Masterpieces from the Berlin Museums. European Painting of the 17th and 18th Centuries

This exhibition was one of the earliest large public displays of the West Berlin painting collections after the Second World War. The collections formerly held at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum on Museum Island had been dispersed during the war, with many works evacuated to repositories in the western zones of Germany and held at the Allied Central Collecting Point in Wiesbaden. By the early 1950s the paintings were making their way back to Berlin, where the Dahlem complex in the American sector was being converted into a temporary home for the Staatliche Museen collections. The Gemaldegalerie would remain at Dahlem, in what was always conceived as a provisional arrangement, until it finally moved to its permanent building at the Kulturforum in 1998.

“Meisterwerke aus den Berliner Museen” opened on 9 September 1951 and presented European painting of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from the reassembled West Berlin holdings. Two Vermeers were included: “Woman with a Pearl Necklace” (catalogue no. 129) and “The Glass of Wine“ (catalogue no. 111), both long-standing possessions of the Berlin state collections. Their appearance here was among the first opportunities for postwar audiences to see these works displayed in Berlin again.

Note on the end date: Essential Vermeer records the closing date as “Mar.” 1952 (i.e. some point in March 1952), not September 1952 as held in this record. The year-long span “Sept. 9, 1951 to Sept. 9, 1952“ may reflect a transcription error; the display was in any case an extended semi-permanent presentation rather than a conventional loan exhibition, suited to the transitional state of the Dahlem galleries at that moment.