Art Treasures from the Vienna Collections

This exhibition brought 279 objects from the Kunsthistorisches Museum and other Vienna collections to American audiences as an act of postwar cultural diplomacy. The Austrian government lent the works in gratitude to the United States for rescuing them from the salt mines of Upper Austria, where they had been concealed during the war. American forces had discovered them alongside Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna and other masterpieces. Nearly all the pieces had been acquired by the House of Habsburg and included 128 paintings by Titian, Velazquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Vermeer, together with Renaissance bronzes, the Cellini Salt Cellar, arms and armor, and Flemish tapestries.

The tour had opened in Europe (Zurich, Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris, Stockholm, Copenhagen, London) before crossing the Atlantic. The American leg opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in November 1949, then moved to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where attendance ran to nearly 900,000 over the Washington showing. The Chicago stop at the Art Institute, from November 1950 through January 1951, was part of a second American circuit that continued to Saint Louis, Toledo, Toronto, Boston, and Philadelphia before the works eventually returned to Europe. Catalogue number 124, illustrated in color on plate iv, was Vermeer’s painting, listed under the title “The Artist in His Studio.”

The Art of Painting carried a particularly charged recent history. Hitler had purchased it in 1940 from Jaromir Czernin for 1.65 million Reichsmarks, intending it for his planned Fuhrer Museum in Linz. It had been stored in the Alt Aussee salt mine before being discovered by Allied forces and restituted to Austria after the war. By the time it reached Chicago, the painting had only recently been formally incorporated into the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s collection. Austria had not yet recovered full sovereignty (the State Treaty restoring it would not come until 1955), and the tour gave the new republic a rare opportunity to present its cultural heritage to American audiences under its own authority.