THE STÄDEL CELEBRATES ITS BICENTENNIAL WITH A SPECIAL EXHIBITION PROGRAM
MONET AND THE BIRTH OF IMPRESSIONISM – FIGURATIVE PAINTING OF THE EIGHTIES IN GERMANY – MASTERWORKS IN DIALOGUE. EMINENT GUESTS FOR THE ANNIVERSARY – AND MUCH MORE
In writing down his last will and testament, Johann Friedrich Städel laid the cornerstone for Germany’s oldest civic museum foundation in 1815. 2015 will see the bicentennial of this historic day on March 15. The Städel will celebrate its anniversary with a variety of high-carat exhibition and research projects, numerous substantial acquisitions and additions to its collections, a major public celebration, as well as a considerable extension of its educational offer, particularly in the digital sphere.
JEAN-JACQUES DE BOISSIEU. A Contemporary of Städel’s
February 11 – May 10, 2015
Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings
Jean-Jacques de Boissieu (1736–1810) was already a highly acclaimed artist beyond France in his lifetime. Not only princes but also private collectors like Johann Friedrich Städel were fascinated with the landscapes, genre scenes, and portraits depicted in the artist’s drawings and prints. The founder of the Städelsches Kunstinstitut acquired over twenty drawings and far more than two hundred etchings by de Boissieu, which still rank among the central holdings of the Städel’s Department of Prints and Drawings. Created in a period of historically revolutionary events, de Boissieu’s oeuvre mirrors the landscape and life of the province around the artist’s native city of Lyon with an almost irritatingly unexcited and serious steadiness. His etched landscapes and portraits as well as his subtly nuanced brush and chalk drawings reveal a progressive realism that hints at a bourgeois understanding of art independent of any academic norms.
Curator: Dr. Jutta Schütt
MONET AND THE BIRTH OF IMPRESSIONISM
March 11 – June 28, 2015
Exhibition annex
With Claude Monet’s painting The Luncheon (Le déjeuner) from 1868/69, the Städel Museum possesses one of the key works of early Impressionism. Starting from this work – and the institution’s outstanding holdings of early Impressionist works by Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, and Paul Cézanne – the show on display at the Städel will highlight the beginnings of the Impressionist movement from spring 2015 on. The comprehensive anniversary exhibition, with which the Städel celebrates its bicentennial, draws on the history of the institution’s own collection: it was already in the first years of the twentieth century when Georg Swarzenski, then Director of the museum, passionately championed French art, which today constitutes an important focal point of the Städel’s collection. The special exhibition sheds light on how a contemporary experience of looking at things becomes manifest in the Impressionist artists’ paintings and how the representation of this “modern gaze” in their pictures changed in the course of time. Based on a selection of more than ninety paintings including numerous world-renowned loans from museums abroad – such as Claude Monet’s La Grenouillère (1869) from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, L’Étang à Montgeron (The Pond at Montgeron) (1877) from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, or the monumental Luncheon (1874) from the collection of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris – the individual lines of development within Impressionism and the change in the relationship between content and form can be illustrated. The presentation of Impressionist painting is rounded off by photographs and cartoons dealing with the art movement.
Curator: Dr. Felix Krämer
Sponsored by: Commerzbank-Stiftung
Vices of Life: The Prints of William Hogarth
June 10 – September 6, 2015
Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings
Presenting works by the English painter, copperplate engraver, and etcher William Hogarth (1697–1764), the Städel Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings focuses on artworks from the days of its founder Johann Friedrich Städel. It was Hogarth who established the new genre of the “modern moral subject” with his series A Harlot’s Progress (1732), A Rake’s Progress (1735), and Marriage à-la-mode (1745). An attentive observer, the artist made the vices and seamy sides of modern life in the metropolis of London his subject. Hogarth regarded his works as a printed theater of his day and laid the foundations for sociocritical caricature in England. The Städel’s Department of Prints and Drawings comprises a significant array of works by Hogarth, including all the series in their entirety that gained the artist his international renown. The special quality of these works, which came to inform a whole era, lies in Hogarth’s great interest in individual physiognomies, his keen powers of observation, and his mordant wit.
Curator: Annett Gerlach
THE 80S.
FIGURATIVE PAINTING IN WEST-GERMANY
July 22 – October 18, 2015
Exhibition annex
From 22 July to 18 October 2015, the Städel Museum will be presenting “The 80s. Figurative Painting in West Germany” in a major special exhibition. With some one hundred works by altogether twenty-seven artists, the show will illuminate the novel, disconcerting and enormously dynamic approach to figurative painting that developed in the 1980s almost simultaneously in Berlin, Hamburg and the Rhineland. 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. The exhibition will shed light on the West German art centres – for example Moritzplatz in Berlin or Mülheimer Freiheit in Cologne – while at the same time providing insights into the figurative painting of those years in all its complexity and diversity. The artists who turned the art world topsy-turvy with unbridled intensity and a fast painterly tempo in the years around 1980 produced figurative paintings that ventured a critical examination of the tradition of painting, the post-war avant-gardes and their own immediate present. They drew their themes primarily from their surroundings. As a result, the established art scene became as much a subject of their works as homosexual emancipation and the intoxicating pace of the international club and music world conveyed by New Wave and Punk from the mid seventies onward. The protagonists of the time were nevertheless anything but a homogeneous painterly movement. On the contrary, the painting of a decade demarcated by student revolts on one end and a reunified Germany on the other is distinguished by a multi-faceted and often contradictory coexistence of various currents, influences and sensitivities. With its specific focus on post-1945 painting, the Städel Museum’s collection of contemporary art offers an ideal framework for the presentation of this eventful decade.
List of artists: Hans Peter Adamski, Peter Angermann, Elvira Bach, Ina Barfuss, Peter Bömmels, Werner Büttner, Luciano Castelli, Walter Dahn, Jiří Georg Dokoupil, Rainer Fetting, G. L. Gabriel, Georg Herold, Gerard Kever, Jan Knap, Milan Kunc, Martin Kippenberger, Helmut Middendorf, Christa Näher, Gerhard Naschberger, Albert Oehlen, Markus Oehlen, Salomé, Andreas Schulze, Bettina Semmer, Volker Tannert, Thomas Wachweger and Bernd Zimmer.
Curators: Dr. Martin Engler, Franziska Leuthäußer
Sponsored by: Deutsche Bank AG
MASTERWORKS IN DIALOGUE. EMINENT GUESTS FOR THE ANNIVERSARY
October 7, 2015 – January 24, 2016
Presentations of the Old Masters, Modern Art and Contemporary Art,
Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings
The Städel collection looks forward to welcoming a number of international visitors on the occasion of its bicentennial. A show that has been conceived by all the Städel’s curators together will confront key works of the institution’s own holdings with masterpieces from the most renowned museums over the world. The fascinating and inspiring comparisons will – both in terms of contents and space – encompass all collections of the Städel Museum: visitors will come upon temporary “partnerships” in about eighty selected places throughout the house to be explored for three and a half months. Jan van Eyck’s Annunciation (c. 1434/36) will fly in from Washington, for example, and meet with the master’s Lucca Madonna (1437) that resides in the Städel. The two paintings, which rank among the most beautiful and, as regards their contents, most complex Madonnas of the most famous Early Netherlandish artist, were part of the splendid old masters collection of William II, King of the Netherlands, until 1850. The confrontation of Edgar Degas’s Musicians in the Orchestra (1872–1876) with his Ballet Scene from Meyerbeer’s Opera “Robert Le Diable” (1876) reveals a common ground in terms of both contents and motifs, in particular in regards to the depicted relationship between orchestra and dancers. Bringing together loans such as Geschlecht mit Klößen (Sex with Dumplings, 1963) with paintings from the collection of the Städel Museum like Acker (Field, 1962) elucidates the painter Georg Baselitz’s early work as a crucial position in the history of German twentieth-century painting. The Department of Prints and Drawings will also be visited by works of Elsheimer, Goltzius, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and others. The approximately eighty encounters of important anniversary guests with works from the Städel’s collection will not only yield insights into exciting and sometimes surprising art-historical and historical connections but also unfold a background for reassessing the Städel’s own holdings.
Curators: Dr. Bastian Eclercy, Dr. Martin Engler, Dr. Felix Krämer, Dr. Eva Mongi-Vollmer, Prof. Dr. Jochen Sander, Dr. Jutta Schütt, Dr. Martin Sonnabend
Sponsored by: DZ Bank
JOHN BALDESSARI
November 5, 2015 – January 24, 2016
Exhibition annex
On the occasion of the Städel Museum’s bicentennial, the American artist John Baldessari (b. in National City, California, in 1931) has, based on holdings from the Städel’s collection, created a new series of works, which will be presented there in winter 2015/16. Masterpieces by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Agnolo Bronzino, Dirck van Baburen, or Maria Lassnig provided the artist with the visual material for his large-format collages. Baldessari has ranked among the most influential figures of the international art scene since the late 1960s. An outstanding representative of Conceptual Art and Media Art, he developed an original and unmistakable understanding of the pictorial between painting and photography, text and image. In his work, he uses and explores pictorial strategies of Modernism, such as montage or the incorporation of everyday elements, and confronts these with approaches of the postwar avant-gardes like their discourses on consumerism and the media. Following in the tradition of his exploration of the complex relationship between painting and photography, Baldessari’s new group of works reflects on a number of quite different exhibits from the Städel’s collection, setting them off against text and monochromy, photography and concept. The result is an against- and with-each-other that questions old and more recent works alike, shedding new light on them.
Curator: Dr. Martin Engler
Titles and exhibition dates subject to change
The bicentennial program and anniversary activities will be presented in detail in the context of the Städel Museum’s annual press conference scheduled for January 21, 2015 at 11 a.m. Please register for this conference in the Metzler Hall by contacting presse@staedelmuseum.de.