Letter to Helen Clay Frick

THE AMERICAN COMMISSION FOR THE PROTECTION AND SALVAGE OF ARTISTIC AND HISTORIC MONUMENTS IN WAR AREAS Owen J. Roberts, Chaiman David E. Finley, Vice Chairman Huntington Cairns, Secretary-Treasurer William Bell Dinsmoor Herbert H. Lehman Archibald MacLeish Paul J. Sachs Archbishop F. J. Spellman Francis Henry Taylor John Walker, Special Advisor OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART WASHINGTON 25, D.C. Address reply: American Commission c/o Frick Art Reference Library 10 East 71st Street New York 21, N. Y. Miss Helen C. Frick Frick Art Reference Library 10 East 71st Street New York City January 19, 1945 Dear Miss Frick: I wish once more, on behalf of the A.C.L.S. Committee on Protection of Cultural Treasures in War Areas, to thank you for the invaluable help and generous hospitality which you voluntarily offered to the Committee and which we gratefully accepted. You realize, I am sure, that without your whole­ hearted cooperation the task which we assumed, one which grew to unforeseen and incredible proportions, would have been quite impossible of accomplish­ment. The exact degree of utility of the services which the Committee has been able to perform cannot be revealed until the war is over, except in the most general way (as in the symposium held last month at the Metropolitan Museum). All details are locked within the confidential files of the Amer­ican Commission in their offices at the National Gallery of Art and those of the British War Office in London; but I can assure you that the reliance of the ground and air forces upon the "Frick maps" and the lists and reports emanating from the quarters within this library is repeatedly recognized in the reports from the various fields of action. You can have the satisfac­tion of knowing that your generous action in contributing in so many ways toward a project which so vitally affects our mutual concerns, and to which so many other individuals, institutions, foundations, and branches of the armed forces of the United States, have given unstintingly in money, mater­ials, space, transportation, and personnel, has yielded most invaluable re­sults. As the work on the maps and lists is drawing toward its end--my re­port of last August 14, of which you have a copy, forecast January 31, 1945, as the probable end of our most active work, and we are not far behind this schedule--the reduction or transfer of the Committee's staff requires immed­iate attention; for, with the gradually tightening army security restrictions on the use of reports from the field, the amount of research and indexing that can be profitably done away from government offices is rapidly diminish­ing. One of the immediate problems, therefore, is to make provision for continuation of a second activity which had been centered in the Frick Art Reference Library, namely, the continuation of the card index file, so that this work will not come to a dead end and cease to be of utility. I am sure that you will be as gratified, as I am, that in the Commission meeting at Washington held yesterday the following resolutions were passed: "That the Office of the Secretary-Treasurer shall assume the respon­sibility of processing the classified and unclassified material in the files of the Commission and which may be received by it in the future, in order to...