West European and American Painting from the Museums of the USA

West European and American Painting from the Museums of the USA opened at the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad (11 February – 24 March 1976). It gathered paintings from five American museums: the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, ranging from the Italian Renaissance and Dutch and French old masters to the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, a single German Expressionist canvas, and American realism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The exhibition was organised for the Soviet Union by the American industrialist and collector Armand Hammer, one of the American shows of the détente-era cultural exchange.

Its Vermeer was A Lady Writing (National Gallery of Art, Washington). From Leningrad the show travelled to Moscow (8 April – 19 May 1976) and then to Kyiv and Minsk over the summer.