Last Appearance

The vast majority of U.S. gallerygoers had never seen such a collection before and never would again. They had been making the most of the world art masterpieces which once hung in Berlin's Kaiser Friedrich Museum.

To begin with, nearly a million had seen the collection in Washington last March and April. Then the U.S. Army sent it on tour (TIME, May 10), and another million in twelve cities had had a look--paying some $290,000 (to be used as relief for needy German children) for the privilege. In St. Louis alone, a record 227,414 jammed the City Art Museum during an 18-day exhibition, outdoing even the Manhattan attendance by some 90,000. This week in Toledo the collection is making its final appearance before being returned to Germany.

The group of paintings shown in Toledo is substantially reduced from the one Washington saw. Of the 202 pictures shipped to the U.S. after Third Army troops discovered them in a Merkers (Germany) salt mine in 1945, some 100 of the more fragile ones have already been returned. Nonetheless, the collection is still imposing, includes ten Rembrandts (one of them The Man with the Golden Helmet), two Rubenses and two Botticellis.

At the close of the Toledo exhibition next week the collection will start on its road back. The Department of the Army will ticket it for Wiesbaden, in the U.S. zone, but it will not go back to the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin--at least not for the present. This is not so much because of the difficulty of shipping art by the airlift as because the Army still holds the paintings "in trust for the German people." As matters now stand, Berlin is a poor place to lodge such a trust.

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