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Home Town Cleveland, Ohio
Last Address New York, New York Burial location unknown.
Date of Passing May 11, 1966
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James Rorimer was born in Cleveland in 1905, and became a leading figure in the museum world. Upon graduating cum laude from Harvard in 1927, where he was a student in Paul Sachs’s distinguished museum course, Rorimer joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He was named Assistant Curator in 1929 and Associate Curator in 1932. Rorimer was largely responsible for developing the Metropolitan’s medieval collections known as, and housed in the Cloisters. He began planning this new medieval extension in 1930, becoming Curator of Medieval Art in 1934 and Curator of the Cloisters upon its opening in 1938. A forward-thinking man, Rorimer was one of the early proponents of using radiography to examine artworks; in 1931 he published Ultraviolet Rays and Their Use in the Examination of Works of Art.
After being drafted into the army as a private in the infantry in 1943, he soon became a commissioned officer. Rorimer was selected at the recommendation of his Harvard professor Paul Sachs to become one of the first Monuments Men, and arrived in England for training in early 1944. By August, Rorimer was on the ground in France. He spent several weeks inspecting monuments in Normandy before being assigned to the Seine Section in Paris. In addition to inspecting buildings in Paris and the surrounding countryside, he began investigating the looting of private French collections by the ERR (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg), an official Nazi looting operation. Rorimer was transferred to Seventh Army in the spring of 1945, and arrived in Germany during the last month of the war. In this capacity, Rorimer helped discover some of the greatest repositories of hidden treasures, including the castle Neuschwanstein which housed ERR loot from France, and the Heilbronn mines that contained art evacuated from German museums. After the war, he also played an important role in the establishment of the Munich Collecting Point, which served as the primary facility for receiving, processing, caring for, and restituting thousands of artworks after the war. For his instrumental role in the Allied effort to locate and restitute displaced works of art, Rorimer was awarded the Bronze Star, the Belgian Croix de Guerre, the French Legion of Honor, and the Cross of the Commander of the Order of Denmark. In 1950, Rorimer published a book about his experience as a Monuments Man entitled Survival: The Salvage and Protection of Art in War.
Following the war, Rorimer returned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was promoted to the position of Director of the Cloisters in 1949. He then succeeded Francis Henry Taylor as Director of the museum in 1955. During his tenure, Rorimer was a remarkably successful fundraiser and museum director. He helped develop the Watson Library into one of the largest art libraries in the U.S., and also increased museum attendance from two million to six million visitors annually. He amassed millions of dollars in donations which he used to acquire some of the most famous artworks in the Metropolitan’s collection, such as Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer by Rembrandt and the Annunciation, or Merode Altarpiece, by the Early Netherlandish master Robert Campin. Rorimer served as the museum’s director until 1966, when he died unexpectedly from a heart attack.
Rorimer’s papers are conserved at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. in the Gallery Archives, and at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
Description The European-Mediterranean-Middle East Theater was a major theater of operations during the Second World War (between December 7, 1941, and March 2, 1946). The vast size of Europe, Mediterranean and Middle East theatre saw interconnected naval, land, and air campaigns fought for control of the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. The fighting in this theatre lasted from 10 June 1940, when Italy entered the war on the side of Germany, until 2 May 1945 when all Axis forces in Italy surrendered. However, fighting would continue in Greece – where British troops had been dispatched to aid the Greek government – during the early stages of the Greek Civil War.
The British referred to this theatre as the Mediterranean and Middle East Theatre (so called due to the location of the fighting and the name of the headquarters that controlled the initial fighting: Middle East Command) while the Americans called the theatre of operations the Mediterranean Theatre of War. The German official history of the fighting is dubbed 'The Mediterranean, South-East Europe, and North Africa 1939–1942'. Regardless of the size of the theatre, the various campaigns were not seen as neatly separated areas of operations but part of one vast theatre of war.
Fascist Italy aimed to carve out a new Roman Empire, while British forces aimed initially to retain the status quo. Italy launched various attacks around the Mediterranean, which were largely unsuccessful. With the introduction of German forces, Yugoslavia and Greece were overrun. Allied and Axis forces engaged in back and forth fighting across North Africa, with Axis interference in the Middle East causing fighting to spread there. With confidence high from early gains, German forces planned elaborate attacks to be launched to capture the Middle East and then to possibly attack the southern border of the Soviet Union. However, following three years of fighting, Axis forces were defeated in North Africa and their interference in the Middle East was halted. Allied forces then commenced an invasion of Southern Europe, resulting in the Italians switching sides and deposing Mussolini. A prolonged battle for Italy took place, and as the strategic situation changed in southeast Europe, British troops returned to Greece.
The theatre of war, the longest during the Second World War, resulted in the destruction of the Italian Empire and altered the strategic position of Germany resulting in numerous German divisions being deployed to Africa and Italy and total losses (including those captured upon final surrender) being over half a million. Italian losses, in the theatre, amount to around to 177,000 men with a further several hundred thousand captured during the process of the various campaigns. British losses amount to over 300,000 men killed, wounded, or captured, and total American losses in the region amounted to 130,000.
