BACK TO DRESDEN

TOURING the past five months nearly 300,000 visitors have --' tramped through East Berlin's dark, rundown National Gallery to feast their eyes on the cream of one of the world's great art collections: 536 key paintings from Dresden's state art museum, the Gemalde-Galerie (see color pages). Next week the collection will finally come down off the walls to be packed up and shipped back to Dresden for the city's 750th anniversary. There, on June 4, the paintings will at last resume their place in the partially restored art gallery from which they were hurriedly removed in the early days of World War II.

Few art collections have had a more troubled existence than the Dresden collection was subjected to in the years of hot and cold war that followed. Stored by the Germans in some 50 separate underground caches, the paintings were seized by the invading Russians in 1945. tossed helter-skelter into open trucks for the trip to Moscow. For the next decade their whereabouts was a well-kept Soviet secret. Not until the present Soviet leaders staged a red-carpet display of their booty last year at Moscow's Pushkin Museum (TIME, Sept. 12), before handing the collection back to the East Germans, did the Western world know how many--if any--of the museum's most important paintings were still in existence.

Damaged Goods. The Soviet's grand gesture nearly backfired earlier this year when Western art experts got their first close-up view of the paintings. Despite boastful Russian claims that the paintings had been carefully preserved and restored by Soviet experts, Art News Editor Alfred Frankfurter touched off an international art ruckus by noting that at least 30 of the masterpieces were cracked, blistered or awkwardly patched up.

Some of the damage is still comparatively minor, e.g., the crack across the top of Tintoretto's Rescue of Arsinoe. But in the case of Diirer's "Dresden" altarpiece. the damage has resulted in almost total loss; the painting, done on fine linen, was apparently water-stained and rotted (probably while in the Germans' wartime hideout), then clumsily glued onto a wooden panel (probably by the Russians).

Twelve Barrels of Sold. Despite the wear and tear and continued bad handling (several paintings have been further damaged during the Berlin exhibition because of poor temperature and humidity control), the Dresden collection remains among Europe's top six. It was formed at the time when most of Europe's great collectors were kings and princes, whose pocketbooks were all their countries' wealth could provide.

Greatest of Dresden's art patrons was Augustus III (1696-1763), both Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, who lived for art, was willing to spend as much as "twelve barrels of gold'' at a time for paintings he wanted. An insatiable collector, he acquired such paintings as Vermeer's Girl Reading a Letter (which he thought was a Rembrandt), Rubens' Bathsheba and Tintoretto's Rescue of Arsinoe, in one peak year bought a grand total of 715 paintings. Greatest of Augustus' coups was his acquisition of Raphael's Sistine Madonna, once the property of the Benedictine monks of San Sisto, in Piacenza, Italy. When the painting was brought before him, Augustus pushed aside his throne, then in a rare gesture of royal humility cried: "Make room for the great Raphael."

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