Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Program - MFAA Personnel

MFAA Personnel

The American museum establishment led the efforts to create the MFAA section. Included in this group were current museum directors, curators and art historians, as well as those who aspired to join their ranks. Upon returning home from service oversees, these remarkable men and women led the creation or improvement of some of the greatest cultural institutions in the United States. Virtually every major museum employed one or more MFAA officers before or after the war, including the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Many other Monuments Men were professors at esteemed universities such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, New York University, Williams College, and Columbia University, among others. Paul Sachs’ famous “Museum Course” at Harvard educated dozens of future museum personnel in the decades preceding World War II. S. Lane Faison's passion for art history was passed on to hundreds of students and future museum leaders at Williams College in the 1960s and 1970s, some of whom are currently directors at major United States museums.

Other MFAA personnel became founders, presidents, and members of cultural institutions such as the New York City Ballet, the American Association of Museums, the American Association of Museum Directors, the Archaeological Institute of America, the Society of Architectural Historians, the American Society of Landscape Architects, and the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as respected artists, architects, musicians, and archivists.

Two monuments officers were killed in Europe, both near the front lines of the Allied advance into Germany: Captain Walter Huchthausen, an American scholar and architect attached to the U.S. 9th Army, was killed in April 1945 by small arms fire somewhere north of Essen and east of Aachen, Germany; and Maj. Ronald Edmund Balfour, a British scholar attached to the Canadian First Army, was killed in March 1945 by an explosion in Cleves, Germany.