DALLAS (AP) — A group dedicated to finishing the work of World War II’s Monuments Men is betting on a deck of playing cards — and reward money — to help find missing works of art taken by the Nazis.
Inspired by the U.S. military’s history of creating playing cards related to missions, the Dallas-based Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art on Wednesday announced the creation of the deck focusing on works — including paintings, sculptures and reliquaries — they believe still exist.
“What is needed is to raise awareness about what is missing,” said Anna Bottinelli, the foundation’s president. “Because you might know of a friend who has a beautiful painting on the wall and you don’t even question that that painting belongs to someone else.”
The group, which is offering rewards of up to $25,000 for information leading to the recovery of each cultural object featured in the deck, will highlight a few of the cards each week on their social media.
Bottinelli said the foundation worked with museums, law enforcement and owners of lost art as they narrowed down which works to feature, which include those by Vincent van Gogh, Caravaggio and Claude Monet.
One, a pastel by Edgar Degas titled “Portrait of Mlle. Gabrielle Diot” that was taken by the Nazis from a home in France in 1940, is known to have been sold in the mid-1970s to an unknown Swiss collector.
“Many of these have resurfaced in the recent past — even as late as 2008 — in auctions,” Bottinelli said.
The deck, being sold through the foundation and the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, is a nod to a U.S. military tradition that includes a deck featuring the most-wanted fugitives from the Iraq War and one from WWII designed to help soldiers identify aircrafts, Bottinelli said.
FBI Special Agent Christopher McKeogh, a New York-based member of the agency’s Art Crime Team, said he thinks there’s a misconception that because it’s been nearly 80 years since the end of the war, that most of the missing art has been found.
“There’s still a lot of artwork to still be on the lookout for,” McKeogh said, noting that the Nazi’s looting was “on a scale that is really hard to comprehend.”
McKeogh said that in some cases, people haven’t realized an artwork’s past until taking it to a gallery or an auction house.
“In those cases, we’ll take steps to seize it and hopefully repatriate the artwork,” McKeogh said, adding that once such a history is uncovered, “owners are usually very willing” to have it returned.
“We can never undo the atrocities of the war, but any little thing that we can do to reunite one of these works with the heirs, it’s an important thing,” McKeogh said.
Robert Edsel, founder and chairman of the Monuments Men foundation, said that for those who do realize they own looted art, “this is a chance for people to do the right thing, to come forward, to address the problem.”
Edsel started the foundation in 2007 to honor the Monuments Men, the group of men and women from Allied countries, many with art expertise, who served during WWII to protect cultural treasures as battles waged, and after the war helped return artwork plundered by the Nazis to the rightful owners.
He has written several books on the Monuments Men, including one that the movie “The Monuments Men” starring and directed by George Clooney was based on.
The foundation gets frequent calls from people wondering about objects from the war, and has over the years helped return more than 30, including a 16th century tapestry taken by a U.S. officer from Adolf Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest retreat near the end of the war. The officer’s family gave the tapestry to a German museum in 2016.
In addition to the 52 works of art in the deck, two cards — the jokers — each feature a set of Nazi photo albums of artwork which have missing volumes.
There’s reason to hope someone might come across one: The foundation has already found five that had been brought home by U.S. soldiers after the war as souvenirs.
“It has always been a joy for us to see how much gratitude there was on both parties: The party that was returning something and the party that was receiving,” Bottinelli said.
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This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Christopher McKeogh’s name.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
