Masterpieces of painting saved from the German Salt Mines: Property of the Berlin Museums

The Art Institute of Chicago was the third stop on the American tour of paintings rescued from a German salt mine at the close of World War II, following the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (May 17 to June 13) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (June 19 to July 7). Chicago gave the presentation a notably different title from the other venues, billing it as “Masterpieces of painting saved from the German Salt Mines” rather than the standard “Paintings from the Berlin Museums.” Vermeer was represented by two works from the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin: Woman with a Pearl Necklace (catalogue no. 138, listed as “Young Woman with a Pearl Necklace“) and The Glass of Wine (catalogue no. 139, listed as ”Lady and Gentleman Drinking Wine“). The Chicago showing ran for five weeks, longer than any preceding stop, before the tour moved on to Boston on August 14.

The tour was the outcome of a wartime rescue operation in which US Army troops had discovered over 200 Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum paintings stored underground in the Kaiserroda mine near Merkers, Thuringia, in April 1945. The works were transferred to American custody and, after years of storage at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, dispatched on a circuit of 14 American cities that drew approximately 7 million visitors in total. All 202 paintings returned to Germany by spring 1949. For a fuller account of the wartime removal and the subsequent debate over cultural property, see the Boston entry for this tour.