Masterpieces of Art from European and American Collections. Twenty-Second Loan Exhibition of Old Masters

The Twenty-Second Loan Exhibition of Old Masters at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1941 was one of the annual series of Old Master loan exhibitions that director Wilhelm Valentiner had built into a signature event at the DIA since the 1920s. Each year the museum assembled paintings from European and American private and institutional lenders into a focused temporary show; by the twenty-second instalment the series was a well-established fixture of the Detroit art calendar. The 1941 edition, however, carried an extraordinary dimension: several of its European loans were there not by ordinary arrangement but because the outbreak of war had made their return impossible.

Vermeer’s The Milkmaid, lent by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, had traveled to the New York World’s Fair of 1939 as one of the supreme attractions of the “Masterpieces of Art” exhibition that Valentiner himself had helped organize. When Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940 the painting could not be sent home, and it remained under DIA custodianship for the duration of the occupation. By 1941 it had already appeared once in Detroit, in the DIA’s companion exhibition of 1939 drawn from both the New York and San Francisco World’s Fairs; its inclusion in the Twenty-Second Loan Exhibition gave Detroit audiences a second sustained opportunity to study the work before it eventually made its way east to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it hung as late as 1944. The Milkmaid returned to Amsterdam after the liberation of the Netherlands in 1945. The Glass of Wine, belonging to the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin (acquired by the museum in 1901 from the Hope collection), was among the German loans that had crossed the Atlantic for the 1939 fairs and likewise remained in American hands while the war continued.

Valentiner’s German background gave the exhibition a particular resonance. Born in Tübingen and trained under Wilhelm von Bode at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, he had emigrated to America after the First World War and arrived in Detroit in 1921, becoming director in 1924. His scholarly connections to the Gemäldegalerie and his long advocacy for Dutch and Flemish painting shaped the DIA’s collecting for two decades. The 1941 loan show reflected both those institutional relationships and the strange circumstances of wartime, when some of the greatest paintings in European public collections were temporarily resident in America, available to be seen by audiences who might never otherwise have encountered them.