BERLIN.- The Gemäldegalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin has completed the digitization of historic photographs documenting works of art that were lost during the Second World War, when fires destroyed hundreds of paintings stored in the Friedrichshain flak bunker in May 1945. The newly digitized images are now publicly accessible online in high resolution, offering scholars and the public a rare visual record of masterpieces once thought to have disappeared from view forever.

The project focuses on around 430 large-format glass negatives preserved in the Gemäldegalerie’s photo archive. These negatives show paintings that formed part of the Berlin collection before wartime destruction. In total, the Gemäldegalerie lost approximately 585 paintings as a result of the war, most of them in the fires that swept through the Friedrichshain bunker shortly after the conflict ended.

Among the works lost were paintings by some of the most important names in European art history, including Caravaggio, Peter Paul Rubens, Paolo Veronese and Anthonis van Dyck. Although the original paintings can no longer be recovered, the surviving photographic negatives now make it possible to study them in striking detail.

The photographs were made by Gustav Schwarz between 1925 and 1944 on behalf of the Berlin museums. At the time, they were primarily intended for reproductions in publications and postcards. Today, they have taken on a very different role: they are an irreplaceable visual testimony to a collection violently diminished by war.

Beginning in 1941, the Gemäldegalerie moved many of its most important paintings into the Friedrichshain flak bunker to protect them from air raids. The most valuable works were evacuated to mines in Thuringia in March 1945 and later secured by American troops in May of that year. But around 430 paintings, many of them large-format works, remained in the bunker. They were destroyed in two fires whose cause remains unresolved.

The glass negatives themselves survived the war largely unharmed in what was then the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum on Museumsinsel. After the war, because of Berlin’s division, they remained in the eastern part of the city and were stored in what is now the Bode-Museum. In 1998, following the reunification of the East and West Berlin painting collections, the glass negative collection was moved to the Kulturforum. The negatives are reportedly in remarkably good condition, with only a small number showing damage.

For the Gemäldegalerie, the digitization project is both an act of documentation and a form of cultural recovery. The high-resolution images make visible the scale and quality of what was lost, while also creating new possibilities for art historical research, conservation studies, provenance research and the identification of related works on the art market.

“With the digitization of these historical images, we are regaining a piece of cultural identity,” said Dagmar Hirschfelder, director of the Gemäldegalerie. “The pictures that once seemed irretrievably lost are now visible and tangible again for our public, but also for research — at least through their photographic transmission.”

The quality of the photographs is unusually high. Fine details, including craquelure, can be seen clearly, allowing researchers to examine the condition of the paintings before the Second World War. Until now, many of these lost works were known mainly through books or small reproductions. Their online availability now opens the material to a global audience.

The digitized images are available through the Gemäldegalerie’s online collections. A related Google Arts & Culture story presents the history of the lost works and the results of the digitization project. Further information is also available through the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin’s project page on lost masterpieces.

The project was led by Dr. Katja Kleinert, deputy director and curator of 17th-century Dutch painting at the Gemäldegalerie, and Franziska May, research associate for provenance research at the Zentralarchiv and the Gemäldegalerie. Project participants included Maria Stein, photo archivist at the Gemäldegalerie; Eva Gudermann, FSJ Kultur Berlin volunteer at the Gemäldegalerie; and Florian Schmitt, who produced the digital images as an intern at the Gemäldegalerie.