Returned Masterpieces from the Collections of Berlin Museums. 10th exhibition at the Central Collecting Point

This was the tenth and final exhibition mounted at the Wiesbaden Central Collecting Point, the Allied art depot housed in the building of the Landesmuseum Wiesbaden (today Museum Wiesbaden). It gathered some 202 paintings belonging to Berlin’s state museums, chiefly the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum (the picture gallery now known as the Gemäldegalerie) together with works from the Nationalgalerie. Among them hung the two Berlin Vermeers, Woman with a Pearl Necklace and The Glass of Wine, shown to the German public as part of a collection that had spent the previous years scattered far from home.

The pictures owed their wanderings to the war. As the front closed on Berlin in March 1945, the museums’ most valuable holdings were evacuated to a salt mine near Eisenach in Thuringia for protection. American forces recovered the works that spring, and the first transport reached Wiesbaden on 20 August 1945. There the United States Army had established a Central Collecting Point under its Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section, organised by the officer Walter I. Farmer, where rescued and displaced art from across the region could be inventoried, conserved, and prepared for return to its rightful owners.

Not every work stayed in Germany. In late 1945 the Army selected 202 of the finest Berlin paintings and shipped them to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, ostensibly for safekeeping. The decision provoked the Wiesbaden Manifesto of 7 November 1945, in which Farmer and his fellow Monuments officers formally protested that removing the works set a precedent neither morally justifiable nor necessary. The pictures went all the same. After three years in storage they were exhibited at the National Gallery in 1948, drawing close to a million visitors in a matter of weeks, and then toured more than a dozen American cities, including New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, before some two and a half million people.

Following President Truman’s order, the paintings returned to Wiesbaden in 1949, and ninety-seven of these American travellers were reunited here with the works that had remained behind. The American authorities presented the repatriation as a lesson in democracy, a gesture of re-education for postwar Germany. The accompanying catalogue, printed in both English and German and edited by Dr Clemens Weiler of the Wiesbaden gallery, carried a preface by the United States land commissioner James R. Newman. The Central Collecting Point itself closed in 1951, and the Berlin pictures, the two Vermeers among them, were eventually transferred back to Berlin.