Watteau. The Draughtsman
to 15 January 2017
Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings
The Städel Museum’s comprehensive exhibition of the work of Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) – one of the most outstanding draughtsmen in the history of French art – runs until 15 January 2017. The exhibition, held in the Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings, brings together fifty of Watteau’s drawings, complemented by six of his paintings, and a small selection of drawings by contemporaries and followers. “Watteau –The Draughtsman” was developed in collaboration with the Teylers Museum in Haarlem in the Netherlands. It is the first monographic exhibition on the artist to be held in Germany for more than thirty years, and it will be the first in this country ever devoted to the phenomenon of Watteau the draughtsman, in all his many facets. The drawings, which the artist completed in large numbers and in a wide variety of contexts, were the basis for his work as a painter.
Curators: Dr. Martin Sonnabend (Städel Museum), Dr. Michiel Plomp (Teylers Museum)


Battle of the Sexes. Franz von Stuck to Frida Kahlo
to 19 March 2017
Exhibition House
The exhibition deals with the artistic investigation of gender roles from the mid-19th century to the end of the Second World War. The traditional definition of male and female as active/passive, rational/emotional, culture/nature was a crucial theme in modern art: many artists presented audiences with exaggerated gender characteristics, reinforcing stereotypical models of behaviour. But others attacked commonplace clichés, attempting to subvert them with strategies including irony, exaggeration, masquerade, and hybridisation. This major exhibition uses 140 works of painting, sculpture, graphic art, photography, and films to present particularly incisive artistic statements, putting them in dialogue with one other. Important artworks on the topic were selected from the Städel Museum’s permanent collection, including paintings by Max Liebermann, Edvard Munch, and Franz von Stuck, sculptures by Auguste Rodin, and photographs by Frank Eugene and Man Ray. In addition, carefully-chosen loans of important works mean canonical names – like Gustave Moreau, Édouard Manet, Gustav Klimt, Otto Dix, Meret Oppenheim, and Frida Kahlo – can be juxtaposed with discoveries that extend the canon with bold but lesser-known artists, including Leonor Fini, Jeanne Mammen, Rudolf Jettmar, and Gustav Adolf Mossa. Against a background of intensive discussion of gender questions and the constant evolution of men’s and women’s roles, the project offers insights into the complexity of the problem, while exploring art-historical aspects of this highly relevant social and political theme.
Curators: Felicity Korn (Städel Museum), Dr. Felix Krämer (Städel Museum)


Into the Third Dimension. Spatial Concepts on Paper from the Bauhaus to the Present
15 February to– 14 May 2017
Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings
Apparently familiar characteristics – including form, volume, delineation, emptiness, and structure – produce depth and space and thus allow the viewer to orient his gaze through the image. But how do drawings and prints – in other words, flat, two-dimensional representations – depict these elements of the third dimension? These questions are addressed by the exhibition “Into the Third Dimension. Spatial Concepts on Paper from the Bauhaus to Contemporary Conceptual Art” at the Städel Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings. Selected works by thirteen artists are on display, including Lucio Fontana, Eduardo Chillida, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Giò Pomodoro, Blinky Palermo, James Turrell, and Michael Riedel. The show begins with geometrical compositions from 1923 by El Lissitzky and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, continuing through the century to prints made by contemporary conceptual artists. In this way, lithographs with Constructivist perspectival representations are juxtaposed with embossed prints emerging out of two-dimensional flatness. Lacerated surfaces which open onto imaginative spaces encounter sketches made for wall pieces. Sculptural and object-like prints by artists working in the tradition of Minimal Art, installation art, and light art are juxtaposed with chalk drawings, foldings, and collages by 20th century sculptors. To enable a greater range of spatial experiences, the display combines prints and drawings with sculpture in the round. The exhibition brings together significant works from the Department of Prints and Drawings with selected pieces from the Deutsche Bank Collection in the Städel Museum.
Curator: Jenny Graser (Städel Museum)


Photographs Become Pictures. The Becher Class
27 April to– 13 August 2017
Exhibition House
One of the most radical changes in art’s relation to its aesthetic, media, and economic contexts is closely associated with the names Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff, Jörg Sasse, and Thomas Struth – but even more so with the names of their teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher. This group of artists – to which names like Volker Döhne, Tata Ronkholz and Petra Wunderlich should be added – formed the first of a long line of ‘Becher Classes’ at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. “Photographs Become Pictures. The Becher Class” brings together over 180 major works, some in large format, by these important artists, as well as a selection of their early works. This generation not only shaped the international photography scene of the 1990s, they went one further, and helped to transform the way artistic photography is perceived. Their visual creations make arguments in both formal and conceptual terms, interrogating human beings in their natural and cultural habitat, investigating their immediate surroundings and their private and global dimensions, examining their principles of social and aesthetic organisation. For all the heterogeneity of these artists’ work, their oeuvres are always characterised by an ambivalent relation to painting, shifting between appropriation and differentiation. Their works are an expression of a self-conscious emancipation of photography as an artistic medium, while also reflecting the (not merely digital) moment, when the boundaries between these two previously competing media dissolve.
Curator: Dr. Martin Engler (Städel Museum)
Co-curator: Dr. Jana Baumann (Städel Museum)


Géricault to Toulouse-Lautrec. French Lithographs of the Nineteenth Century
22 June to 10 September 2017
Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings
This summer, the Städel Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings is devoting an exhibition to French lithography in all its abundant diversity. The invention of this ‘stone printing’ technique at the end of the eighteenth century ushered in an entirely new epoch in printmaking: as compared to other methods in use until then, it offered more variety in the means of artistic expression, made the printing process faster, and allowed larger editions. In France, prominent artists began experimenting with lithography around 1820, and over the course of the century substantially broadened its range of artistic possibilities.
The spectrum of works on display will include expressive compositions by Théodore Géricault, one of the rare lithographs executed by Goya when he was in exile in Bordeaux in the 1820s, Eugène Delacroix’s masterful Goethe and Shakespeare illustrations, and Honoré Daumier’s political and social commentaries in the form of newspaper caricatures. Works of the later nineteenth century such as Edouard Manet’s virtuoso inventions, Symbolist works by Rodolphe Bresdin and Odilon Redon, and masterworks of colour lithography by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the “Nabis” Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard will also be on view. The prints, about eighty in all, represent highlights of lithography of the period in question, but also the superb quality and wide diversity of the Städel’s holdings in this area.
Curator: Dr. Martin Sonnabend (Städel Museum)


Matisse – Bonnard. ‘Long live Painting!’
13 September 2017 to– 14 January 2018
Exhibition House
‘Long live Painting!’ – this was the rallying cry with which Henri Matisse (1869–1954) greeted his friend Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) on 13 August 1925. The postcard from Amsterdam bearing these words marked the beginning of an important correspondence between the two painters. The exchange of letters, which lasted until 1946, makes their mutual appreciation very clear. The Städel’s large-scale special exhibition sheds light on a friendship lasting more than forty years, presenting the relationship in the context of their contribution to modern art and revealing its broader significance for their work. With over 100 paintings, sculptures, and drawings, the show opens a dialogue between the two artists, offering new perspectives on the development of the European avant-garde from the beginning of the 20th century to the end of the Second World War. The closeness of the relationship is underlined by the two painters’ intense engagement with very similar subjects. A number of chapters addressing these central themes – including Interiors, Still Life, Landscape, and Nude – illustrate the sheer variety of the artistic results. The exhibits on display include masterpieces from leading international collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art, Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. This extensive selection of works is enhanced by a series of photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, who visited both Bonnard and Matisse in the south of France in 1944.
Curator: Dr. Felix Krämer (Städel Museum)
Co-curator: Dr. Daniel Zamani (Städel Museum)


Maria Sibylla Merian and the Tradition of Flower Depiction
11 October 2017 to– 14 January 2018
Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings
Born and raised in Frankfurt, Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) is one of Frankfurt’s most famous daughters. 2017 marks the 300th anniversary of her death. To mark the occasion, the Städel Museum, in cooperation with the Kupferstichkabinett of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, will present an exhibition devoted to flower illustration in drawings and prints from the 15th to the 18th century. At its centre is the extraordinary figure of Maria Sibylla Merian: a copperplate engraver, a painter of flowers and insects, a naturalist, and an explorer. Educated in the tradition of ‘florilegia’ (flower books) and tulip books, Merian became a naturalist, first investigating the metamorphosis of caterpillars and butterflies, later the symbiosis of insects and plants. She published the results of her research in illustrated books containing copperplates and etchings, as well as body-colour drawings of the highest artistic quality. The central works of this exceptional artist will be shown in the context of flower representations by her predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. In the 18th century, gardens and valuable plants, above all tulips, were valuable goods. ‘Florilegia’ from the time communicate their particular importance: the images were produced as splendidly colourful drawings on vellum, or as large-scale hand-coloured copperplate engravings, produced in exclusive small editions, such as the famous Hortus Eystettensis by Basilius Besler. The exhibition also includes ornamental engravings with floral motifs, for example by Martin Schongauer, apothecary books from the 15th and 16th century, plant studies from the circle of Albrecht Dürer, and nature studies by Georg Flegel and Georg Hoefnagel from around 1600. Also included are a group of flower drawings by Bartholomäus Braun, who – like Maria Sibylla Merian – worked in Nuremburg, as well as 18th century flower portraits by Barbara Regina Dietzsch and her circle.
Curators: Dr. Martin Sonnabend (Städel Museum), Dr. Michael Roth (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett)

Titles and exhibition dates subject to alteration.

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