Masterpieces from Austria

“Meisterwerke aus Oesterreich” opened at the Kunsthaus Zürich in November 1946, running for nearly five months into March 1947. The exhibition was among the first international showings of Austrian Old Master works after World War II, bringing major paintings from Austrian collections to neutral Switzerland at a moment when Austria itself was still under four-power Allied occupation and its cultural institutions were only beginning to reconstitute themselves.

Vermeer’s “The Art of Painting” was among the works presented. One of his largest and most complex canvases, it depicts a painter at work in his studio with a model dressed as Clio, the Muse of History, and has long been interpreted as an allegory of painting’s elevated status among the arts. The work had passed into Austrian aristocratic hands through the Czernin family, but in 1940 Count Czernin sold it to Adolf Hitler, who regarded it as a prize acquisition for the planned Führermuseum in Linz. After the war it was recovered from the Altaussee salt mine in the Austrian Alps, where it had been stored with thousands of other looted and displaced works. By 1946 it was under Austrian state administration and would eventually enter the permanent collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

The Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland’s largest art museum, had maintained its program of international exhibitions throughout the war years, making it a natural venue for this postwar cultural overture. Switzerland’s wartime neutrality had preserved it as a space for artistic exchange, and the Kunsthaus had the infrastructure and audience to give Austrian masterworks a significant reception. The unusually long run of the exhibition, nearly five months, likely reflected both the logistical realities of the postwar period and genuine public appetite for reconnecting with the artistic heritage of a neighboring country that had endured occupation and destruction.