Masterpieces from the Berlin Museums and Palaces

Two years after the 1951 “Meisterwerke aus den Berliner Museen” survey of European painting, Museum Dahlem mounted a follow-up exhibition with a broadened scope. Its full title, “Meisterwerke aus den Berliner Museen und Schlössern. Gemälde alter Meister. Gemälde des 19. Jahrhunderts,“ announced the key distinction: alongside works from the state museum collections, the show incorporated paintings held by the Verwaltung der Staatlichen Schlösser und Gärten, the separate administration responsible for artworks in the former Hohenzollern and Prussian royal palaces. The inclusion of palace holdings gave the 1953 exhibition a different character from its predecessor, presenting Berlin’s dispersed cultural inheritance as a unified whole.

The exhibition ran from 9 May through November 1953 at the Dahlem complex in the former Asian Art building, then serving as a temporary home for the West Berlin picture collections while the city’s historic museum island remained in the Soviet sector. Both Vermeers in the Berlin holdings were included: “Woman with a Pearl Necklace” appeared as catalogue number 86 and “The Glass of Wine” as catalogue number 87, exhibited in sequence as a pair representing Vermeer’s distinctive treatment of light and domestic interior.

For “Woman with a Pearl Necklace,” the exhibition offered one of its first major public showings in Berlin since the wartime dispersal of the collections to protective storage and the subsequent American tour of 1948. “The Glass of Wine,” which had last been shown in Berlin in the 1929 “Meister des hollandischen Interieurs” exhibition, likewise returned to view. Together, the two works gave Berlin audiences a rare chance to see the city’s own Vermeers together on home ground.