Altogether 432,121 visitors saw the Monet exhibition that closed last night at the Städel Museum. That number makes “Monet and the Birth of Impressionism” by far the most successful show in the museum’s two-hundred-year history. On this past weekend alone, 20,000 had the opportunity to visit the unparalleled special exhibition in Frankfurt am Main. The Städel shows hitherto achieving the highest visitor numbers were Botticelli (2009/2010, 367,033 visitors), followed by Dürer (2013/2014, 258,577 visitors). The average visitor number per day for the Monet exhibition was 4,278; some 150,000 visitors took advantage of the online advance ticket sales, which offered convenient admission to the show without long waiting times. Over the course of the exhibition’s fifteen-week duration (11 March to 28 June 2015), altogether 3,513 guided tours were conducted, including 2,232 special guided tours for groups and 595 for school classes, child day-care centres and universities. Some 25 per cent of the visitors made use of the audio guide narrated by actress Diane Kruger.
The museum’s digital presence also reports record user numbers. The newly developed Städel App has already been downloaded more than 25,000 times, and the Monet “digitorial” (http://monet.staedelmuseum.de), with which the Städel offered a multi-media online preparation course for one of its own exhibitions, has been invoked 260,000 times to date. The museum’s presence in the social networks also proved extremely popular during the exhibition runtime, as is mirrored in the steadily growing user numbers and ranges.
On the whole, with “Monet and the Birth of Impressionism” the Städel Museum succeeded in appealing to a broad public as well as the scholarly community in its endeavour to place a fresh new focus on the early years of Impressionism and elucidate Claude Monet’s special position within the history of French art. The bicentennial exhibition within the framework of “200 Years Städel” was accompanied by a wide-ranging media echo. “Monet and the Birth of Impressionism” met with an exceedingly broad and positive response – in the local, regional, national and international press.
“The Städel is more popular than ever. The immense success of the exhibition more than confirms that, with our work and our objectives, we are on the right path. The Städel has once again proven itself a place of art-historical research as well as an identity-establishing centre of society accessible to many different target groups. At the same time, the impressive reception of the digital offers accompanying the show demonstrates clearly that we will continue to carry the original notion of a citizens’ foundation into the future in a manner that upholds tradition while keeping pace with the times” comments Städel director Max Hollein.
The exhibition was made possible by the Commerzbank-Stiftung.
The next special exhibition to be presented by the Städel Museum in its anniversary year will be “The 80s: Figurative Painting in West Germany”, to take place from 22 July to 18 October 2015. Featuring approximately 100 works by altogether 27 artists, the show will shed light on the novel, disconcerting, and extremely dynamic figural painting that developed in the 1980s in Germany almost simultaneously in the centres Berlin, Hamburg, the Rhineland and elsewhere. Works by Ina Barfuss, Werner Büttner, Walter Dahn, Jiří Georg Dokoupil, Rainer Fetting, Georg Herold, Martin Kippenberger, Helmut Middendorf, Christa Näher, Albert Oehlen, Salomé, Andreas Schulze and many others will be on view.
MONET AND THE BIRTH OF IMPRESSIONISM
Curator: Dr Felix Krämer, Head of the Department of Modern Art
Project director: Dr Nerina Santorius, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Modern Art
Exhibition dates: 11 March to 21 June 2015
Location: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main
Catalogue: The exhibition was accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue edited by Felix Krämer and published by Prestel Verlag. With a foreword by Max Hollein and texts by Christoph Asendorf, Eva Bader, Marlene Bielefeld, Hollis Clayson, André Dombrowski, Chantal Eschenfelder, Dorothee Hansen, Felicity Korn, Felix Krämer, Svenja Mordhorst, Ingrid Pfeiffer, Isolde Pludermacher, Nele Putz, Nerina Santorius, Beate Söntgen and Maria Zinser. German and English edition, approx. 300 pages, 39.90 EUR (museum edition).
Digitorial: The digitorial is supported by the Aventis Foundation. Even now – after the exhibition has closed – it can be accessed at monet.staedelmuseum.de. Design and programming: Scholz & Volkmer.
Audio guide: The audio guide was supported by the Georg und Franziska Speyer’sche Hochschulstiftung. Narrated by the actress Diane Kruger, it provided a guided tour of the exhibition in German and English.
Städel App: The Städel App is supported by the FAZIT-STIFTUNG. The app has been optimized for the newest generation of Android and iOS smartphones. It offered the audio guide to the exhibition in the form of a smartphone download. Available for downloading at www.staedelmuseum.de/de/angebote/staedel-app.
Social Media: The Städel Museum communicated the exhibition in the social media with the hashtags #monet and #staedel.
Supported by: Commerzbank-Stiftung
Media partners: Alnatura, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Verkehrsgesellschaft Frankfurt am Main
Mobility partner: Deutsche Bahn AG
Cultural partner: hr2-kultur
The exhibition advertising campaign at Frankfurt Airport was realized with support from Fraport AG and Media Frankfurt.