Masterpieces of European Art

In the autumn of 1974, the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo presented eighty-two paintings from the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden in an exhibition organised jointly with the Kyoto National Museum, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, with the support of the East German Ministry of Culture. The show ran in Tokyo from 21 September to 24 November before travelling to Kyoto, where it remained on view from 3 December 1974 to 26 January 1975. Combined attendance across both venues reached 264,030 visitors, reflecting the exceptional public appetite in Japan for European old master painting.

The Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, housed in the Zwinger palace complex, holds one of the great encyclopaedic collections of European painting assembled over centuries by the Saxon electors. The 1974 tour gave Japanese audiences a concentrated encounter with works spanning the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, including paintings by Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Vermeer. Among them was Vermeer’s “Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window” (c. 1657-59), one of the museum’s most prized Dutch seventeenth-century holdings. The painting depicts a young woman absorbed in a letter beside a leaded casement, her reflected profile caught in the glass, in a composition that concentrates all of Vermeer’s characteristic attention to interior light and psychological stillness.

The loan was a significant act of Cold War cultural diplomacy: the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, a state institution of the German Democratic Republic, sending masterworks to Japan at a moment when access to the Dresden collection by western audiences remained heavily restricted. For many Japanese visitors the 1974 exhibition was their first opportunity to see these works in person, and its scale and attendance confirmed the National Museum of Western Art’s role as a primary conduit for European museum culture in East Asia.