Art Under Siege

...In addition to paintings, the National Gallery’s library was also transferred to the underground quarry, for which controlled temperature was also imperative...

...In his autobiography, Clark paid Davies this witty tribute: He had always been a solitary character, and was said by his contemporaries in Cambridge to have emerged from his rooms only after dark...

...Although he took some pleasure in personally choosing the fi rst paintings to be transported back to the museum, including Bellini’s Doge Leonardo Loredan and Titian’s Noli Me Tangere, events beyond London gave the war’s sequel an inexpellable gloom...

...Whether this will have been proved right is anyone’s guess—though the European response so far to the gathering threat of Islamic terrorism does not augur well...

...This sweep of historical imagination was one of the supreme gifts of Mr...

...One unexpected scholarly benefi t of the transfer was that it allowed Davies to assess the collection afresh, and as a result, pioneering new editions of The Early Netherlandish School, The British School, The French School, and The Early Italian School were all brought out at this time...

...Churchill...

...One thousand seven hundred feet above sea level, it was accessible only by four miles of mazy, mountainous road...

...Yesterday, he smashed up his car, and, I believe, himself a little—so perhaps the problem has solved itself for the moment...

...To ensure that there was an opening big enough into the quarry, 5,000 tons of rock had to be blasted away...

...In his autobiography, Another Part of the Wood (1974), Clark vividly recalled this tense time: By 1938 it did not require Mr...

...He stumbled with a dog into the Dining Room a few days ago...

...I felt that European civilization could never again recover its confi dence and its equilibrium...

...Also key to keeping the museum’s cultural life going was Clark’s hiring of the pianist Myra Hess who, he later recalled, had “a jolly, rolling walk, and a strong element of the old trouper...

...However obliging, most owners did not have what was necessary to store paintings: Their houses lacked the requisite size (doorways had to be of an immense height to accommodate larger paintings), fi reproofi ng, or the proper temperature...

...Engineers later concluded that the temperature-controlled heating of the chambers had made the rock above more than usually friable...

...When a section was identifi ed as liable to give way, 300 paintings were removed within seven hours...

...Accordingly, in 1941, and with all the Old Masters in storage, he mounted an exhibition of contemporary painting, including works by Clive Bell and Graham Sutherland, which garnered high praise in some quarters but annoyed others: “Another bomb there might save posterity lighting a few bonfi res in the future,” one diarist wrote...

...Manod quarry roofs are safer than most...

...Davies transported two shipments of paintings to the castle on special trains and stored them in its massive dining room and garage, where the ghosts of the West Indian slaves whose labor paid for the castle must have welcomed them with amusement...

...As Bosman observes, “The brick chambers protected the pictures from minor falls, but there was always the possibility of the whole collection being buried in a catastrophic collapse...

...After sojourning in each house, Davies made notes, remarking of one visit: “The owner is nice, ruled by his wife, a tartar, anxious to have NG pictures instead of refugees or worse...

...BY EDWARD SHORT In September 1938, at the height of the Munich crisis, which would result in Neville Chamberlain’s giving Herr Hitler carte blanche to help himself to Czechoslovakia— Churchill put it nicely when he said that “the German dictator, instead of snatching his victuals from the table, has been content to have them served to him course by course”—the assistant keeper of London’s National Gallery, Martin Davies, made a tour of country houses to see whether they would be suitable for storing the museum’s art collection for the duration of what even then the English knew would be a frightful bombing from the Luftwaffe...

...No one, not even Mr...

...What strikes the reader most about this undertaking is how tremendously effi cient it was...

...In the case of Van Dyck’s Equestrian Portrait of Charles I, one of the largest paintings in the collection, Rawlins and his team had to hollow out a road leading to the quarry to enable the special cart—expressly designed to transport the painting, dubbed the “Elephant Case”—to pass under a low bridge...

...However, this would be Manod’s only failure...

...We realized at last that the pandering of successive governments to the peace-loving inclinations of the country in which, for once, materialism and idealism were united, had left us impotent...

...Of another, “Owner . . . seems obliging in a haughty way...

...Once the British ascertained that the sites of the country houses where National Gallery paintings were stored—Bangor, Aberystwyth, Caernavon, and Penrhyn— would be within the fl ight path of German bombers headed for targets in and around the Liverpool docks, they realized that they would have to transfer most of the paintings to a more secure place, and it was then that they moved their treasures to the Manod quarry near Blaenau Ffestiniog in Wales...

...The fact that the building next door, which now holds the Sainsbury Wing, was completely demolished shows how close the Gallery came to a similar fate...

...These revealed to him how insecure was the evidence for all attributions in early art, and for the very existence of certain painters...

...In the morning he would emerge, thin and colorless as a ghost, and would be driven up to the caves, carrying with him a strong torch and several magnifying glasses...

...Churchill, knew exactly how weak we were...

...Coincidentally, Chamberlain was a friend of Clark’s...

...Ian Rawlins, a railway expert, was responsible for seeing that the heroic removal of the paintings went smoothly...

...Clark insisted that they be daily...

...About the music she chose, Hess later remarked: “Everybody was very busy during the war and there was nobody to tell the people that this sort of music was over their heads...

...Edward Short is a writer in New York...

...In times to come, Clark’s supreme gift may be seen not as his glorious television series Civilisation or his incomparable monograph on Leonardo or his critical work on Piero della Francesca and Rembrandt, but the work he did to keep the National Gallery’s collection out of that common grave...

...Hess took a deep breath and agreed...

...so this sunless exile was not as painful to him as it would have been for a less unusual man...

...So they came and liked it...

...In The National Gallery in Wartime, Suzanne Bosman has written a fascinating account of how director Kenneth Clark and his staff arranged for the wartime storage of the museum’s contents, fi rst in country houses and then in the capacious repository of a disused quarry in the Welsh mountains...

...That the paintings and library were stored underground made them vulnerable to other threats besides aerial bombardment...

...Davies was fully cognizant of this: It would have been useless to save the pictures from bombs, only to crush them in Wales with tons of slate falling on them...

...With these he would examine every square millimeter of a few pictures...

...There is certainly an Ealing touch to one of Davies’s concerns: “One of our troubles at Penrhyn Castle,” he wrote, “is that the owner is celebrating the war by being fairly constantly drunk...

...The National Gallery in Wartime is an entertaining, informative, cautionary book, which everyone interested in London, the Battle of Britain, or art will thoroughly enjoy...

...And then it was only possible after the cart’s tires were defl ated...

...At every turn unforeseen challenges tested his ingenuity...

...This book is wonderfully illustrated, including photographs of solitary railway vans negotiating the long and winding roads of Wales on their way to the quarry—scenes worthy of the old Ealing comedies in which English pluck always carries the day...

...He and his wife Jane often dined with Chamberlain at Chequers...

...Once the success of the transfer spread through Britain’s cultural grapevine, other museums joined the National Gallery in making Manod their wartime home, including the Courtauld Institute, the National Portrait Gallery, Sir John Soane’s Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum...

...The brutal Russian occupation of Berlin, the discovery and visible documentation of the German extermination camps, these and a dozen other ghastly revelations fi lled my mind,” he wrote...

...Now that Americans begin to forget their own vulnerability to attack from assailants that can make Hitler’s ruffi ans look like choirboys, it might be a salutary reminder to read of how Clark and his staff protected the Gallery’s riches...

...The courage it took to sit and listen to Myra Hess play Beethoven can only be appreciated by remembering that, in October 1940, a large bomb fell on the National Gallery, ruining Room XXVI (where Room 10 is today...

...Chamberlain although he had a fund of information on unimportant matters (he occupied a whole luncheon at Chequers in 1938 by giving Jane the history of every famous gem), had no conception of what Gibbon called “The vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave...

...Hygrometers monitored the effects of temperature on the paintings with unprecedented accuracy...

...nevertheless, the pictures could not walk away like a gang of quarrymen from any doubtful section...

...Penrhyn Castle, a huge neo-Norman pile built in Wales in the early 19th century, was one of the few exceptions...

...In twelve years I hardly ever saw him look at a picture as whole, but at a series of small areas of paint, which he usually found to be more or less damaged...

...Churchill’s eloquence, nor the muddled, hysterical support of the left for Czechoslovakia, to arouse in the minds of ordinary men and women a sense of shame and foreboding...

...Whatever jubilation Clark felt at war’s end was fl eeting...

...Not only did Kenneth Clark save the National Gallery collection, he also saw to it that the museum remained “a defi ant outpost of culture right in the middle of a bombed and shattered metropolis...

...this will not happen again...

...Three quarters of a million people eventually attended the concerts...

...Moreover, within the quarry, temperature-controlled rooms had to be constructed to house the paintings, narrow-gauge railway tracks had to be put down to ensure their easy transportation, and special wagons had to be designed by the London, Midland and Scottish Railway Company to protect the paintings from fl uctuations of humidity and temperature...

...When Clark broached the idea of having lunchtime concerts, Hess thought they might be periodic...

...Here, truly, was a close-run thing...

...But Clark had no illusions about Birmingham’s most famous son: I was educated as an historian, and so have a certain prejudice in favour of those who can think historically...

...It is indeed true that the history of art, like all history, is to a large extent an agreed fable, and perhaps only someone as passionately skeptical as Martin Davies could have exposed so many convenient fallacies...