Art treasures from the Vienna collections

This landmark touring exhibition brought 279 objects from the Kunsthistorisches Museum and other Vienna collections to American audiences as an act of cultural diplomacy. The Austrian government lent the works in gratitude to the United States for rescuing them from the salt mines of Upper Austria, where they had been concealed during the war. Among the 128 paintings were works by Titian, Velázquez, Rubens, and Rembrandt, alongside Renaissance bronzes, the Cellini Salt Cellar, Flemish tapestries, and arms and armor, nearly all of them assembled over centuries by the House of Habsburg.

The tour opened with a European leg (Zurich, Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris, Stockholm, Copenhagen, and London) before crossing the Atlantic in late 1949. The American circuit began at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, then continued west. The Los Angeles showing, held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1950, was one of several stops on an itinerary that also took the collection to San Francisco, Chicago, Saint Louis, Toledo, Boston, and Philadelphia over the following two years.

Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, catalogued as “The Artist in His Studio,” was among the most closely watched works on the tour. Hitler had acquired it in 1940 for his planned Führermuseum in Linz, and it was found by American forces among the art hidden in the Austrian salt mines. Austria had not yet recovered full sovereignty, which would not come until the State Treaty of 1955, and the painting had only recently been incorporated formally into the Kunsthistorisches Museum collection. Its Los Angeles appearance gave West Coast audiences a rare opportunity to see the large allegorical canvas that Vermeer had kept in his own possession until his death.