Images & Texts

PRESS RELEASE
Exhibition Programme 2020

Starting in March, the Städel Museum is devoting the major exhibition EN PASSANT. Impressionism in Sculpture to the question of what it means in concrete terms to translate the qualities of Impressionist painting such as light, colour, mood, movement – even transience – into solid materials. The presentation focuses on five artists: Edgar Degas, Auguste Rodin, Medardo Rosso, Paolo Troubetzkoy and Rembrandt Bugatti. With more than 160 works, the exhibition provides a comprehensive overview of the possibilities and challenges of Impressionism in sculpture.

As of 19 May 2020, almost a decade after the opening of the Garden Halls, the Collection of Contemporary Art in the Städel Museum is being presented in a completely new way for the first time. Starting from the central space of the Garden Halls and beginning with major works by the younger and youngest generation of contemporary artists, a history of art after 1945 will be unfolded. Works from various schools, styles and groups facilitate surprising comparisons, perspectives and visual axes between the immediate present and its roots in past decades – an experience of the collection based not on chronology but rather on specific themes. In total, the new presentation comprises roughly 230 works by 170 artists on nearly 3,000 square metres of exhibition space, including recent acquisitions and donations, such as works by Victor Vasarely and Miriam Cahn.

The vast collection and newest scholarly research of the Städel Museum’s department for print and drawings will be showcased in two exhibitions in 2020. In Städel’s Legacy, a selection of ninety-five master drawings by Raphael, Correggio and Primaticcio, Watteau, Boucher and Fragonard, Dürer, Roos and Reinhart, as well as Goltzius, Rembrandt and De Wit are put together. This will give an exemplary impression of the character, order and artistic significance of the former drawing collection of Johann Friedrich Städel. In autumn, Dutch Drawings of the Eighteenth Century (working title) will take over and will accentuate a flourishing production of art in the century of the Enlightenment, particularly in centres such as Amsterdam, Haarlem, The Hague and Dordrecht. There, in addition to paintings and prints, drawings were produced on a large scale and at a high level. Johann Friedrich Städel was also a collector of those drawings. With these, he acquired works of his present or recent past and thus at the same time an art that corresponded particularly to the bourgeois taste of the time.

At the end of the year, the Städel Museum, together with the National Gallery of Canada, will for the first time address Rembrandt’s rise to international fame in Amsterdam in the exhibition Becoming Rembrandt: Creativity and Competition in Amsterdam, ca. 1630-1655. The presentation combines the Städel’s collection of works by Rembrandt, including “The Blinding of Samson” (1636), with outstanding loans from international collections, including the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden, the National Gallery in London, the Museo del Prado in Madrid and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

The full list of exhibitions runs as follows:

EN PASSANT. Impressionism in Sculpture
19 March to 25 October 2020

Städel’s Legacy: Master Drawings from the Founder’s Collection
13 May to 16 August 2020

Back to the Present: New Perspectives, New Works – The Collection from 1945 to Today
from 19 May 2020

Dutch Drawings of the Eighteenth Century (working title)
1 October 2020 to 10 January 2021

Becoming Rembrandt: Creativity and Competition in Amsterdam, ca. 1630 – 1655
9 December 2020 to 5 April 2021
 
You can read and download the complete press release here.

WALL TEXTS

Download the complete wall texts for the exhibition "Great Realism & Great Abstraction" here.

WALL TEXTS

Download the complete wall texts for the exhibition "MAKING VAN GOGH: A German Love Story" here.

PRESS RELEASE

"GREAT REALISM & GREAT ABSTRACTION"
DRAWINGS FROM MAX BECKMANN TO GERHARD RICHTER

13 NOVEMBER 2019 TO 16 FEBRUARY 2020

"Great realism, great abstraction" – the approximately 1,800, twentieth-century German drawings in the collection of the Städel Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings occupy a realm between these two poles. In the winter of 2019/2020, the museum will show a representative selection of some 100 works mirroring the emphases of the collection that have taken shape over the course of its long history. Drawings by Max Beckmann (1884–1950) and the “Brücke” artists – first and foremost Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) – will form the prelude. They developed a pictorial language that, varying between the near-representational and the abstract, carried over into the works of artists who devoted themselves to figurative and abstract tendencies in divided post-war Germany. These include exponents of Informel, Neoexpressionist currents and Pop Art, among them Karl Otto Götz (1914–2017), Joseph Beuys (1921–1986), Georg Baselitz (1938), Gerhard Richter (1932) and Sigmar Polke (1941–2010). Drawing served the artists as a means of immediate expression, whether in the trenches of World War I, the boulevards of the awakening metropolis of Berlin or in the midst of the emerging world of consumption and commodities. In this medium, they constructed idealistic life plans, rebelled against established traditions in politics and society, or reflected on decisive events in German history. Because it was the respective context that determined the technique, the works on view will range from simple pencil sketches and miniature-like chalk drawings to vivid pastels and watercolours and even monumental collages.

The catalogue accompanying the exhibition will be the first ever to investigate the Städel Museum’s collection of twentieth-century German drawings on the basis of selected examples.

With support from Stiftung Gabriele Busch-Hauck Frankfurt am Main

Download the complete press text here.

In search of the legendary Portrait of Dr Gachet / Free of charge in German and English / Available on findingvangogh.comde, Spotify, Deezer, Apple and Google Podcasts

The Städel Museum is presenting its first podcast: FINDING VAN GOGH. In five episodes and many voices, the series tells the eventful story of the legendary Portrait of Dr Gachet (1890), the last great portrait painting by Vincent van Gogh. In the podcast, the journalist Johannes Nichelmann meets with contemporary witnesses, experts and Van Gogh enthusiasts in Germany, France, London, New York and Switzerland. They talk about the painting’s execution, recall its history in the Nazi period and offer first-hand insights into the mechanisms of today’s art market. Not least importantly, the podcast examines the question of how an artwork and its artist can become a legend. FINDING VAN GOGH – the Städel’s new digital museum education offer – is available free of charge in German and English on findingvangogh.com and all the usual podcast platforms.

You can read and download the complete press release here.