Paintings from the Berlin Museums Exhibited in Co-operation with The Department of The Army

Cleveland was the fifth stop on the 1948–1949 US tour of masterworks rescued from the Merkers potassium mine, where American troops had discovered more than 200 paintings from Berlin’s Kaiser Friedrich Museum in April 1945. After the Department of the Army permitted 97 of the works to tour thirteen American cities before their return to Germany, the exhibition traveled from Washington and New York through Chicago, Boston, and Detroit before arriving at Cleveland in October. A single Vermeer appeared here: “Woman with a Pearl Necklace” (catalogue no. 138 in the venue’s catalogue, overall tour catalogue no. 14), listed under its German title “Junge Dame beim Schmücken” (“Young Woman with a Pearl Necklace“). The Cleveland run drew over 100,000 visitors in sixteen days, and on October 21 alone 18,120 people attended, breaking the museum’s single-day attendance record of thirty-one years. The Cleveland Museum of Art also published the catalogue used by eight other venues on the tour, selling a record 159,000 copies.

Founded in 1916 with an endowment from Cleveland industrialists Hinman Hurlbut, John Huntington, and Horace Kelley, the Cleveland Museum of Art had grown by the late 1940s into one of the premier encyclopedic museums in North America. Under director William M. Milliken, the institution was actively building its European painting holdings, and the Berlin exhibition arrived at a moment when the museum’s international reputation was being consolidated through a series of major bequests and acquisitions. Admission was charged at 25 cents, with proceeds directed to the German Children’s Relief Fund.