With Museum, ‘Monument Men’ trains to save Ukrainian cultural heritage

Twenty men and women in military gear huddled around a 19th-century painting of a fiery sunset at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a recent Saturday afternoon. They leaned toward the vivid image of the Ukrainian wilderness as their guide spoke.

“The weaponization of art history,” said Alison Hokanson, associate curator of European paintings, “is the weaponization of objects, but also the weaponization of the stories told through these objects.”

The visit from a reserve unit, the 353rd Civil Affairs Command, based on Staten Island, was part of the Army’s revived program to deploy art-trained officers in a military capacity to rescue works in conflict zones – a new generation of the Monuments Men who recovered millions of European treasures looted by the Nazis during World War II. The program was announced three years ago but was interrupted by Covid and bureaucratic hurdles.

Captain Blake Ruehrwein, an Air Force veteran who also directs education and outreach at the Naval War College Museum in Newport, RI, instructed a new unit learning the ropes from some of the world’s top art experts. “Take what you learn here and apply it,” he told officers attending the museum workshop in early June. “Protecting culture is everyone’s job.”

The troops listened as Hokanson explained that the landscape painting they were staring at was by Arkhyp Kuindzhi, recently reclassified as a Ukrainian-born artist rather than Russian (wall labels also give the Russian transliteration, Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi). As Russia sought to erase Ukrainian identity by targeting the country’s cultural heritage, the Met has been investigating artworks and artists falsely labeled as Russian since the beginning of the war and reclassifying them as Ukrainian.

The Smithsonian cultural rescue initiative and the With museum have worked with the military to help soldiers understand the role art plays in the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. (Last year, The New York Times identified 339 buildings, monuments and other cultural sites that had been badly damaged or destroyed in the fighting. One notorious example was the destruction by a deadly Russian air raid of the Mariupol Drama Theater, a landmark where hundreds of people and recently, the destruction of a dam in southern Ukraine appears to have flooded the home museum of self-taught artist Polina Rayko, according to the foundation that manages the artist’s estate.)

“Part of the conversation here is how to document evidence of crimes,” said Corine Wegener, director of the Smithsonian Initiative, who faced many of the same challenges as an arts, monuments, and records officer in Baghdad 20 years ago. “We have worked hard to develop a methodology for documentation. You are not just looking for broken objects, but for evidence of how they broke.”

In 2022, Captain Ruehrwein participated in a simulation at the National Museum of the United States Army, at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, where officers learned the basics of forensic documentation, emergency preparedness, and war zone preservation techniques. There was also a trip to Honduras where new monument agents toured the Mayan ruins of Copan with a local infantry brigade. The partnership focused on how the two countries can strengthen their efforts to locate and evaluate World Heritage sites such as these ruins, which could be endangered by natural disasters, vandalism and looting.

“Before you touch or move anything, take a picture of it,” said Lisa Pilosi, chief of object preservation at the Met. “That can be used as evidence in criminal court.”

Pilosi said Met officials had been working with the military on cultural heritage protection since 2013, including efforts to help colleagues in Iraq rebuild their institutions after theft and destruction, but her focus on disaster relief has grown over the years as important monuments and works of art have routinely become the target of conflict.

“My boss likes to joke that this has become my side business,” Pilosi said. She has met with the US State Department and Ukrainian officials, including the country’s first lady Olena Zelenska.

But public reaction to the reclassification of Ukrainian art has been mixed. Another curator read excerpts of the troops from letters criticizing the decision to change the wall texts and the nationalities of artists, including emails calling the museum “fascists” and threatening violence.

“We had to escalate some letters to security,” said the curator, who asked not to be identified for security reasons. “Remember, this is a label on a painting, and this is the firestorm that started it.”

The Met has added security personnel to the European paintings space on the second floor and has placed some works behind protective glass. But the museum hasn’t stopped its research into reclassifying Ukrainian artists, said Max Hollein, the director of the Met. He said in a statement that staff are studying objects in the collection “with experts in the field” to determine the best way to accurately present them.

“Scientific thinking is evolving rapidly, due to increased awareness and attention to Ukrainian culture and history since the Russian invasion,” Hollein said. “We remain committed to this pursuit of knowledge – and to sharing our research and findings with visitors and scientists alike.”