A new movie about real-life war heroes who rescued thousands of priceless artworks from Adolf Hitler is called “The Monuments Men.” Or, as they think about it over at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, “How We Got Some Beautiful Stuff.”

Starring and directed by George Clooney, “The Monuments Men” opens in theaters nationally Friday. It depicts the efforts of academics and museum curators who raced against time to discover where Hitler and his minions had stashed stolen artworks, including Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.”

Hitler, an art school dropout before he was a despot, originally intended to display the pieces in a museum in Linz, Germany, but his plans changed as it became clear the Nazis would lose World War II. That’s when he issued the order to destroy the works.

Luckily, most of them were saved, and some found their way to the MIA, which is making available a self-guided tour of nine pieces with ties to the Monuments Men.

“It’s great to see this story being told,” said Erika Holm-quist-Wall, the MIA’s assistant curator of paintings and specialist in provenance, which is the history of a work’s ownership.

“The Hollywood spin on it raises awareness. For us, it’s a fantastic way to get people to visit the museum to see these amazing works of art that were caught in this whole sticky web.”

The most famous of the MIA works is a bust of St. John the Baptist by Italian sculptor Benedetto da Rovezzano. A widely reprinted photo shows the Monuments Men hauling it out of a salt mine in Altaussee, Austria, where Nazi looters had dumped it, along with such works as the “Mona Lisa” and Jan van Eyck’s “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb” altarpiece.

Other pieces on the MIA’s self-guided tour include Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s “The Piazza San Marco, Venice,” which Hitler ordered removed from a German museum because it was “degenerate” (the Nazis weren’t fans of modern art), and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s “Modern Bohemia,” also taken from a museum and later sold at a Swiss auction house for $75 to raise money for Nazi causes.

Holmquist-Wall won’t reveal how much the Kirchner painting is worth, other than “a lot of money,” but it’s safe to say its value is in the millions.

One other aspect of museum culture that “The Monuments Men” sheds light on is the efforts to determine the provenance of artworks. The MIA has been at the forefront of efforts to trace ownership, which has been a key focus of museums in the past 15 years.

“It has been a more recent development since the Washington Conference (on Nazi-Confiscated Art) in 1998,” said Elizabeth Campbell Karlsgodt, author of “Hunting Hitler’s Stolen Treasures: The Monuments Men.” At that conference, 44 countries agreed to restitution of works to their rightful honors.

The results have varied.

“Some museums have been very protective of their collections,” said Karlsgodt, even as “public pressure has mounted for museums to do provenance research, even when they have clear title to the works.”

Other museums, such as the MIA, began reviewing all art acquired from 1932 through 1946. The website of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, for instance, lists the provenance of works and the settlements issued to rightful owners.

“We feel pretty good” about the provenance of the MIA’s collection, Holmquist-Wall said. “But there are always surprises, little scraps of research you may have missed.

“That’s why we have posted about 27 paintings and 30 pieces of Judaica (ceremonial Jewish art, which was especially ripe for theft) on our website. We posted all of the known provenance and we’ve posted even when we have been able to get clearance on items because we want to be as transparent as possible.”

As part of the effort to ensure artworks are traced to their owners, Holmquist-Wall has become something of a latter-day monuments woman, embarking on her own search in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

“I found Alphonse Rothschild’s inventory number scrawled on the back of (Johannes Lingelbach’s “The Piazza del Popolo”) and I was able to trace it to his own personal catalogue inventory, which the Nazis also took,” said Holmquist-Wall, who has degrees in art history from the University of St. Thomas and St. Catherine University.

“It’s perverse. They actually used (Rothschild’s) numbering system when they stole his painting. So you’re looking through this correspondence with swastikas all over it — it’s a pretty awful feeling — and you can trace that it was on a list of items designated for the Linz museum, that it was housed at Altaussee, the salt mine, and then that the Monuments Men found it. Just to be able to trace that paper trail was incredibly gratifying.”

That paper trail could be said to continue to the ticket that Holmquist-Wall will be handed when she attends an upcoming screening of “The Monuments Men.” The MIA has bought out a showing of the movie for its staff to attend.

They’ll see George Clooney, Matt Damon and Bill Murray begin a 1940s search for treasures — a search that, seven decades later, will result in MIA visitors embarking on their own hunt throughout the museum for the priceless masterworks that eluded Hitler’s grasp.

Chris Hewitt can be reached at 651-228-5552. Follow him on twitter.com/ChrisHMovie.

FYI

Cori Wegener, the cultural heritage preservation officer at the Smithsonian Institution, will discuss “The Worst of Times: Protecting Heritage in Armed Conflicts and Natural Disasters” at 6 p.m. Feb. 21, in the auditorium of O’Shaughnessy Educational Center on the St. Paul campus of the University of St. Thomas.

Admission is free.

When Wegener worked at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, she was called “the Clark Kent of museum work.”