Rescued Masterpieces

In May 1945, Soviet trophy brigades combing the hills and tunnels of Saxony uncovered the hidden repositories of the Dresden Gemäldegalerie. Some of the most prized works, including Vermeer's “Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window,” had been stored at Königstein Fortress for safekeeping as Allied bombers approached. Soviet forces gathered the paintings at Pillnitz Palace, then transported them by rail to Moscow and Kyiv. There they entered the care of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, where a decade of conservation work restored canvases damaged by damp and years of wartime storage. In the spring of 1955, before their return, the Pushkin put them on public display in fourteen rooms; more than 1.2 million visitors came to see them over four months.

The restitution came that August. Following the death of Stalin and the Soviet recognition of the German Democratic Republic's sovereignty, the USSR announced it would return the collection “for the purpose of strengthening and furthering the progress of friendship between the Soviet and German peoples.” On 25 August 1955, 1,240 paintings were formally handed over to GDR representatives, with the Vermeer among them; it arrived back in Dresden in 1956. The episode was not without friction: Soviet art historians suggested that, in acknowledgment of the rescue and restoration effort, the Germans might donate the Vermeer and Giorgione's “Sleeping Venus” as gifts. The GDR declined.

“Gerettete Meisterwerke” revisited that wartime story nearly three decades later. The exhibition opened at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow on 10 October 1984, then traveled to the State Hermitage in Leningrad, where it ran from 6 December 1984 to 20 January 1985. Presenting Dresden masterpieces that had passed through Soviet hands, the show commemorated the rescue narrative long central to Soviet-GDR cultural diplomacy. For Vermeer's “Girl Reading a Letter,” the Hermitage showing was a return visit to the country whose soldiers had found the painting in a Saxon fortress four decades before.