The Monuments Men

Quinn: Hello, welcome back to Pictorial on Relay FM. I'm Quinn Rose, and I did not go to art school, but I love learning about art and I'm so happy we’re back.

Betty: Yay! And I'm Betty. I'm also someone who did not go to art school, but I definitely love learning about art and I am super excited that we are back because I missed you Quinn. And I missed everyone else, of course.

Quinn: I missed you too. We were just away for what, like six weeks, just a little summer break from us, but we’re back now. We’re going to have a couple of fun topics coming back into this, which I'm very excited for. I am actually kicking it off today with something that was mentioned previously. So way back in episode 15, when we talked about looting and the British museum, you had mentioned to me something called the Monuments Men, which was a program during World War II to try to preserve art and culture. And they also made a movie about it in 2014. And so that is what we're going to be diving into today. But before we dive into my research on it and stuff—I want to hear from you since you were the person who originally knew about this topic, like what do you know about it going in? 

Betty: Yeah, that's right. I barely remember that episode now. It felt so long ago. But I do, I do remember this and yeah, I did, what I know about it is mostly from the movie. Cause I saw the movie actually in theaters when The Monuments Men came out in 2014. And most of what I know is from the movie, which I know like movie adaptations, isn't always the most accurate. But I am aware of the fact that there was a group of people who went over to Europe, like during World War II, to try to preserve and save the artworks that would have been, or possibly would have been destroyed during the war, by the Nazis. And they managed to save a lot of art and I thought it was a pretty, pretty good movie. But yeah, I will say like beyond what was in the movie, I hadn't really done too much research on like, what really happened. So I'm interested to see how much the movie got right and how much it got wrong.

Quinn: Yeah. Well, I haven't seen the movie, but what I did do for this is read the book. So I decided to go and read The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert Edsel, which was the book that that movie was based on. And so a lot of the information that I'm talking about today is pulled from this book. A very mini sort of a book review before I talk about the content and history—this book is better than I thought it was going to be. I assumed it was going to be really dry and it actually, there were sections of it that were quite gripping. However, he fully invented dialogue. It was so weird. He says in the beginning, he was like, I invented a bunch of dialogue. [laughs] It’s like, why? It’s cool because there's all these like real letters that these guys wrote to their wives that have this actual history. And then he also just like invented a lot of dialogue. And he also, we're going to talk about my favorite person in this whole story later, whose name is Rose Valland, but he spent so much time talking about how ugly she is in a very weird way.

Betty: Oh my God. When was this book written?

Quinn: So it was published in 2009.

Betty: Okay, so it's pretty recent. Not to say that people in the past are allowed to call women ugly, but…

Quinn: I'll say, okay. I do want to get into her more kind of in my finale of this episode cause she's the coolest part, but just to introduce a little bit of her, there was plot relevance. The whole thing is she was a spy. She was an assistant art curator and she ended up kind of taking on the role of spy amongst the Nazi occupation of Paris, which was incredibly dangerous, incredibly heroic. And the reason, one of the reasons why she kind of escaped notice is like, you know, she's a woman. She very much kept her head down. She tried not to draw attention to herself. And he talks about how, like she had a very plain look, she was very “matronly.” And the whole thing is like, that was part of her being a great spy and like not getting murdered, but also like he spent way too long talking about it.

Betty: Right. Yeah. Okay. That makes a bit more now, like that's relevant. Like I guess her looks was a part of this identity that helped her blend in.

Quinn: Anyway, but that's my mini book report. I'll give this like three and a half stars. Like the history was super, super interesting and even like more interesting than I expected it to be. The writing itself made some confusing choices. Anyway I'll get into a bit of the actual kind of background of this. First of all my, I'll say that my assumption kind of going into it, like the very sort of sketchy picture that I had of what this was going to be. I was like, okay, there was a group of people nicknamed the Monuments Men. I assumed that like, first of all, that they were created at the beginning of the war. Second of all, that their mission was really to like hunt down the stolen Nazi stuff, which is not not true, but not completely true.

Betty: Okay.

Quinn: And that also that this was like some kind of, sort of crack team, like lots of spies and like intrigue and sort of heroics. Which again, not not true, but definitely not the whole picture. So first of all, yes, even before the war started, or before I should say the United States entered World War II—art professionals, kind of major people in the art world and like the US were like, hey, we should maybe not destroy Europe. We should maybe not destroy all of them of Europe's art because we like Europe. And they made some sculptures we like. So they were these like groups that were made. There was the American Defense Harvard Group was prominent. It was a group of people like affiliated with Harvard who were involved in sort of like art conservation and curators and stuff. The American Council of Learned Societies… They were all like, hey, there's a lot of art in Europe and maybe we shouldn't destroy, please don’t.

Betty: Kind of, that makes sense. Because like, obviously, or this seems obvious, but sometimes people forget, there were a lot of wars before World War II in Europe. In fact, it seemed like Europe just constantly had wars and I could see the fact that, you know, like probably through these conflicts, there have been art work that have been lost and destroyed and people noticed and probably for a long time, were like we should stop that.

Quinn: And especially like… World War II is so different than even World War I, like immediately before it, because of the approach that Hitler and the Nazis were taking to their horrible actions, Cause one of their huge things was the destruction of all cultures except for their culture. It wasn't just about conquering the people or the land. One of their very specific and explicit goals was to destroy all art and culture that was not their own and to spread theirs throughout the entire world. So that meant that like when art professionals were looking at this from the outside, they were like, hey, please, don't run over really old European buildings with American tanks. And also like someone needs to go find all of the stuff that the Nazis have already stolen. And this was not, that was not happening at the beginning of the war. But finally we did get that. FDR, who was president at the time, created the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic Historic Monuments and War Areas. That was in 1943.

Betty: It’s a lot of words

Quinn: Everything is so long in politics. There were eventually I think, I believe at the peak, there were 345 men and women from 13 different countries were are part of what is officially titled the Monuments Fine Arts and Archives section. Or as they are colloquially nicknamed, the Monuments Men.

Betty: Okay. So, you know, the Monuments People really, but that’s okay.

Quinn: I mean, because of the time period, they were mostly men, but there were definitely like women who are very important to it as well. And I’m probably going to call them Monuments Men a lot, just because it's a lot of faster than saying the Monuments Fine Arts and Archives section.

Betty: No, for sure.

Quinn: But also this struck me because, because there’s—at the peak, there were like 350 of these people. In all of the world.

Betty: Yeah, that's true. I mean, I was obviously in the movie, they had to distill that down to just like, I don't even know, like half a dozen people or something, but so I'm like, oh, 300. That's a lot more than, you know, I saw in the movie, but then when you think—

Quinn: It's more than just like George Clooney. 

Betty: It's not just George Clooney running around saving everything. But at the same time now that I think of it, there's the whole world is pretty big and there's a lot of art. 

Quinn: Yeah. And I mean, not to spoil the ending, but those 350 people ended up recovering over 5 million pieces of art.

Betty: Wow. That's a lot.

Quinn: The actual like Monuments, Fine art and Archives people were not sent out into the field or like sort of recruited out of other people in the army until two weeks before D-Day. This is fully in 1945. We are nearing the end of the war. And they were finally like, oh, we should really get on this.

Betty: Oh my God.

Quinn: Like almost all of the events of this book take place within 11 months of like the end of the war.

Betty: Wow. That's pretty impressive.

Quinn: I know. But it also is like, and there were so many things that they talked about in this book that really just like reminds you that the stories that we tell about all of history, but I think especially in times of war, sort of the idealized myth of the hero, where like, things are very simple and straightforward and like efficient. And we know we go do things and save things and we got this and you know, we punch out the bad guys. War is so slow and so inefficient. People were constantly lost. So much of his book is the various Monuments Men who we meet running around trying to like get onto transportation to where they're trying to go. It’s wild.

Betty: This is one of those things where I think like, we, you know, you and I obviously have talked a lot about how important art is, but I feel like being in this world, like, you know, working in a museum and talking about art, like I constantly have to defend like the importance of arts and culture, which I don't think I should, but then people will always ask like, you know, why is a painting or a sculpture important? And I'm sure we'll get into that. But yeah, I do think this is one of those things that we just don’t, we just don't think about. And we don't think about like how, how there's so much more to war than just, you know, like guns and tanks and, you know, things blowing up.

Quinn: The days of actual armed combat and trying to fight and reclaim ground are so outnumbered by the days that are waiting around, that are strategizing, that are just traveling from place to place, that are trying to figure out where these paintings are. That's specific to the Monuments Men, but you know, a lot of this applies to really all sorts of things.

Betty: That’s true.

Quinn: Obviously this is a whole giant book that covers like a lot of history and a lot of different people, but I want to focus in on just a couple of things. I started out kind of talking about this, but I wanted to stress this, is while this division absolutely did a lot of, of like sort of Nazi treasure hunting and reclaiming objects that the Nazis stole, which is the story that I'm about to tell in a minute, they also did a lot of just like preventing Americans from destroying things. Which is, I think the thing that, like, it doesn't really get talked about a lot because that's not very sexy, you know, that's not like an exciting thing, but it is a tremendously important thing. And I think it's something that should be considered in any kind of conflict. I'll say it—I'm against war. But I think that when you are in cases of, of war time and conflict, this effort that was made to preserve cultures, even German culture when they were fighting in Germany and even having people out there in the field who were trying and doing their best and often succeeding to prevent the destruction of German monuments and things like that of importance to what at that time was the enemy. I think that's incredibly important. And I think that speaks to who we can be as human beings.

Betty: I’m not sure if you'll get into this later, but did the book kind of summarize, like what kinds of people were sent over? Like, I think if I can recall in the movie, like it wasn't just people who worked in a museum or like art historians, like what, what kinds of people joined this organization?

Quinn: So it actually mostly was.

Betty: Oh, okay.

Quinn: That’s a really interesting part of this. And I think the last thing when I talk about is kind of like what people did after the war, but… Not exclusively, but a lot of people who are involved in the Monuments Men were already artists, curators, historians, conservationists. And some of them were like drafted into the army, some of them enlisted, they came from various places. And I should specify, I think that the way we’ve been talking makes it sound like there's like a group of people who were kind of traveling around together. Where it’s more like there were one or two people from this division kind of attached to each unit of, each major unit of the army. And so you were kind of working with like—unless there was a really major event happening, which there were a few of near the end, it was just kind of like you and maybe one other person working on this mission alongside like the whole fighting unit of the army that you were with.

Betty: Oh, okay.

Quinn: But they weren't, some of these people who were in this division were incredibly prominent people in the art world. Like some of the most prominent people in the Monuments Men were like James Rorimer, who was a curator at the Met and was a very prominent, like rising star in the, the sort of American art world. There was George Stout who was like one of the, who was a leading art conservator who worked at like the Fogg and the Gardner art museums. And he was actually incredibly important to the entire Monuments Men, because he like, sort of had the skills and the expertise to be able to physically transport the artwork that they were recovering out of like all over Europe and sort of getting it to safety. One of the other Monuments Men actually said about Stout, “he was the greatest war hero of all time. He actually saved all of the art that everybody else talked about.”

Betty: So everybody else just talked about doing it. He was just like, I actually did it.

Quinn: He actually had the skills to like physically save the art, which a lot of people didn't have.

Betty: I find that like, you know, like working in a gallery and talking to, you know, staff and conservationists and archivists even, is that like a lot of it, a lot of what is important about things like managing art and managing collections is just like good documentation and good management and being able to properly track things. So I presume that like a lot of it, it's not like just in the movie where you're literally chasing someone with a painting, like on their back, like it actually is, you know, sort of like paperwork and going through records.

Quinn: First of all yeah, it was a ton of paperwork and it sometimes straight up luck. There is an incident that is very casually mentioned in this book, and I feel like should have gotten a whole chapter, where they discovered this incredibly huge depository of art and money and many other things in Merkers, Germany, in a salt mine. And the reason they found it is because there were two women on the side of the road who needed a ride. And then when they like—the soldiers like gave them a ride, they were like, there's gold in the mine. So first of all, shout out to those two.

Betty: Yeah. I think this was in the movie. I do remember someone talking about gold and that, oh, now all of a sudden people are interested because it's not just art. There’s like money involved.

Quinn: Yes. One of the major, major breakthroughs of this whole experience was this mine in Merkers and yeah, it's, I believe that it was billions of dollars in today's money. Just absolutely ridiculous amount of money and a ridiculous amount of art. This mine at Merkers actually made international headlines. It became sort of, I mean, it's very flashy, like, oh my God, we found all this Nazi gold. And so it got a huge amount of attention. And it actually created like this really strong motivation among other army units to be like, to find the next big mind depository because they wanted the, sort of the positive attention and accolades.

Betty: Okay, well, good press is good.

Quinn: Yeah, I guess.

Betty: Yeah. Whatever works to encourage people to save art, I guess.

Quinn: Yeah. Like of course it was all the money and not priceless art that was being discovered. But as you were also saying about how a lot of this comes down to like record keeping, it is time to talk about the person I mentioned at the beginning, Rose Valland. So the story of Rose, she was an incredibly intelligent, dedicated, and highly educated woman in France. She had two different advanced degrees. It was ridiculous. She was not allowed to be a curator because she was a woman, because she was low status, curator was like a very class associated title. And so at the time that the Nazis invaded France she was an unpaid assistant. She was volunteering at an art museum. Then when they invaded and took over the museum, her boss was basically like, hey Rose, like we're hiring you as an assistant. Also, what if you stayed here. And like stayed here under Nazi occupation and like pretended to cooperate fully with the Nazis so you can spy on them. And she did it. Under incredible, incredible personal risk. She spoke German, which she did not let the Nazis know so that people had full conversations around her, had incredibly sensitive records around her, and didn't know that she could understand everything. She kept meticulous records of what art was being taken out, where it was going—as much as she could, because a lot of this happened very quickly and very not properly. Obviously. And so, but she took incredibly detailed records of where everything was going as much as she could and then continued to work there, protecting whatever she could, as well as she could, under Nazi occupation for years.

Betty: That not only a lot of work, but that definitely takes a really, really brave person to do that. I can't even, I can't even imagine.

Quinn: She had nerves of steel for sure. Paris was liberated. And—but she didn't know who to trust. She had all of this information. First of all, she was suspected of like being a Nazi because she had been like on the face of it collaborating with the Nazis, but she managed to like, she had like her boss to vouch for her and stuff. And like, she was like, no, no, no. Super not. But she eventually was introduced to James Rorimer, who I mentioned was a prominent curator and was a prominent member of the Monuments Men. And over months of knowing each other and building trust and kind of working together she eventually chose to trust him with her incredibly valuable information, on the condition that he personally seek out what she was sending him to. So he—she was like, I'm not giving us information if you're just going to pass it along. You have to go.

Betty: Yeah, that’s true. Because if it passes through enough hands, inevitably, it just gets riskier and riskier, the more people it's exposed to. 

Quinn: Well it’s interesting, at that point, it wasn't even about risk. They had, you know, kicked the Nazis out of Paris. Like she was physically safe. She was scared of the bureaucracy.

Betty: Oh, okay. I can understand that.

Quinn: Yeah. There had been an incident earlier where she had alerted that there was like a train full of art that was being stolen and this, they may—sorry, I didn't write down the notes for this one so I don't remember the exact details, but it's something like they did stop the train, but then it was months, literal months before the actual art was uncovered because it got so tied up in bureaucracy and she was like, we don't have the time for that. Like, I can't just hand this off to the proper authorities because then we might never get the art back. It might be too late by then.

Betty: No, you're right. I mean, I probably shouldn't say this, but having done work for the government before, I can definitely see that. Nobody intends on, you know, not doing anything, but because of rules and because of whatever government regulations, things just don't happen sometimes for seemingly forever.

Quinn: Yeah. She didn't want to get stuck in that churn of bureaucracy. And it, it ended up being the right decision. She eventually was able to trust that Rorimer was like a good guy and was actually gonna get this done, gave him all of her notes, information that she had. And he, and that was instrumental in helping discover like a lot of lost art, most prominently, the Neuschwanstein Castle in the Bavarian Alps, which had over 20,000 stolen art items mostly from Jewish collectors and art dealers, as well as a ton of records. And bringing back to that paperwork theme, like the actual records of all of the looting which was incredibly helpful, you know, just kind of proving everybody's crimes, but also like in some accounts helpful for recovery efforts and like returning the art as well.

Betty: That’s incredible. That's like, and I guess, yeah, you're right. Like it's, it's not just like all this work. It is luck. Like I could, she happened to have found somebody who was trustworthy or, you know, ended up trusting the right person. Kind of just have one question. But I'm not sure if this is something that would have been addressed in the, in the book, but do you kinda know for the most part, like where a lot of these works ended up. Are they all in like America or did they go back to some of these collections? Did some families get their art back? I'm sure not all of it because lots of people died, but does it kind of get into that? 

Quinn: Yeah. There's not a ton of like specifics, but they do—in what was honestly, pretty incredible, there was like an official decision that was made that was like, okay, the art and like cultural items that we have recovered, we are going to like—the official policy of like the United States and the Allied powers and whatever is like to return them. To return them to their people of origin—or mostly their specific thing was we are going to return them to the country of origin. And then the country's job is to kind of get it to the specific people that it belongs to. Or if there's no one to return it, to like to get it into a museum. In what might be like the first time, there was like a very officially declared a policy of like everything that we've uncovered as sort of like people in this war is going back to whoever was originally stolen from, for as best as our ability. That being said, there are still hundreds of thousands of things that have not gotten back to the original families. And that is work that is still ongoing. I do want to share one story from the very end of the war here which is the story of Altaussee which was a giant complex of salt mines that had just an absurd amount of stolen art in it. And there was actually a completely wild race against the clock. This was at the very end of the war is they basically were like, okay, we know that there's art in a salt mine, but the Nazis are going to destroy it. And here's where things get real weird. So Hitler had something called the Nero Decree. And this basically was when it became clear that they were definitely going to lose. He put out this decree that basically said burn down Germany to his own army. Basically scorched earth. If I can't have it, no one can kind of thing. However, he didn't mean the art. So Hitler was obsessed with art. He was obsessed with destroying art that he didn't like, and he thought represented cultures that he did not agree with. He obviously, like a very famous fact about Hitler is like he was denied from art school. And so he fancied himself like a real art lover. However, some generals in the Third Reich, like did interpret the Nero Decree and think like, okay, we need to destroy all of this art. And so there was actually some like internal conflict within the Nazis of like people who wanted to destroy the salt mine and people who didn't. And it was going to be destroyed. But when the American army got there, the bombs that were going to destroy the mines had been removed and the, all of the entrances to the mine had been collapsed so that no one could access it to destroy anything. And that was like, hmm. What happened here? The official story was more or less like the Austrian resistance kind of was the mastermind behind this, which wasn't true. It just wasn’t. And as it turns out the best we know of the real story, the people who ran the salt mine did this because they didn't want to destroy the salt mine, because they worked there. It was these miners, and there was like a lot of back and forth of like petitions to different people who were in Nazi government in the area. And like trying to get permission to take these bombs out. And finally, they got some kind of like, not even full official permission, kind of like implicit permission and the miners went in and over like overnight working many, many hours straight, removed them, collapsed the entrances and ended up saving—I mean, just paintings alone, over 6,500 paintings there. A ridiculous amount of art was saved by these people. And they never really got any credit for it. One person who was instrumental in saving them, and like was very motivated to like, save this art and save the mine, really never got any credit for it and spent like the rest of his life, like trying to get like a little bit of credit for it. And honestly, it's very sad, but I guess he's being acknowledged in this book now.

Betty: That is well, I mean, it's kind of good to know, it’s not just the people working in the museums who was a part of saving the art. Like there are, even if the intent is they want to keep their place of employment, but at the very least there were other people that contributed to this project.

Quinn: Yeah, for sure. I mean, that was a big part of it, but it was also like some of these people really were, they were like, you can't destroy thousands of paintings and other art pieces. The different parts of the story, like without Rose Valland, like, without those two women they picked up on the side of the road, like without these miners, like so much more art would have been lost than was. And it just like, so many little heroes of history that we barely even know. This is where also some of the most famous pieces were being kept and some this unit had been trying to track down like the entire time they had been in Europe. Like Michelangelo's Madonna of Bruges, which actually there's this amazing picture of them, some of the Monuments Men then who were there on the ground getting it out of the salt mine. And it's just like on these pillows, these absolutely priceless and incredibly fragile works of art that they had to—the entrances were collapsed. They had to like dig out entrances. They had to get out. There was also that they thought that they had a time limit of like a week because the Soviets were going to actually get that area of Germany. And then the Soviets were going to own all of that. And they were like, that can't happen. So these people were working day and night.

Betty: Oh yeah. I see this picture. It's like, it seems like he's got like a cushion that he just grabbed from somebody's house nearby or something. And these ropes. That's, I mean, it's difficult to you know, transport art just in normal circumstances. I can't even imagine having to do it in this type of situation.

Quinn: I know, but they did it and it's, it's still around, which is amazing. And one of the other pieces that they found in here was Vermeer’s The Astronomer which by some accounts was Hitler's favorite painting. And I want to say, as I'm wrapping up here, just one last note about Hitler. In his last will and testament, which he wrote immediately before committing suicide—obviously translated into English, “my pictures and the collections, which I have bought in the course of years have never been collected for private purposes, but only for the extension of a gallery in my hometown of Linz on Danube, is my sincere wish that this bequest be duly executed.” So Adolf Hitler, who has lost World War II, who was about to die, said “please build my art museum.”

Betty: And did they, did they build this art museum?

Quinn: No!!

Betty: Okay, good.

Quinn: He had this grand vision that the Third Reich was going to take over the world and he was going to be the center of all art and culture, and he was going to have this amazing music and that was going to showcase all this like beautiful Aryan art. I honestly have skirted over a lot of the more dark topics around this on this episode because obviously a lot of this stuff is extremely dark and disturbing and horrifying, and I haven't really gotten into it because I wanted to keep this like relatively light and focus on the good actions that were taken. But I do just want to take a moment to say even beyond the incredible value of reclaiming this art and returning it to the people that it belong to, the millions of pieces of art that were stolen from museums, that were stolen from Jewish people. A lot of those Jewish people who did not survive the war but who, maybe whose families were able to reclaim their possessions at the end and just get one tiny, small piece of their history back. Even beyond all of the inherent value in that, which there is so much, I also have to say that Hitler himself was obsessed with art and every single painting that is taken away from someone who stole it and brought back to its rightful owner, is spitting on his grave.

Betty: I think, you know, now kind of knowing some of the details of what actually happened, you know, the movie was not the best. However, but I do think, I do think that the main message of the movie that I got from anyway, like, is kind of trying to emphasize it's, you know, it's already bad enough that there's just, you know, literal destruction of people and their homes and, and their lives and everything. But it goes even further when you destroy like their history and the achievements and the, sort of these records of their existence, of their history, of their lives. And like destroying that, like, it goes even further than just what's already the horrible atrocities of killing people in a war. And so, that's kind of like one of the reasons why, like, this is so incredible is just that we’re, in a way it's kind of like it's saving a part of who these people were, as much as possible. And, and I think like the movie did get across like that message of how important our history and our culture is to us and how like valuable these things are to, you know, everyone's history. So I think as much as the movie, you know, wasn't totally accurate. I do think the overall message was there.

Quinn: So this book does end with a, what feels like an end of movie over the credits kind of montage of where they are now. There is a section of where all the Nazis are now, which is put to death immediately after World War II, for the most part. So that rules. Then there is a section of where a lot of the Monuments Men that were featured in this book kind of went to. And what's a fascinating part of this is that most of them were incredibly prominent members of especially American art. The ones that I mentioned earlier, James Rorimer was director of the Met for 11 years before he passed away. George Stout was the director of the Isabelle Gardner Art Museum. Like these people like left—a lot of them had careers in art beforehand, and then afterwards continue their careers and became like the leaders of the American art scene. Rose Valland blessedly, you hear this differently, this goes differently so many times, but she is one of the most decorated women in French history. She was given a ton of awards. It took like another 10 years for her to be awarded the title of curator. If I die and I see any of the people who denied her that title, it's on sight. But she remained very active in the art community, finally achieved the title of curator, which she deserved like 20 years previously and was given just a stupendous number of honors. So that's great. Also this'll be in the show notes, there is a Drunk History featuring Tiffany Haddish, of Tiffany Haddish telling the story of Rose Valland. And it's very good. Obviously not appropriate language, but it's very fun. So I'll include that in the show notes. And yeah, and like, as you asked about before, this is still ongoing work. There is a Monuments Men foundation, which is still active today, which is still working to continue to recover works of art that were stolen and bring them back to their rightful families and to their rightful home countries. And it's very sad that that work still has to be going on, but there are people who are doing it and they're still, they're still putting in the work for that, which I think is really amazing.

Betty: Like you said a lot of this history, you know, is very sad. And there were a lot of things that were lost in the war, but it's just, it's incredible to know that there was so much dedication in salvaging, like all this, all these incredible monuments of our history. 

Quinn: This is a very fun episode to come back to. Thank you for listening to me prattle on about this book I read for like an hour.

Betty: No problem. This was, it was really interesting to learn about.

Quinn: Before we finish up today, I do want to share with you another podcast that you might like, and that is Material, which is also on Relay FM. It's hosted by Andy Ihnatko and Florence Ion, who are both very smart veteran technology journalists. And this show is all about Google. All about the freshest developments around Google service, software and research. And what I think is very relevant to a lot of the stuff that we talk about here, they focus in on a Google's famous motto “don't be evil.” And why that really isn't part of Google's culture anymore. And as people who spent a lot of time talking about something that we love, but also has a lot of problems, which is just like the entirety of the art world. That is a really important angle, I think.

Betty: Yeah I think it's, it's super interesting and if listeners want to get started on some episodes, or if you're not sure where to start, there are some great episodes like The Shoe Keeps Dropping, which is where Andy, he experiences an earthquake, Google tells him about it, and they mourn the loss of unlimited photo backup to Google photos. Or A Summary where they actually cover Dr. Timnit Gebru and why she was fired from the Google Brain, or Malarkey where Google is not only put through the ringer by the department of justice, but caught out for providing its AI tech for border surveillance. So there's a lot, a lot of really interesting topics to check out.

Quinn: Yeah, you can check that out now on relay.fm/material or just, you know, pull it up and whatever app you're listening to right now. Now, if you'd like to see our show notes and check out more from us, you can do that at relay.fm/pictorial. You'd also find us on Twitter or Instagram @pictorialpod, and you can find me on Instagram @aspiringrobotfm.

Betty: And you can find me on Twitter or Instagram @articulationsv and I am also on YouTube at ARTiculations. And speaking of YouTube, we do have a Pictorial Podcast YouTube channel, where we do upload some of the episodes. They are a few episodes behind, but we are catching up where you can see some of the pictures as we talk about them through the podcast.

Quinn: Thanks for listening, art enthusiasts.