Who was Ardelia Hall?

Ardelia Hall never saw her life’s work entailing the return of stolen European paintings to their rightful owners. Hall — who had a master’s degree in Chinese language and history from Columbia University and worked for many years as a curatorial assistant in the Art of Asia Department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — found herself, through luck and hard work, the fine arts and monuments adviser to the U.S. Department of State’s Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs for almost 20 years.

By the end of her career in 1964, the State Department, under Hall’s leadership, had helped to return over 4,000 pieces of art to 14 countries.

“Ardelia Hall is a very interesting character because for all the work that the Monuments Men did, the Monuments Man that served longest was a woman: Ardelia Hall,” says historian Robert Edsel, author of The Monuments Men, about the American effort to save and return art during World War II that was looted by the Nazis.

Of note, Hall helped to return a rare copy of the Mainz Psalter — one of ten known to exist, and part of the second printed series of books (after the Gutenberg Bible) — to the State Library of Saxony in Dresden, a portrait of Saint Catherine by Peter Paul Rubens to the Dusseldorf Museum, and a Monet landscape painting to the Rothschild family.

What to Do With Stolen Art?

At the end of World War II, the Allies had identified some 700,000 pieces of art and 3 million books that had been looted by the Nazis from primarily Jewish families and art museums around the continent.

“By the time the last monuments officers left Europe in 1951, they had returned more than 4 million stolen objects: paintings, tapestries, drawings, library books, religious objects, church bells,” Edsel says. “If it could be picked up, if it had value, the Nazis looted it.”

There were still hundreds of thousands of pieces of art to be sorted and returned to their rightful owners, though, and countless others that had entered the black market or traveled home with American GIs.

While Hall’s contribution totaled only 4,000 pieces of art, compared to 4 million, she was known throughout the U.S. government as a workhorse and an invaluable resource in coordinating repatriation efforts.

She worked from her office in Washington to make connections through diplomatic channels and identify the rightful owners — whether foreign governments or individuals — to whom stolen art should be returned.

The Scope of the Monuments Men and Women’s Work

Hall was the longest-serving member of the Monuments Men and Women — 345 people from 13 nations who rescued and preserved art in the middle of one of the greatest conflicts of the 20th century.

“[They] were museum directors, curators, art historians, academic scholars — some were artists themselves,” explains Edsel. “Many were architects, and they all had established careers. The average age was almost 40. They wanted to be a new kind of soldier, one charged with saving rather than destroying.”

These men and women traveled all over Europe during and after World War II, tracking down looted art. They learned that the Nazis tended to store stolen items in salt mines, castles, and bunkers for safekeeping until they could add them to Hitler’s envisioned “Leader Museum” in Austria.

“In the American Zone of Germany, more than 1,800 repositories in mines, castles, churches, monasteries, and remote villages were discovered,” Hall wrote in 1951 for a State Department Bulletin.

The Monuments Men and Women saved works considered to be the pinnacle of European art, such as: the Ghent Altarpiece by Jan van Eyck, a Madonna sculpture by Michelangelo, and The Astronomer by Vermeer. All of these works were found in a salt mine in Austria.

The U.S. Department of State, Then and Now

After the war, the U.S. led a global effort to see a small amount of justice after the Holocaust’s devastation. One way was to restore artworks and other personal belongings that had been stolen.

The State Department was at its center. Employees in its Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs, Hall's station, mapped the road forward. Hall joined the Roberts Commission to help establish the U.S. government’s position on protecting cultural heritage.

She worked behind the scenes to create guidelines for art restitution that could be used in the United States by scholars, museums, galleries and auction houses that might come across stolen works.

“For the first time in history, restitution may be expected to continue for as long as works of art known to have been plundered during a war continue to be rediscovered,” Hall wrote in 1951.

During the 1950s, Hall, as an Asian-art specialist, would ensure that cultural items were preserved during the Korean War. She became an essential force in preserving or returning art threatened by conflicts worldwide.

Today, the State Department continues her art restitution work through offices including the Office of the Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues and the Cultural Heritage Center. The State Department facilitates negotiations for compensation agreements with nongovernmental organizations and other countries’ governments and advocates for international restitution legislation. At the center of these efforts are the guiding strictures of the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art — 11 principles that assist countries in resolving issues surrounding Nazi-looted property.

In fact, the State Department today helps to coordinate the correct, legal pathways for the return of any stolen art to any country.

“I think State Department can play an active role not in scolding or telling people what to do, but as a participant in that discussion helping other countries, because we may be in a bit more of an impartial position, not having a lot of those objects, trying to counsel parties that are disagreeing about solutions,” Edsel says.