Encourage and Preserve Art

by Dee Dee Colabella

The MFAA (Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Program), which is most often referred to as the Monuments Men, was a group of artists, sculptors, architects, museum curators, and other nonmilitary professions recruited by the Allied Forces in WWII to help protect and recover stolen artifacts from destruction during the war.

Hitler was obsessed with art and began systematically stealing artifacts, paintings, gold, anything of value from the European and the Jewish families he sought to eliminate. Part of his plan was to start a museum complex in Austria after the end of the war.

Francis Henry Taylor, Curator of the Museum of Modern Art at the time, relentlessly requested that President Franklin D. Roosevelt do something to stop the eradication of these treasures and monuments. Roosevelt responded by creating the MFAA, which later became the Monuments Men. When it became apparent that Germany would lose the war, Hitler decided to destroy what he had stolen.

A team saved artworks such as Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna; Vermeer’s The Artist’s Studio; and Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece. One of these men, Frederick Charles Shrady, settled in Easton, CT after the war. Shrady and the other Monuments Men evacuated these great works of art, along with over 15,000 other art pieces and cultural objects, from the Altausee Salt Mine in Austria.

Shrady’s fame lasted long past the war - he became a local 068 celebrity as an artist and sculptor. Shrady created “Our Lady of Fatima,” a ten-foot-high bronze statue which was commissioned by the Vatican. She found her home in the gardens of the Vatican in 1983.

Shrady and the other men and woman who served as a part of the MFAA were not trained as soldiers, yet they risked their lives to save the artwork that Hitler sought to destroy.

The whole world will then have the right to look to us, with grateful eyes; but we will fail unless we consciously appreciate the value of the art in our lives and take practical steps to encourage the artist and preserve his works. In no walk of life can man fail to find richer experience as he falls under the influence of beauty immortalized by inspired genius.

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Orbs and ribbons of light play across a large canvas, composed of layers upon layers of oil paint. This ethereal and complex style is typical of the artist, who is working on an elaborate exhibition of 12 large paintings that relate to one another in a unique way.

from the Cooper Union with distinction in 1985 as a painting major and soon began a career in art restoration. After many decades of in-painting the missing and damaged areas of thousands of paintings, he had to resolve many technical challenges, and in so doing, synthesized this experience into the development of his own style.

Gulbrandsen, a recipient of the ArtFul Visual Arts Initiative grant, has been expanding this large collection after a successful show at D.Colabella Fine Arts on Main Street in Ridgefield in 2022. To see more of his work, go to dcolabellafineart.com/charles-gulbrandsen