Art treasures from the Vienna collections

“Art treasures from the Vienna collections” was a landmark touring exhibition organized by the Austrian government as an act of gratitude to the American people for the rescue of Vienna’s art holdings from the salt mines of Altaussee in Upper Austria, where they had been hidden for safekeeping during the war. Between 1943 and 1945, those mines had sheltered masterworks from the Kunsthistorisches Museum alongside thousands of stolen works gathered by the Nazis from across Europe. American and Allied forces located and secured the caches in the final weeks of the war, and Austria’s postwar government wished to acknowledge that debt publicly.

The exhibition comprised some 279 objects from the Kunsthistorisches Museum and other Viennese collections, including 128 paintings by Titian, Velázquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Vermeer, as well as Renaissance bronzes, arms and armour, goldsmiths’ work (among them Cellini’s celebrated gold Salt), tapestries, ivories, and antiquities. Organised by Ernst Buschbeck, curator of the Vienna Picture Gallery, and Erich Strohmer, curator of sculpture and decorative arts at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the show had already toured major European capitals before crossing the Atlantic. The North American circuit opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in November 1949 and subsequently visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Saint Louis received the exhibition from 4 March to 22 April 1951, one of the final venues on the extended American tour before the works moved on to the Toledo Museum of Art. Vermeer’s large allegorical canvas known as “The Art of Painting” (c. 1666-1668) was among the highlights of the Saint Louis showing. The picture, in which a painter works at his easel before a model costumed as Clio, the muse of history, had been acquired by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in 1946 after a wartime transfer of ownership and was here being seen by American audiences for the first time. For many visitors it was their only opportunity to study the painting outside Vienna; it has not travelled to North America since.