Rescued Masterpieces

In the final weeks of the Second World War, as Allied bombing reduced much of Dresden to rubble, the treasures of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister had already been dispersed to shelters across Saxony. Paintings including Vermeer’s “Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window” were stored in fortified repositories such as Königstein Fortress and a disused railway tunnel near Pirna. When the 1st Ukrainian Front reached Dresden in May 1945, Soviet trophy brigades, guided by German museum staff, systematically recovered the hidden caches. The works were gathered at Pillnitz Palace and then transported by rail to Moscow and Kyiv, beginning a decade-long Soviet custody of the collection.

At the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Soviet conservators spent years restoring canvases that had suffered from damp and the stresses of wartime concealment. In the spring of 1955, before restitution, the museum mounted a public exhibition of the recovered Dresden works across fourteen rooms; more than 1.2 million visitors came over four months. That August, following a Soviet declaration of goodwill toward the German Democratic Republic, 1,240 paintings were formally handed back to GDR representatives. Vermeer’s painting returned to Dresden in 1956, resuming its place in the collection it had left more than a decade before.

Nearly thirty years later, “Gerettete Meisterwerke” brought a selection of those same Dresden masterpieces back to the Pushkin, where they had once been restored and exhibited before their restitution. Opening on 10 October 1984, the exhibition presented works from the Gemäldegalerie within the framework of Soviet-GDR cultural diplomacy, commemorating the wartime rescue narrative that had shaped relations between the two states. After its Moscow run it traveled to the State Hermitage in Leningrad, where it remained on view from 6 December 1984 to 20 January 1985. For Vermeer’s “Girl Reading a Letter,” the Pushkin showing was a return to the very institution that had housed and conserved the painting four decades earlier.