Restored Works of Art in the German Democratic Republic

Held at the Altes Museum on the Museumsinsel in East Berlin from April to June 1980, this exhibition showcased artworks from across the German Democratic Republic that had undergone conservation treatment. Organised under the umbrella of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, it gave the East German state a platform to demonstrate the care it invested in its inherited artistic heritage, presenting restored Old Master paintings and other works as evidence of a living cultural tradition that the GDR claimed as its own.

Vermeer’s “The Procuress” (1656), catalogue number 21 in the exhibition, travelled from its home at the Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden, where it has been part of the collection since 1741, when it was purchased for August III of Poland, Elector of Saxony. The painting shared the fate of the rest of the Dresden collection during the Second World War: evacuated for safekeeping, it was seized by the Red Army in 1945 and taken to the Soviet Union, remaining there for a decade before being restituted to the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden in 1955. The gallery reopened to the public in 1960 following reconstruction of the war-damaged Semper Building.

The 1980 Berlin showing was one of the very rare occasions on which “The Procuress“ left Dresden. It remains among the least-travelled of Vermeer’s paintings, appearing in only a handful of exhibitions across the twentieth century. The exhibition itself is sparsely documented in the Western scholarly literature, reflecting the limited circulation of DDR cultural programming beyond the Eastern Bloc.