectual heavyweights, notably Henri Bergson, Henri Focillon, Julien Luchaire, and Jules Destrée, who promoted or presided over IIIC operations yet did not do the day-to-day work: Michela Passini, ‘La Conférence d’Athènes sur la conservation des monuments d’art et d’histoire (1931) et l’élaboration croisée de la notion de patrimoine de l’humanité’, in Le double voyage: Paris–Athènes (1919–1939), edited by Lucile Arnoux-Farnoux and Polyna Kosmadaki (Athens: École Française d’Athènes, 2018), 244.
25 Gaston Poulain, “À l’Institut de coopération’, Comoedia, 31 January 1931, 6.
26 ‘Nouvelles de l’étranger – Exposition internationale de moulages’, Journal des débats, 2 August 1929, 2.
27 Poulain, 6.
28 Fifteen European countries and twelve different languages were represented in all: ‘Folklife and Popular Arts’, Mouseion no. 5 (September 1928).
29 Jules Destrée, ‘Musées d’art Populaire’, Mouseion no. 5 (September 1928), 90.
30 J.M. Remouchamps, ‘Le Musée de la Vie wallonne, à Liège’, Mouseion no. 5 (September 1928), 104.
31 Destrée, 90.
32 ‘Rapport présenté à la XIIIème Session de la Commission internationale de la Coopération intellectuellel’, 103. Each annual report to Geneva presented the year’s receipts taken by Mouseion. The 1933 audit counted 24,072 francs in Mouseion sales that year, though it is impossible to know the breakdown of subscriptions versus one-off purchases. See ‘Report of the Governing Body of the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation’, Geneva, 9 August 1934, 10. Available at Hathi Trust, <https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015080149258> [accessed 17 July 2023]. The International Museums Office Archive holds more qualitative clues, with Mouseion subscription paperwork for 1935 including orders from major museums like the Prado, Museums of the Kremlin, and Museum and Art Gallery of Birmingham, the city museum services of Lyon, Strasbourg, Florence, and Genoa, and folk museums like the Danish Folk Museum, Basque Museum, and Norsk Folkemuseum near Oslo: UNESCO Archives online, AG01/IICI/H/X-8 (‘Mouseion’ Abonnements, 1934–1938), <https://atom.archives.unesco.org/mouseion-abonnements> [accessed 2 August 2023].
33 Caillot, chapter 2.
34 ‘L’organisation de la coopération intellectuelle en 1929–1930: Rapport général de l’Institut international de la cooperation intellectuelle’, Coopération intellectuelle (1931), 519.
35 ‘Rapport annuel pour l’exercise 1934–1935’, reprinted in Mouseion 31–32 no. 3–4 (1935), 102–7.
36 Muséographie: architecture et aménagement des musées d’art (Paris: International Office of Museums and the Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, 1934). The list of contributors to the volume included heads or deputy heads of major museums across Europe and North America.
37 ‘L’activité de l’Office international des Musées’, Mouseion 31–32, no. 3–4 (1935), 234–8.
38 Internal planning memos generated by the Secretariat are similarly mute on any institutional concerns: UNESCO Archives online, AG01/IICI/OIM/VI/File 1a. (Conservation des oeuvres d’art. Conférence de Rome), <https://atom.archives.unesco.org/conservation-des-oeuvres-dart-conference-de-rome> [accessed 1 May 2023].
39 Kott, 211–15.
40 Kott, 211.
41 Mouseion 11, no. 2 (1930), 157–83, for its recurring section, ‘Muséographie Générale’. That particular issue featured a report on the Deutscher Museums-Bund provided by Dr Werner Noack, president of the association, on Britain’s Museums Association by F.A. Bather, director of the association’s flagship journal, and on the twenty-fifth meeting of the American Association of Museums, held in June 1930.
42 Letter, Stanley Cursiter to Foundoukidis, 9 November 1933. UNESCO Archives Online, AG01/IICI/OIM/IV/File 13.b (Réunion d’experts-Madrid-1934) <https://atom.archives.unesco.org/reunion-dexperts-madrid-1935> [accessed 24 March 2023].
43 Letter, British Museums Association Secretary to Foundoukidis, 27 February 1934; Foundoukidis reply, 3 March 1934. In UNESCO Archives Online, AG01/IICI/OIM/IV/File 13.b [accessed 4 June 2023].
44 ‘L’activité de l’Office International des Musées en 1935’, Mouseion 31–32, no. 3–4 (1935), 254.
45 ‘L’Activité de l’Office International des Musées. Rapport annuel pour l’exercise 1935–1936’, Mouseion 35–36, no. 3–4 (1936), 248.
46 Euripide Foundoukidis, ‘La Coopération intellectuelle dans le domaine des Arts, de l’Archéologie, et de l’Ethnologie’, Mouseion 43–44, no. 3–4 (1938), 292–3.
47 Ibid.
48 ‘Civil War in Spain: Fierce Fighting in the Streets of Barcelona’, Illustrated London News, 1 August 1936, 8.
49 ‘Barcelone après la fusillade’, Marianne, 19 August 1936, 1.
50 Euripide Foundoukidis, ‘L’Office international des musées et la protection des monuments historiques et des oeuvres d’art en temps de guerre’, Mouseion 35–36, no. 3–4 (1936), 187–200.
51 For the white paper: UNESCO Archives Online, AG01/IICI/OIM/Documents de l’OIM, 1931-1936/Item 53. <https://atom.archives.unesco.org/rapport-du-comite-de-direction-de-loffice-international-des-musees-la-protection-des-monuments-et-oeuvres-dart-en-temps-de-guerre-ou-de-trouvles-civils> [accessed 7 May 2023].
52 Foundoukidis, ‘L’Office international des musées’, 187–200.
53 Letter, Foundoukidis to Sánchez Cantón, 17 September 1936, UNESCO Archives Online, AG01/IICI/OIM/VI/File 26, part 1 (Conservation des oeuvres d’art. Protection des établissements et monuments d’art en temps de guerre), <https://atom.archives.unesco.org/conservation-des-oeuvres-dart-protection-des-etablissements-et-monuments-dart-en-temps-de-guerre> [accessed 5 February 2023].
54 Ibid. The file is filled with back-and-forth letters between Paris, Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona, and Geneva.
55 Letter, Sánchez Cantón to Foundoukidis, 6 December 1937, UNESCO Archives Online, AG01/IICI/OIM/VI/File 26, part 2 (Conservation des oeuvres d’art. Protection des établissements et monuments d’art en temps de guerre), <https://atom.archives.unesco.org/conservation-des-oeuvres-dart-protection-des-etablissements-et-monuments-dart-en-temps-de-guerre-partie-2> [accessed 6 February 2023].
56 Ibid.
57 For an overview of the history of international treaties aimed at protecting cultural property: Patrick Boylan, ‘The concept of cultural protection in times of armed conflict: from the crusades to the new millennium’, in Illicit Antiquities: The theft of culture and the extinction of archaeology, edited by Neil Brodie and Kathryn Walker Tubb (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 43–108.
58 José Renau, ‘L’Organisation de la Défense du patrimoine artistique et historique espagnole pendant la guerre civile’, Mouseion 39–40, no. 3–4 (1937), 62.
59 Francisco Javier Sánchez Cantón, ‘Les premières mesures de défense du Prado au cours de la guerre civile’, Mouseion, 39–40, no. 3–4 (1937), 73. They were later moved to Barcelona and further on as the front lines shifted.
60 Ibid.
61 Renau, ‘L’Organisation de la Défense’, 20–2, 56.
62 Boylan, 54–8. Charles de Visscher, a professor of international law at the University of Leuven, led the drafting.
63 Due to that scepticism and the onset of war, the treaty was never ratified. Many of its ideas would show up in the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict: Boylan, 54, 64.
64 Letter, Sir Eric Maclagan to Foundoukidis, 2 November 1937, UNESCO Archives Online, AG01/IICI/OIM/VI/File 26, part 2 [accessed 6 February 2023].
65 Letter, Foundoukidis to Maclagan, 16 May 1938, UNESCO Archives Online, AG01/IICI/OIM/VI/File 26, part 2 [accessed 6 February 2023].
66 Letter, Jan Kalf to Foundoukidis, 26 July 26, 1938; letter, Foundoukidis to Kalf, 29 July 1938, UNESCO Archives Online, AG01/IICI/OIM/VI/File 26, part 2 [accessed 6 February 2023].
67 La Protection des monuments et oeuvres d’art en temps de guerre (Paris: International Museums Office, 1939).
68 Euripide Foundoukidis, ‘Commentaire du projet’, Mouseion 47–48, no. 3–4 (1939), 213–14. For the full draft of the convention’s text (‘Projet de convention’), see the same Mouseion issue, pages 180–201.
69 Lynn Nichols, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (New York: Vintage, 1994); Héctor Feliciano, The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art (New York: Basic Books, 1997); Elizabeth Karlsgodt, Defending National Treasures: French Art and Heritage Under Vichy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).
70 According to his personnel record, Foundoukidis remained in the position until 30 September 1941, when the French Vichy state allowed his contract to expire (along with the other ‘agents of the IIIC’): UNESCO Archives online, AG01/IICI-A-IV/File 28.66 [accessed 19 May 2023]. A meeting in 1945 of the IIIC’s administrative council confirmed that 1941 rupture, noting that the ‘all official activity had been interrupted after the occupation of Paris’, though Foundoukidis had continued to work discreetly on an English translation of the Office’s manual on art restoration, as well as an index for the Muséographie book: UNESCO Archives online, AG01/IICI/C.A./PV.1-Procès-verbal de la séance tenue à Paris le 25 octobre 1945 <https://atom.archives.unesco.org/proces-verbal-de-la-seance-tenue-a-paris-le-jeudi-25-octobre-1945> [accessed 19 June 2023].
71 ‘Les Mesures de précaution prises dans divers pays pour protéger les monuments et oeuvres d’art au cours de la guerre actuelle’, Mouseion 49–50, no. 1–2 (1940), 9–27.
72 ‘L’Activité muséographique pendant la guerre’, Mouseion: Supplément mensuel (February 1940), 1–6.
73 ‘Les Mesures de précaution’, 9–11. Historians have generally concurred that the evacuations were skilfully executed, if sometimes hastily: Karlsgodt, Defending National Treasure, Ch. 3 on the French case and Nichols, The Rape of Europa, Ch. 4, on multiple cases of evacuation and/or sheltered storage in situ, across western Europe.
74 ‘Les Mesures de précaution’, 11.
75 Ibid., 11–12.
76 Ibid., 12.
77 Ibid., 9. [My emphasis.].
78 It is worth noting that historians have described the First World War, which saw similar curatorial feats, as a similar moment in the history of museums: for example, the introduction to Mars und Museum: Europäische Museen im Ersten Weltkrieg, edited by Christina Kott and Bénédicte Savoy (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2016), 9–30, which reflects on the many novel museum practices, roles, and inventions that the war prompted.
79 ‘Les Mesures de précaution’, 14.
80 La Protection, 22.
81 ‘Les Mesures de précaution’, 9.
82 ‘L’Activité muséographique pendant la guerre’, 1–6.
83 Ibid., 2.
84 Ibid.
85 ‘The V. and A. Reopens’, The Times, 11 January 1940, 7.
86 ‘L’Activité muséographique pendant la guerre’, 2.
87 Ibid, 3.
88 Ibid.
89 Pearson, Museums in the Second World War, chapter 2.
90 Foundoukidis, ‘Le project de Convention’, 12.
91 Ibid.
92 Ibid.
93 Ibid., 13.
94 ‘Les Mesures de précaution’, 9–27; and ‘L’Activité muséographique pendant la guerre’, 1–6.
95 UNESCO Archives Online, AG01/IICI/OIM/Documents de l’OIM, 1931–1936/Item 53.
96 Nichols, Rape of Europa, 43–7 (on Austria in 1938) and 66–8 (on Poland in 1939).
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Sarah Griswold
Sarah Griswold is Assistant Professor of History at Oklahoma State University, where she specializes in modern European history. Her current research focuses on the politics of cultural heritage during the era of the world wars.