Images & Texts

From 19 September 2018 to 17 March 2019, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main presents a comprehensive solo exhibition with works by the painter Lotte Laserstein (1898–1993). Laserstein’s oeuvre is one of the great recent art historical rediscoveries and features sensitive and compelling portraits from the final years of the Weimar Republic. The exhibition builds upon works from the collection of the Städel Museum, which in the past few years was successful in acquiring important works by the artist, including the paintings Russian Girl with Compact from 1928 and Boy with Kasper Puppet (Wolfgang Karger) from 1933. With approximately forty paintings and drawings, the exhibition focusses on Laserstein’s artistic development. Emphasis is placed on works from the 1920s and 30s, which mark the peak of her artistic work. “Lotte Laserstein. Face to Face” is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Germany outside of Berlin.

The exhibition is supported by the Ernst Max von Grunelius Stiftung, the Rudolf-August Oetker Stiftung and the Friede Springer Stiftung. Additional support is provided by the City of Frankfurt am Main.

“The child portrait Boy with Kasper Puppet (Wolfgang Karger) was the first new acquisition since my appointment as Director of the Städel Museum, and the work of Lotte Laserstein in general has accompanied me both personally and professionally for many years. I am thus all the more pleased that our exhibition will provide an opportunity to take a fresh look at the work of this important painter and introduce her to a wider audience,” Städel director Philipp Demandt comments on this exhibition project which he initiated.

The painter Lotte Laserstein made a name for herself in the pulsating city of Berlin during the Weimar Republic more than anything else through portraits of her contemporaries. In her paintings, the artist depicted the life in Berlin that surrounded her, focusing on representations of the so-called “New Woman” and captured her pictorial motifs from a decidedly female perspective. She participated in numerous exhibitions and competitions and was highly praised by art critics. Following this early recognition, however, her career ended abruptly: Due to the political conditions under National Socialism, the painter, who was a baptised Christian but declared Jewish due to her grandparents, was increasingly excluded from the public cultural scene. In 1937, she managed to leave Germany and emigrate to Sweden, where, however, she was not able to recapture her early success. Cut off from the international art scene, her work faded to a large extent from public view. It was not until 2010 that Laserstein once again became the focus of attention with the purchase of one of her major works by the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Evening over Potsdam from 1930, which is also included in the Frankfurt exhibition.

“Lotte Laserstein shares the fate of many of her contemporaries, who began to build a reputation during the Weimar Republic, but whose artistic careers were severely curtailed by the Nazi system. She can be included among the so-called “Lost Generation”, since her realistically painted images were neglected by post-war research orientated toward the avant-garde. It is only since the 1990s that this extraordinary artist has received belated recognition, to which our exhibition can make a crucial contribution”, the curators of the exhibition, Alexander Eiling and Elena Schroll, emphasise.

Style and Motifs
Laserstein’s paintings stand in close stylistic proximity to the New Objectivity, but they do not quite fit into this art historical category. Although there are similarities to this art movement in terms of subject matter and attitude in the painter’s works, Laserstein’s style of painting is neither objectively undercooled nor socially critical, as is typical of the New Objectivity. Her painting style always remains realistic, with a partially late-Impressionistic, loose brushstroke and a carefully composed pictorial composition. Overall, the influence of her academic education – to which women had only just begun to gain access – is clearly recognisable in her works, which is why her style can be described as academic realism. Although traditional with regard to technique, her pictures were of great topicality in terms of content.

Lotte Laserstein’s favoured subject is the human being in all its many facets, which is why she devoted herself primarily to portraiture. In her portraits, she brilliantly depicts the people of the interwar period, such as in Girl Lying on Blue (1931) or The Mongolian (1927), whereby her works are characterised by sobriety, modernity and psychological depth. In her oeuvre, there are also motifs that speak of the enthusiasm of the time for technology and sports, although these are much fewer in number. In her portraits, Laserstein paints types from modern everyday life: athletic women, young girls putting on make-up, a motorcyclist in full gear and fashionably dressed city dwellers. The artist plays with quotes from art history and often incorporates reflections and duplications of figures. She frequently paints complex compositions, in which she also depicts herself painting in the studio to refer to her role as an academically trained artist. Furthermore, with her fashionably dressed protagonists, Laserstein drafts a type of emancipated urban woman who moves freely and confidently in the public sphere without male accompaniment. This contemporary image of the “New Woman” is of particular interest to her. Portraits of women thus comprise the greater part of her artistic production, and rarely does she paint portraits of men.

Her Model Traute Rose In addition to herself and professional models at the academy, Laserstein repeatedly portrays her long-time muse and friend Gertrud Rose (née Süssenbach), called Traute, who embodies the type of the “New Woman” as it was downright propagated in the media during the interwar years, and is thus an ideal model. Rose – like Laserstein herself – corresponds to the ideal of the times: an androgynous, athletic, emancipated young lady with bob and loose-fitting clothes. In her portraits, Rose appears as a tennis player, occasionally in double portraits alongside the artist or as a nude model in the context of the studio. In contrast to conventional representations of female models by male artists, in which the woman becomes an objectified vis-à-vis of the painter, Laserstein’s paintings testify to the close relationship between the two friends, which was based on trust and equality. This is particularly evident in At the Mirror (1930/31) and In My Studio (1928), in which Rose is depicted nude and Laserstein in the role of the painter. Especially these nudes have repeatedly led to the assumption among scholars of a homosexual love relationship between the two women, for which there are, however, no biographical indications. Laserstein maintained a close, lifelong friendship with Traute Rose, who remained in Germany, and the two corresponded extensively during the artist’s time in Sweden.

Biographical Details Lotte Laserstein, born in East Prussia in 1898, grew up in a bourgeois environment. After the premature death of her father, her mother moved with her and her younger sister Käte to their widowed grandmother in Gdansk. She received her first drawing lessons in 1908 from her aunt Elsa Birnbaum, who ran a private painting school. From 1921 to 1927, she attended the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts, where she was one of the first women to complete her master studies. Through her participation in the spring exhibition of the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1928, she received widespread recognition and sold her first work to a public institution, namely the Berlin City Council. The painting In the Tavern (1927) was later confiscated as “degenerate art” within the context of National Socialist propaganda.

Since the late 1920s, Laserstein participated regularly in various exhibitions. She soon succeeded in building a reputation, and the arts pages and critics wrote downright eulogistically about her art. In 1928, Laserstein participated in the competition “The Most Beautiful German Portrait of a Woman”, organized by the cosmetics company Elida in cooperation with the Reich Association of Visual Artists. Out of the 365 works submitted, the painting Russian Girl with Compact, now in the collection of the Städel Museum, was nominated for the final round and exhibited together with twenty-five works by almost exclusively male artists in the prestigious gallery of Fritz Gurlitt in Berlin, where her first solo exhibition also took place in 1931.

After the seizure of power by the National Socialists, Laserstein’s nascent career ended abruptly. She was dismissed from the board of the Association of Berlin Women Artists and was only able to exhibit in 1935 within the frameworks of the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden (Cultural League of German Jews). The small painting school, which she had run for financial security since 1927, was also forced to close. Political restrictions made her living and working conditions increasingly difficult. An exhibition in the Galerie Moderne in Stockholm in 1937 offered her the opportunity to leave Germany. Although Laserstein remained extremely productive in Swedish exile and made her living through commissioned work, she was unable to recapture her early success, and her work largely disappeared from public perception.

In Germany, Laserstein was rediscovered in 2003 through the exhibition “Lotte Laserstein. My Only Reality”, curated by Anna-Carola Krausse for Das verborgene Museum in cooperation with the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin in the Museum Ephraim-Palais. In 2010, the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, with the support of the Cultural Foundation of the German Federal States, acquired Laserstein’s monumental key work Evening over Potsdam from 1930.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by Prestel Verlag, with a foreword by Philipp Demandt and a preface by Thomas Köhler. The catalogue provides an introduction to Laserstein’s art by Alexander Eiling. Elena Schroll examines the painter as part of the “Lost Generation”, Annelie Lütgens compares Laserstein’s portraits with works by other women artists of her time, and the Laserstein expert Anna-Carola Krausse analyses the reinterpretation of traditional motifs by the artist. The catalogue also includes contributions by Kristin Schroeder, Kristina Lemke, Maureen Ogrocki, Philipp von Wehrden and Valentina Bay, who investigate Laserstein’s nudes, her exile in Sweden and her artistic marketing strategies.

After its launch at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main, the exhibition will travel to the Berlinische Galerie, where it will be complemented with, among others, works created by Lotte Laserstein while in exile.

Exhibition dates: 19 September 2018 to 17 March 2019

Curators: Alexander Eiling (Head of Modern Art, Städel Museum), Elena Schroll (Assistant Curator of Modern Art, Städel Museum)

Information: www.staedelmuseum.de
Location: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main
Visitor Services and Guided Tours: +49(0)69-605098-200, info@staedelmuseum.de
Opening Hours: Tue, Wed, Sat, Sun 10 am – 6 pm; Thu, Fri 10 am – 9 pm; closed on Mondays
Special Opening Hours: 3 October 2018 10 am – 6 pm; 24 December 2018 closed, 25 & 26 December 2018 10 am – 6 pm; 31 December 2018 closed; 1 January 2019 11 am – 6 pm

Admission: 14 EUR, reduced 12 EUR; Sat, Sun and holidays: 16 EUR, reduced 14 EUR; family ticket 24 EUR. Free admission for children under the age of twelve. Groups of at least ten persons who would normally be charged the full admission fee: reduced admission fee per person. Groups are required to book in advance: please call +49(0)69-605098-200 or contact info@staedelmuseum.de. Admission to special exhibitions is free for members of the Städelscher Museums-Verein.
Advance Ticket sales: tickets.staedelmuseum.de

General Guided Tours of the Exhibition: Fridays at 7 pm, Sundays at 2 pm as well as Wed 3 October 2018, Tue 25 December & Wed 26 December 2018 and Tue 1 January 2019, 12 midday. Fee: 5 EUR plus Admission (tickets are available from two hours before the tour begins, Sundays from 10 am, at the ticket desk)

The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive supporting programme. An up-to-date overview can be found at www.staedelmuseum.de.

Catalogue: The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by Prestel Verlag with 192 pages and 159 colour illustrations. With contributions by Valentina Bay, Alexander Eiling, Anna-Carola Krausse, Kristina Lemke, Annelie Lütgens, Maureen Ogrocki, Kristin Schroeder, Elena Schroll and Philipp von Wehrden. German / English. 39.90 € (museum edition).

Audio-Tour: The audio-tour through the exhibition is available in German and English. The German audio-tour is spoken by the actress and singer Meret Becker. The tour is also available as a free app in the Android and Apple stores and can be easily downloaded onto your smartphone from home. On site at the museum, an audio-guide can be rented for a fee of 4.50 EUR (8.00 EUR for two audio-guides).

Social Media: The Städel Museum communicates the exhibition in social media with the hashtag #LotteLaserstein

Supporters and Partners of the Exhibition
Supported by: Ernst Max von Grunelius Stiftung, Rudolf-August Oetker Stiftung and Friede Springer Stiftung.
With additional support from: The City of Frankfurt am Main.
Media partner: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

An exhibition organised by the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, in cooperation with the Berlinische Galerie.

The Städel Museum is delighted to announce a first-rate new acquisition for its collection. The magnum opus by the German Surrealist Richard Oelze (1900–1980) represents a significant enhancement to the Frankfurt museum’s Surrealist holdings. With the aid of generous support from the Cultural Foundation of the German Federal States and a contribution from the Kurt and Marga Möllgaard Foundation, the Städelscher Museums-Verein and the Städel Museum have jointly purchased the painting Archaic Fragment (1935) from a private collection. Long thought lost, the work is one of only three large-scale canvases from the artist’s most important creative period in Paris. The other two – Expectation (1935–36) and Everyday Torments (1934) – are now in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Kunstsammlung NRW in Düsseldorf, respectively. Following careful conservation and restoration measures, Archaic Fragment is now on view in a specially installed cabinet exhibition in the galleries showcasing the Städel Museum’s modern art collection.

“Richard Oelze painted only a handful of large-scale works in his life. All the more delighted are we that – in cooperation with the Städelscher Museums-Verein and with generous support from the Cultural Foundation of the German Federal States – we were able to seize the opportunity to obtain one of these masterworks of German Surrealism for our collection”, commented Städel director Dr Philipp Demandt.

“Archaic Fragment is a telling example of Richard Oelze’s distinctive pictorial language and now, following its restoration, it shines in renewed splendour. It is an ideal enhancement to our Surrealist holdings”, added Dr Alexander Eiling, the head of the Städel Museum’s collection of modern art, who is likewise very pleased about the new accession.

In his Paris years, Richard Oelze cultivated contacts with the chief exponents of the Surrealist movement – among them André Breton, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dalí – whose ideas and styles left distinct marks on his oeuvre. The artists of this group were primarily interested in themes that ran contrary to human logic – their main concern was with dreams, visions and explorations of the subconscious. In Archaic Fragment, the fantastical motifs of the Surrealists combine with the precise painting style of New Objectivity, which Oelze had learned from his Dresden teachers Otto Dix and Richard Müller. And although this precision applies to even the smallest details, the depiction as a whole defies conclusive interpretation. A hybrid entity of plant, animal and human forms hovers as if alive before an imaginary landscape. It is a meeting of the familiar and the strange which, in keeping with Surrealist logic, unite to form an unsettling fabrication of the subconscious. Yet the artist also plays with erotic undertones and sparks the fears and desires that slumber in the human psyche like “archaic fragments”.

“One of the core responsibilities of a vital museum is the ongoing expansion of its collection. I am all the happier that, through the purchase of Archaic Fragment, the Städelscher Museums-Verein – the museum’s oldest and largest patron – has once again had an opportunity to contribute to the further development of the Frankfurt collection on the highest level of quality”, Sylvia von Metzler, the chairwoman of the Städelscher Museums-Verein, emphasized.

“Richard Oelze is the most important German exponent of Surrealism apart from Max Ernst. Archaic Fragment, long given up for lost, is one of his rare large-scale masterpieces. The fact that, thanks to this acquisition, the Städel’s Surrealism collection has now been crowned with such an outstanding work gives me great pleasure”, remarked Prof Dr Markus Hilgert, the secretary general of the Cultural Foundation of the German Federal States.

Restoration and conservation
The painting’s original materials have survived in excellent condition. The careful restoration and conservation measures by Stephan Knobloch, the Städel’s head of painting restoration, focussed on removing patches from the back, closing small tears in the canvas and removing two yellowed layers of varnish as well as older retouching. As a result, the work has been returned almost to its original state. Not only has the original colour scheme been restored, but also the perspective of the overall pictorial composition as intended by the artist. A frame with a type of moulding used frequently in the 1920s and ’30s was copied for the Oelze painting and furnished with a mounting likewise typical of that period.

Cabinet presentation
In the Städel collection, Archaic Fragment enhances another painting by Oelze – Dangerous Desire (1936), acquired back in 1979. The two works are the highlights of a newly installed cabinet presentation in the museum’s modern art galleries. With the aid of three further examples from private holdings, the presentation offers a concentrated look at Richard Oelze’s oeuvre and his independent and innovative position within the Surrealist movement. The presentation will be on view until 21 October 2018 in Cabinet 1.11.1 of the Städel’s garden wing.
Following the cabinet presentation, the painting Archaic Fragment will be on view along with some one hundred important works by international artists in the exhibition “Wilderness”, taking place at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt from 1 November 2018 to 3 February 2019. The extensive thematic exhibition will explore the multitude of different links between wilderness and art from 1900 to the present.

Brief biography of Richard Oelze
Born in Magdeburg in 1900, Richard Oelze studied at the Bauhaus in Weimar from 1921 to 1925. From 1926 to 1929 he lived in Dresden; in 1933 he went to Paris. After his three-year stay in the French capital, he continued to pursue his artistic concerns, painting works that exhibit an affinity to Surrealist imagery. He was called up for war service in 1940, and following his return five years later, he began painting again, if initially with some hesitation. The decade following his first solo exhibition, which took place at the moderne galerie in Cologne in 1950, would prove be one of his most productive periods. He figured prominently at the Documenta II (1959). In 1969 he was one of three artists representing Germany at the Venice Biennale. Among his numerous distinctions is the Max Beckmann Prize of the city of Frankfurt am Main, which he received in 1978, two years before his death.
The outstanding significance of the painting Archaic Fragment is reflected in its exhibition history. The large canvas (98 x 130 cm) was featured alongside works by Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray and others in numerous major international Surrealist shows – for example the “International Surrealist Exhibition” at the New Burlington Galleries in London in 1936. It was thus precisely this painting, and the prominence it gained, that account for the status Oelze achieved over the course of the 1930s and’40s: as one of the most important exponents of Surrealism, championed by well-known art historians and art dealers alike. Max Ernst was one of Oelze’s greatest admirers.

The work in facts and figures:
Richard Oelze (1900–1980)
Archaic Fragment, 1935
Oil on canvas, 98 x 130 cm
Joint property of the Städelscher Museums-Verein e. V. and the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired with support from the Cultural Foundation of the German Federal States and a contribution from the Kurt and Marga Möllgaard Foundation
© Estate of Richard Oelze

Information: www.staedelmuseum.de
Visitor services: +49(0)69-605098-200, info@staedelmuseum.de
Location: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main
Opening hours: Tue, Wed, Sat, Sun 10 am – 6 pm, Thu + Fri 10 am – 9 pm, closed Mondays
Admission: 14 EUR, reduced 12 EUR, families 24 EUR. Groups of at least 10 persons who would normally be charged the full admission fee: reduced admission fee per person. Groups are required to book in advance: please call +49(0)69-605098-200 or contact info@staedelmuseum.de

The photographer Ursula Schulz-Dornburg (b. 1938) has been devoting herself to border landscapes, places of transit and relics of past cultures for more than forty years. With the aid of thirteen extensive workgroups and altogether more than 200 works, the Städel Museum is offering the first comprehensive institutional survey of the artist’s oeuvre ever in the exhibition “Ursula Schulz-Dornburg: The Land In-Between – Photographs from 1980 to 2012”, to be presented from 4 July to 9 September 2018. Schulz-Dornburg, who was born in Berlin and now lives in Düsseldorf, devotes herself in her photos to cult and culture sites in Europe, Asia and the Near East, and above all to the visible and invisible borders of these continents and regions. Her analogue black-and-white photographs are testimonies to no-longer-existing landscapes, past political systems, cultural milieus in the process of dissolution, and expiring societies. Distinguished by ethnological curiosity and an archaeological perspective, the images are on the interfaces between documentarism and political photography, between concept art and a sense of the responsibility to provide insight. Schulz-Dornburg is interested in the marks human beings have left behind in the landscape in the course of lengthy historical processes, as well as in recent political changes of the kind brought about, for example, by the Golf Wars (between 1980 and 2003).

“Photography is one of the Städel Museum’s main focusses in terms of research and collecting alike. Ursula Schulz-Dornburg is an excellent example of the expansion of genre boundaries. Her photographs belong to a realm between documentation and concept art. One of the aims of our exhibition, which we designed in close cooperation with the artist, is to make her oeuvre perceivable in its entirety and put it in art-historical context”, comments Städel director Dr Philipp Demandt.

“One of the distinguishing features of Schulz-Dornburg’s work is that, already very early on, she travelled to places that have only turned up on the Western cultural map more recently. Sometimes we encounter oasis and desert, war and antiquity, past beauty and present destruction in one and the same picture. It is this often unbearable ambiguity that makes Schulz-Dornburg’s oeuvre as unique as it is visually powerful – the manner in which she brings together seemingly irreconcilable opposites, in terms of both aesthetics and content, without reconciling them”, emphasizes Dr Martin Engler, head of the Städel Museum’s collection of contemporary art.

The exhibition
Revolving around the artist’s aesthetic “in-between”, “The Land In-Between” unites photographs taken between 1980 and 2012 – works from the Städel collection, the artist’s own archive and private lenders. In her art, Schulz-Dornburg walks the fine line between concept art and journalistic coverage, politics and aesthetics. One of her best-known workgroups provides striking evidence of this: Transit Sites, Armenia (1997–2011), to be featured in our show. The photos focus on bus stops in post-Soviet Armenia. Here the photographer isolates her subjects from their surroundings, thus making them the sole objects of attention. Derelict modernist buildings bear witness to lost utopias.
The series Vanished Landscapes, Iraq, Marsh Arabs (1980) shows architectures doomed to extinction: Schulz-Dornburg travelled from the mud-walled houses on the Shatt al-Gharraf to those built of reed in the marshlands. Vanished Landscapes, Iraq, Mesopotamia (1980) links historical sites with the immediate present of recent wars. Her chief photographic interest is in man-made structures. For Vanished Landscapes, Palmyra, Syria (2005/2010) for example, she photographed reduced burial sites shortly before the so-called Islamic State destroyed the larger buildings. Deserts are symbols of transit areas, and it was precisely there that Schulz-Dornburg stopped off. In 15 Kilometres along the Georgian-Azerbaijani Border (1998/99) she presents us with a world that seems infinitely remote. Her fine sense of dark and light also finds expression in the Ararat series (2004–2006) – in the constant shifts between sun and clouds, rain and mist.
On the occasion of her Kronstadt series (2002), Schulz-Dornburg photographed surreal-looking metal bodies whose functions are not always obvious to the beholder at first sight. The abandoned buildings in her Opytnoe Pole (2012) and Chagan (2012) series likewise have a virtually fantastical quality about them. For her Solar Positions (1991/1992), the artist entered the interiors of chapels to translate, by photographic means, the macrocosmic movement of the earth into the microcosms of sacred architectures.

The creative process
Ursula Schulz-Dornburg’s series, some of which comprise several dozen photos, will be presented on the upper floor of the Städel’s exhibition annex, arranged in grid-like manner in tableaus covering entire walls. Despite their many fundamental differences, these often very extensive series share the same formal concerns as the Typologies – individual photos arranged in grids and likewise forming large-scale tableaus – carried out from the 1960s onward by the photo artists Bernd and Hilla Becher. Both oeuvres are decisively indebted to the influence of American Concept Art and Minimal Art. Particularly in the presentation, however, the differences become obvious. Schulz-Dornburg’s series often have no temporal conclusion or exhibit deliberate gaps that lend them a certain openness in terms of content and form alike. Her photographs always retain their individual character; their contextualization, however, would be nearly impossible without their serialization. Free of adherence to rigid disciplines, styles or worldviews, they occupy a realm between ethnology, archaeology, photography, documentarism, concept art and a sense of responsibility towards society.

Biographical details
Ursula Schulz-Dornburg was born in Berlin in 1938. In the years 1959 and 1960 she studied at the Institut für Bildjournalismus in Munich. In 1967 she spent time in New York, where she absorbed the influence of artists like Dan Flavin, Michael Heizer, Lawrence Weiner and Walter De Maria. She moved to Düsseldorf in 1969. From the early 1980s onward, she travelled and explored Europe, Asia and the Near East, primarily with a medium format camera and a focus on transit points, border landscapes, cultural sites and relics of past cultures. Her work is represented in the collections of such prestigious museums as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate Modern in London, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Schulz-Dornburg has participated in ground-breaking group exhibitions, for example “Conflict, Time, Photography” at the Tate Modern, London in 2014. Her most recent major solo exhibitions were “From Medina to the Jordanian Border” at the Pergamonmuseum, Berlin in 2011 and “Niemandslicht” at the Kunstmuseum Bochum in 2011/12. In 2016 she was awarded the AIMIA / AGO Photography Prize of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

URSULA SCHULZ-DORNBURG:
THE LAND IN-BETWEEN – PHOTOGRAPHS FROM 1980 TO 2012

Exhibition dates: 4 July to 9 September 2018
Press preview: Tuesday, 3 July 2018, 11.00 am

Curators: Dr Martin Engler (Head of the Collection of Contemporary Art, Städel Museum), Iris Hasler (Research Assistant, Städel Museum)
Location: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main
Information: www.staedelmuseum.de
Visitor services and guided tours: +49(0)69-605098-200, info@staedelmuseum.de

Opening hours: Tue, Wed, Sat, Sun 10 am – 6 pm, Thu + Fri 10 am – 9 pm, closed Mondays

Admission: 14 EUR, reduced 12 EUR, families 24 EUR; free admission for children under twelve years of age.
Groups of at least 10 persons who would normally be charged the full admission fee: reduced admission fee per person.
Groups are required to book in advance: please call +49(0)69-605098-200 or contact info@staedelmuseum.de

Advance ticket sales online at: tickets.staedelmuseum.de
Admission to the special exhibition is free for members of the Städelscher Museums-Verein.

General guided tours of the exhibition: Thursdays at 6 pm and Sundays at 12 noon. The number of participants is limited; no previous reservations necessary.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive programme of events and activities. For current information on the programme, go to www.staedelmuseum.de

Exhibition catalogue: Ursula Schulz-Dornburg: The Land In-Between – Photographs from 1980 to 2012, edited by Dr Martin Engler, MACK Verlag, museum edition in German, 300 pages, 39.90 €, bookshop edition in German and English.

Social Media: The Städel Museum is communicating the exhibition in the social media with the hashtag #SchulzDornburg.

Within the framework of the series “In the Städel Garden”, the Düsseldorf artist Manuel Franke (b. 1964) has developed an artwork of monumental dimensions – 50 metres long and 2.5 metres high – for the garden of the Städel Museum. From 20 June to 23 September, this expansive gesture will lend the Städel Garden a new and very palpable boundary between the museum and the Städelschule. Half sculpture, half painting, Colormaster F will respond to the lawn – a green surface bounded by buildings on three sides – with a curved membrane in vivid monochrome colours. An insurmountable obstacle, Franke’s object will on the one hand block the view, while on the other hand giving visitors the opportunity to experience the hill at the garden’s centre in a whole new way. Colormaster F will not only change the garden in terms of its spatial constellation, but also create a further, additional space, both open and closed, inside it. The artwork will moreover invite visitors to play, explore and pass time, thus offering an entirely new and interactive experience of the familiar Städel Garden all summer long.

“The reason we wanted Manuel Franke to carry out a work for our garden is that he consistently concerns himself with the boundaries between art and society, and we wanted to enhance the garden temporarily with one of his cross-media artistic interventions. His sculpture, which will rest on a massive foundation of sky-blue-coloured concrete, is a hybrid of industrial façade and museum, painting and sculpture, halfpipe and bench. It will prompt visitors to participate, for example by inviting them to sprawl out and relax on it”, explains Martin Engler, head of the Städel collection of contemporary art.

“The Städel Garden poses a challenge for artists because its aesthetic has already been perfectly and thoroughly thought through and it serves the museum as a kind of landmark. That’s precisely why I was happy to accept the invitation. The pink-coloured side of my wave will stretch out over the lawn like a huge sail, turning the grassy surface into a green colour field of equal chromatic intensity. On the one hand the object will close the garden in; on the other hand it will make the museum spill over into the urban space with a rapid movement in gaudy orange”, is how Manuel Franke envisions his work.

As part of the accompanying programme, Franke will engage in conversation with the French conceptual artist Daniel Buren (b. 1938) before an audience on 24 July. The dialogue will take place partly in front of Colormaster F in the Städel Garden, and partly in front of Daniel Buren’s works in the Städel collection.

Colormaster F
The artist adopted the word Colormaster from the name of a colour temperature metre of the kind employed in professional photo technology to measure colour casts in the pre-digital age. Franke has used it repeatedly; in this case the F stands for the city of Frankfurt. By choosing this title, the artist is alluding to the special significance colour holds in his work. “With colour, an object changes its identity.” Colormaster F doesn’t dictate a certain vantage point to its visitors. On the contrary, it invites them to interact with it and explore the various ways of seeing it offers, while at the same time blocking other views. What is more, Colormaster F can never be perceived in its entirety, but always consists of two irreconcilable visual experiences, depending on whether you’re sitting on the hill above the Garden Halls or approaching the museum and the artwork from the Dürerstrasse/city side. Colormaster F makes the architecture of the Städel Garden and the Städel Museum an integral element of itself by responding and relating to it.

A conspicuous aspect of Franke’s intervention is how it takes Adolf Luther’s Integration Standing Lenses (1990) into account. On permanent loan from the Adolf-Luther-Stiftung since 2013, this work is located partially on the lawn and partially on the path leading through the Städel Garden. Rather than interrupting its path from one edge of the lawn to the other, the sculpture Colormaster F will integrate the steles. Franke has repeatedly found ways of embedding other artworks in his own – in 2006, for instance, he integrated James Lee Byars’s work The Tear (1986) on the exterior wall of the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle.

Technique and production
For Colormaster F Manuel Franke is using white cement and pigment, both contributed by the Dyckerhoff company, a concrete manufacturer in Wiesbaden. Thanks to the use of blue-pigmented white cement, the concrete will shed its commonplace character and take on vivid colour. The artist is also employing industrially cambered corrugated metal sheet and high-gloss paint. The sine wave otherwise encountered primarily in agriculture or factory buildings will shine in bright pink on one side of Colormaster F and vibrant orange on the other, and thus to an extent be relieved of its unsensual, industrial quality. The artist is having the sheet metal painted with standardized colours, which will lend the surface the look of a car body.

Manuel Franke
Manuel Franke studied with, among others, Tony Cragg and Irmin Kamp at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and Daniel Buren and Pontus Holten at the Institut des hautes études en arts plastiques in Paris. In his artistic practice he often undertakes interventions in space that oscillate between sculpture, installation and painting. His works are site-specific in that he consistently factors in the architectural and urban structures of the surrounding environment as well as the political, historical and social contexts. A recent work of Franke’s is Achat, a large-scale project for an underground station on the Wehrhahn line in Düsseldorf, where he used hundreds of glass panels to create a walk-in colour space with a vortex-like effect.

Franke has exhibited at such venues as the Kunstraum Düsseldorf, the Artspace Sydney and the Kunstverein Nürnberg and participated in group shows at the Kunstverein Mönchengladbach, the Villa Massimo in Rome and the Kunstmuseum Bonn. His interventions, which are usually temporary, often address the act of sight itself by obstructing views while at the same time offering new and unaccustomed ways of seeing. Characteristic features of his expansive, space-transforming installations are the painterly treatment of the surfaces and the use of bright colours.

“In the Städel Garden”
In the framework of the series “In the Städel Garden”, the Städel Museum offers its freely accessible garden grounds as a venue for changing installations, performances and events on contemporary art. Since the new presentation of the sculpture collection in the Städel Garden in 2013, the museum’s outdoor facilities have frequently served as a setting for performance and installation works by such artists as Adrian Williams (Watering Hole, 2013), Adolf Luther (Architecture as Light and Reflection, 2013), Erwin Wurm (One-Minute Sculptures, 2014), Franz Erhard Walther (Walking Pedestals and Places to Stand, 2014) and David Claerbout (with his film Die reine Notwendigkeit, 2016).


IN THE STÄDEL GARDEN
MANUEL FRANKE, COLORMASTER F

Press preview: Tuesday, 19 June 2018, 11:00 am
Exhibition dates: 20 June to 23 September 2018

Curators: Dr Martin Engler and Iris Hasler
Information: www.staedelmuseum.de
Visitor services and guided tours: +49(0)69-605098-200, info@staedelmuseum.de
Location: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main
Opening hours: Tue, Wed, Sat, Sun 10:00 am – 6:00 pm, Thu + Fri 10:00 am – 9:00 pm, closed Mondays

Admission to the Städel Garden is free of charge.

Opening
The Städel Museum will open the exhibition Colormaster F on Tuesday, 19 June 2018 at 7:00 pm with a public discussion between Manuel Franke and Dr Martin Engler. Afterwards, visitors are welcome to round out the evening over beverages and conversation in the Städel Garden.

Accompanying programme
Thursday, 21 June 2018, 6:30 pm
Evening guided tour of Colormaster F and other sculptures in the Städel Garden

Tuesday, 24 July 2018, 6:00 pm
Daniel Buren and Manuel Franke in conversation (in English)

Thursday, 6 September 2018, 6:30 pm
Introduction to the work by the artist

Social Media: The Städel Museum is communicating the exhibition in the social media with the hashtags #ManuelFranke and # StaedelGarten.

Support: The work is being realized with support from Dyckerhoff Beton.

Frank Auerbach (b. 1931) and Lucian Freud (1922–2011) are among the most prominent exponents of post-war English figurative art. From 16 May to 12 August 2018, the Städel Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings will unite major works by the two artists in a single exhibition for the first time. “Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud: Faces” will present altogether forty drawings and prints, in particular portraits that are among the most uncompromising and most innovative in contemporary art.

The two artists were close friends for nearly four decades, until Lucian Freud’s death. It was not only mutual appreciation for each other’s work that bonded them; they also shared the fate of having been born as sons of Jewish families in Berlin. Already as children, they were compelled to emigrate/flee from Nazi Germany to England. Their works are expressions of very personal vision and experience. And however different their formal approaches, Auerbach and Freud pursued surprisingly similar strategies: for weeks and sometimes years, they observed and portrayed the same people from among their circles of acquaintances. This repetition and limitation served them as means of concentration in the search for insight: into another person, into the self and into the world.

Several exceptional new acquisitions for the Städel Museum provided the occasion for this special exhibition: the Städelscher Museums-Verein e. V.’s purchase of a self-portrait drawing (Self-Portrait, 2017) by Auerbach with funds from the Jürgen R. und Eva-Maria Mann Stiftung and the etching Pluto (1988) by Freud with support from the Heinz und Gisela Friederichs Stiftung, a promised gift of selected prints and drawings by Auerbach and Freud from private holdings in Cologne, and the donation of an Auerbach printing plate by the artist and the Balakjian Estate. Further enhanced by loans from within Germany and abroad, these works form the show’s cornerstones.

“Back in 1994, the Städel Museum acquired Lucian Freud’s Large Head, and thus one of the first – if not the very first – etching by the artist for a German museum. It is a great stroke of luck that we can now enhance this print with additional works by Auerbach and Freud that have recently likewise made their way into the collection. Together they reinforce the presence of these two outstanding exponents of figurative art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, while also further heightening the notable quality of the Department of Prints and Drawings”, Städel director Philipp Demandt commented.

“From the very beginnings of their careers, Auerbach and Freud strove to gain a deeper understanding of the visible world. Their concern is not with representability, but with truth. In the process, they arrive at very different results – or, more correctly, insights – again and again. From this perspective, it is thus well worth our while to view the two artists’ so very different works together”, Regina Freyberger, the head of the Städel Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings from 1750, pointed out.

The exhibition
“Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud: Faces” begins with two self-portraits: a graphite drawing by Frank Auerbach (Self-Portrait, 2017) executed with forcefully dynamic strokes tending towards abstraction, and an etching by Lucian Freud (Self-Portrait: Reflection, 1996) distinguished by concrete and descriptive lines of a virtually painterly quality. Both portraits are psychologically charged to a similarly intense degree. Formally and in terms of their critical, unsentimental self-reflection, both are typical of the two artists’ oeuvres. From the 1940s and 1950s onward, it was above all portraits that emerged from Auerbach’s and Freud’s London studios, initially in oil, and later in the etching technique as well. The prints on view in the exhibition retrace this artistic production from the 1970s onward in representative manner. Yet neither artist is a classical portraitist: commissions in the printmaking medium are rare, and none of the likenesses are of the kind intended to represent the sitter and his life achievements to posterity. Freud portrayed the British politician Lord Arnold Goodman, for example, with tousled hair, wearing yellow pyjamas (Lord Goodman in His Yellow Pyjamas, 1987). Auerbach and Freud are not interested in the public person with his specific biography, but in the human being in his mental, emotional and physical entirety, in his presence and creatureliness. It is for that reason that Freud generally showed his sitters naked and in unsparingly authentic manner. This also explains the motif of sleeping or falling asleep in the two artists’ work: the tireder the model gets, the more clearly does his or her true, undisguised face come to light. At the same time, mutual trust between the artist and his sitter is indispensable. Auerbach and Freud therefore consistently chose their models from within very small circles of familiar persons: Freud’s children posed for him often, and from the 1970s onward he portrayed his mother in more than a thousand sittings. Yet he also made likenesses of people who inspired him, for example the performance artist Leigh Bowery (Large Head, 1993) or the job centre clerk Sue Tilley (Woman with an Arm Tattoo, 1996). Much the same is true of Auerbach: his wife, the painter Julia Wolstenholme, sat for him regularly from 1958 onward (Julia, 1981, 1998, 2001), and he repeatedly portrayed his son Jake (1990, 2006) as well as various fellow artists and friends.

The creative process
Whether it is confined to the face or enhanced by a view of the body, every portrait by either of the two artists is based on a process of gaining insight by means of close, inquiring observation. Frank Auerbach draws or paints one likeness at every sitting. If it does not bear up to his critical appraisal at the next sitting, he scrapes off the paint or erases the pencil lines and starts over again on the same surface. In the etching medium, this process of constant re-seeing, re-experiencing and re-working is technically impossible. In preparation for a print, Auerbach therefore makes several sketches on paper before completing the image on the plate.
Freud proceeded differently. He began by indicating his vis-à-vis’s contours on the pre-treated copper plate before taking the etching needle in hand and working from the centre outward. He viewed his sitters from changing positions. The repetition of individual lines not only brought about plasticity and but also served to confirm statements once formulated. Occasional corrections document the artist’s gradual approximation of his subject.

Biographical aspects
Auerbach and Freud shared the tragic fate of being born as children of Jewish families in Germany and compelled to flee (Freud) or emigrate (Auerbach) from Germany in the 1930s. Freud took out British citizenship in 1939, Auerbach in 1947. The two presumably first met in 1956 at Auerbach’s first London exhibition – an art experience that made a strong impression on Freud. From the start, both artists had a deep appreciation for the art of the other. Towards the end of his working process on a particular composition, Freud frequently asked Auerbach his opinion. To produce their etchings they frequently worked with the same printer, and they moreover portrayed one another. Over the years, Freud amassed one of the largest private collections of Auerbach’s works. After his death, this collection was donated to the British nation and distributed among different museums. Two of the drawings from that bequest, now in the holdings of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, will now document the close artistic exchange cultivated by two artists for the first time in Germany. Auerbach, for his part, gave the Courtauld Institute in London nine of his Freud etchings in 2012. A further etching, Ib of 1982, still in Auerbach’s possession, is likewise on view in the exhibition. The two artists’ biographies are presented in the last room of the show along with the printmaking techniques they employed.

FRANK AUERBACH AND LUCIAN FREUD: FACES

Press preview: Tuesday, 15 May 2018, 11:00 am
Exhibition dates: 16 May to 12 August 2018

Curator: Dr Regina Freyberger (Head of the Collection of Prints and Drawings from 1750, Städel Museum)

Information: www.staedelmuseum.de
Visitor services and guided tours: +49(0)69-605098-200, info@staedelmuseum.de
Location: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main
Opening hours: Tue, Wed, Sat, Sun 10:00 am – 6:00 pm, Thu + Fri 10:00 am – 9:00 pm, closed Mondays
Special opening hours (10:00 am – 6:00 pm): 20, 21, 22 and 31 May

Admission: 14 EUR, reduced 12 EUR, families 24 EUR. Until 21 May, admission on holidays costs 16 EUR, reduced 14 EUR; families 24 EUR. Free admission for children under twelve years of age. Groups of at least 10 persons who would normally be charged the full admission fee: reduced admission fee per person. Groups are required to book in advance: please call +49(0)69-605098-200 or contact info@staedelmuseum.de. Admission to the special exhibition is free for members of the Städelscher Museums-Verein.

General guided tours of the exhibition: Fridays at 6:00 pm, Sundays at 2:00 pm; Monday, 21 May and Thursday, 31 May at 12:00 noon. The number of participants is limited; no previous reservations necessary.
Advance ticket sales online at: tickets.staedelmuseum.de

Catalogue: To accompany the exhibition, the Städel Museum has published a catalogue by Dr Regina Freyberger entitled Frank Auerbach und Lucian Freud. Gesichter, in German, 104 pages, 15 EUR, made possible by the Städelscher Museums-Verein e. V.

Social media: The Städel Museum is communicating the exhibition in the social media with the hashtag #AuerbachFreud.

In the course of its systematic provenance research, the Frankfurt’s Städel Museum received an inquiry from a third party relating to the problematic provenance of Eisgang (1923), an oil painting by Max Beckmann (1884–1950). The painting is listed in the official register of cultural objects of national significance and depicts a typical Frankfurt scene with the River Main and the Eiserne Steg (iron footbridge). It was acquired in 1994 by the Städelscher Museums-Verein. It has since transpired that the original owner of the work was Fritz Neuberger, a Jewish textile manufacturer from Frankfurt, who had bought the painting directly from Max Beckmann. Neuberger and his wife Hedwig were persecuted by the National Socialists, deported, and murdered in eastern Poland. Many of the details of what happened to the picture can no longer be traced. Everything suggests, however, that the Neubergers were dispossessed of Eisgang as a result of political persecution. After many years of research by the Städel Museum and intensive discussions between the board of the Städelscher Museums-Verein and the heirs of the Neubergers, the two parties have now reached an amicable “goodwill agreement”, representing a fair and just resolution of the case in accordance with the Washington Principles on Nazi-confiscated art and making it possible for the painting to remain permanently in Frankfurt. A plaque next to the painting will commemorate the tragic fate of the original owners, Fritz Neuberger and his wife.

To achieve the agreed settlement, the Städelscher Museums-Verein was given generous financial support from the German Federal Government. In a statement, the Minister of State for Culture, Monika Grütters, said: “Eisgang, dating from Beckmann’s years in Frankfurt, is not only a key work in the oeuvre of this great German Expressionist; with its depiction of the Eiserne Steg, a landmark of the city on the Main, it is an important and well-loved symbol of regional identity for the people of Frankfurt and beyond. It is a priority for the Federal Government to promote fair and just resolutions, in line with the Washington Principles, by supporting purchases such as this. That it has been made possible for Eisgang to remain in Frankfurt is a remarkable solution, not only for Frankfurt, but for the German museum landscape as a whole.”

In a statement Städel director, Philipp Demandt, commented: “We are pleased and tremendously grateful to have been able to reach a fair and amicable resolution which allows Beckmann’s Eisgang to remain in the Städel Museum’s collection, and thus on public view in its place of origin. In reaching this agreement, the Städel Museum and the Städelscher Museums-Verein hope to give another clear message that, even though we are not public institutions, we are committed to the principles of the Washington Declaration and are willing to face up to the responsibility of historic injustice.”

Sylvia von Metzler, President of the Städelscher Museums-Verein, announced: “Max Beckmann’s Eisgang is one of those paintings which are particularly popular with the Frankfurt public and which play a key role in shaping the unique identity of the Städel collection – and I am very glad that we have managed to retain in Frankfurt a painting whose original acquisition, in 1994, was only possible thanks to the Städelscher Museums-Verein.”

Max Beckmann: Eisgang (1923)
Measuring 47.5 cm by 59.5 cm, the canvas is one of more than a dozen views of the city painted in oils by Max Beckmann during his time in Frankfurt. The important Expressionist artist spent 17 years of his life in the city, where he developed a close friendship with the director of the Städel, Georg Swarzenski. Until he was removed from his post by the National Socialists in April 1933, Beckmann was a professor at the Städelschule art academy. His painting Eisgang shows a typical view of the Main in Frankfurt. Looking upstream from the Untermainbrücke on a quiet winter morning, it takes in the old town with St. Bartholomew’s Cathedral, the Eiserne Steg, and, on the right, the bank on the Sachsenhausen side of the river. It was a very familiar view for Beckmann – the route from his flat in Schweizer Strasse to the town centre led over the bridge. The view is not topographically exact: Beckmann’s whole attention is on the river, lying like a dark ribbon between its two banks. Great ice floes are floating down the Main, accentuating the dynamic movement of the river. The cool tones in which the landscape is rendered are heightened by the cold light of a crescent moon. The bare trees and two muffled figures on bicycles on the Sachsenhausen bank emphasise the underlying melancholy of the nocturnal, mysterious scene. One of the few winter pictures in Beckmann’s oeuvre, this is an exemplary expression of the artist’s pessimism about the modern world, often perceived as cold and unfeeling. Describing the painting when it was exhibited in 1924 at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, the editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung, Benno Reifenberg, wrote:
“The town is huddled in on itself; as if it were freezing, as if it were afraid of the power of the river, as if it were shrinking under the cold, pitiless grey sky. […] Ice floes are gliding down the dark river. Like strange fish with broad backs, sharp snouts. They stream round the bend in the Main. They move silently past the city, impelled by a mighty, distant force. Now and then they brush against the reddish quays. With an ominous grinding sound.”

Shown at the Documenta III exhibition of 1964, the painting has been listed in Germany’s register of cultural objects of national significance since 2011. Today, the Städel Museum houses a total of fifteen paintings, two sculptures and numerous drawings and prints by Max Beckmann. Eisgang, so important to Frankfurt, is an established part of the permanent exhibition, and is displayed in a special Beckmann Gallery.

The provenance of the work
Eisgang came originally from the private collection of the Jewish textile manufacturer, Fritz Neuberger (1877–1943), who acquired it directly from the artist before 1928, and in whose possession it definitely remained until at least December 1931. Up to this point the provenance of the painting is fully documented, but here the paper trail relating to the chain of ownership is interrupted. It was not until after the war, in 1952, that the painting reappeared in another private collection in Frankfurt. It was sold through a gallery in 1953 to a private collector, from whose heirs the Städelscher Museums-Verein acquired it in 1994. The Verein bought the picture in good faith, with funds from the Kulturstiftung der Länder, the Marga und Kurt Möllgaard-Stiftung and wide-ranging support from its members and the people of Frankfurt.

Up to now, the Städel’s research has been unable to fill a gap of around 20 years in the documented provenance of the painting, a gap which includes the years of National Socialism. The research shows, however, that Fritz Neuberger very likely lost possession of the painting during the Nazi era. The Neubergers were driven from their home in Frankfurt’s Westend neighbourhood in the summer of 1941 and in 1942, after an interim stay in the so-called ‘Ghettohaus’ at 14 Gaussstrasse, they were deported to eastern Poland and probably murdered at the Maidanek concentration camp. The couple left a son, who survived the Holocaust because his parents had managed to send him to England in 1939 with an international relief organisation. A year later he fled from there to the USA. Research conducted by the Städel wasable to trace several attempts made by the Neubergers’ son, dating from immediately after the war until as late as the mid-1980s, to prove the loss of the painting, without, however, being able to provide concrete evidence as to the circumstances of its loss and without knowing its then whereabouts. He stated, amongst other things, that as far as he remembered, the painting was still in his parents’ possession at the time of his emigration in 1939. He died in 1997 at the age of 75. As part of its own provenance research, the Städel Museum had attempted to trace possible heirs of Fritz Neuberger when it was itself approached by the heirs’ legal representatives.

Provenance research at the Städel Museum
Since as early as 2001, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt has been systematically researching the provenance of every object which was acquired during the Nazi era or which changed ownership, or might have changed ownership, during this period – making it one of the first German museums to do so. The basis for this research is the Washington Declaration, formulated in 1998 at the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets, and the subsequent Joint Declaration between the federal government, the 16 German states, and all local municipalities in Germany. For every object that was acquired after 1933 and that can be dated to before 1945, the Museum attempts to examine and continues to research the history of ownership. Alongside these ongoing efforts, the administration and management of the Städel Museum decided, in 2008, to invite an independent team of researchers, in collaboration with the “Degenerate Art” Research Centre at the University of Hamburg, to examine the history of the institution during the National Socialist era. In 2011, the results of this research were issued by the Centre under the title Museum im Widerspruch, one of its series of research volumes published by the Berliner Akademie-Verlag.

So far, it has been proven that eleven objects from the holdings of paintings, drawings and prints at the Städelsches Kunstinstitut and the Städtische Galerie, and five objects from the holdings of the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung were lost bytheir ownersas a result of Nazi era persecution, and these have either been returned to the owners’ heirs or re-acquired from them.

Details of work:
Max Beckmann (1884–1950)
Eisgang, 1923
oil on canvas, 47,5 x 59,5 cm
Acquired in 1994 with means provided by the Kulturstiftung der Länder, the Marga and Kurt Möllgaard-Foundation and other donors, Property of Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V. and the Bundesrepublik Deutschland.
Photo: Städel Museum - ARTOTHEK
© VG Bild Kunst Bonn

Almost no other artist exercised such a decisive influence on European Baroque painting as Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) did. The Städel Museum in Frankfurt dedicates a comprehensive special exhibition to the world-renowned artist, which will be on show from 8 February to 21 May 2018: “Rubens. The Power of Transformation” comprises about one hundred items—including thirty-one paintings and twenty-three drawings by the master—and explores a hitherto little-regarded aspect in his creative process. The presentation reveals how profound the dialogue was into which Rubens entered with his predecessors’ and contemporaries’ achievements and fathoms the scope of their impact on the five decades of his production. Rubens’s extensive oeuvre reflects the influences of ancient sculpture as well as that of the later art from Italy and north of the Alps, from the masters towards the close of the fifteenth century to the artists of his own day. Frequently, only a closer look will reveal how Rubens drew on the work of artists of different epochs: the exhibition offers an opportunity to comprehend the sometimes astonishing correlations in detail. The cross-genre presentation brings together paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and objets d’art. In addition to original sculptures dating from classical antiquity to the Renaissance, the show also encompasses paintings and prints by Rubens’s precursors and contemporaries, among them key works by Titian and Tintoretto, by Goltzius, Rottenhammer, and Elsheimer, as well as by Giambologna, Van Tetrode, and Van der Schardt.

The exhibition has been made possible through the financial support of Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain gGmbH and Städelscher Museums-Verein e. V. It has also been sponsored by the Savings Banks Finance Group represented by Sparkassen-Kulturfonds of the German Savings Banks Association, Deutsche Leasing, Helaba Landesbank Hessen-Thüringen, and Frankfurter Sparkasse.

Städel Director Philipp Demandt: “We are able to present an extraordinary artist’s genius in all its facets to our public with this large-scale exhibition project. The comprehensive show offers a fascinating view of Baroque masterpieces that have never ceased to spellbind the viewer.”

“Rubens was one of the most prolific and fascinating artists of the Baroque age who not only influenced numerous subsequent generations in the field but also literally drank in various sources for his pictorial solutions himself. Our exhibition offers the unique opportunity to directly re-enact this creative process in our minds”, says Jochen Sander, curator of the exhibition and Head of German, Dutch and Flemish Paintings before 1800 at the Städel Museum.

The Exhibition
Structured after pictorial motifs and themes, the tour takes visitors along well-known mythological subjects such as Venus and Adonis, the Judgement of Paris or Prometheus chained to a rock but also confronts them with crucial topics of the Old and the New Testament such as the beheading of Holofernes or the Entombment of Christ. Rubens’s rendering of Christ in Crown of Thorns (Ecce Homo) (c. 1612) already exemplifies the artist’s creative process in the first room of the show: Three exhibits strikingly visualise Rubens’s transformation of an ancient sculpture depicting a centaur into Christ presented to the people. Rubens first made several drawings exploring the ancient sculpture before the motif was developed into his extraordinary representation of Christ in the painting. Completely redefining the subject iconographically, he converted his ancient model of an unbridled, brutish centaur into an image of the suffering Christ calling for the viewer’s empathy. The return to antiquity ensures an extremely astounding representation of Christ’s body, whose athletic upper part is veritably exposed, put on display.

The ancient Roman sculpture of a crouching Venus preparing to take a bath provides another impressive example: Showing the same pose but conveying a completely different frame of mind, she has not merely been transmuted into a freezing Venus, the Venus Frigida (1614) but also into the goddess of Love lamenting her lover’s death (Venus mourning Adonis, c. 1614). A similarly arresting chain of motifs unravels from a work by the Flemish painter Michiel Coxcie depicting Cains’s murder of his brother (The Death of Abel, c. 1539). Rubens had acquired the study of the slain Abel by Coxcie in the form of a drawing, which he reworked in accordance with his understanding (Abel Slain by Cain, c. 1609). A short time after, the artist altered his solution to describe a tragically failing hero who has fallen backwards to the ground in an impressive drawing (Study of a falling man, c. 1610/11). It was this study on which he directly modelled two further paintings on display in the exhibition: the brilliantly executed representation of the Death of Hippolytus (1611–1613) and his monumental Prometheus (1611/12–1618). Some years later, no lesser artist than Rembrandt (1606 – ca. 1669) would vie with Rubens’s masterpiece that excited wide admiration: His Blinding of Samson (1636), one of the Städel’s capital works, which can only be understood against the background of the artist’s study of Rubens, has, therefore, been included in the exhibition.

The direct comparison between works by Rubens and their models offers fascinating insights into the ingenious development of the master’s solutions and surprising motific metamorphoses, as well as his intense endeavours for an adequate format and the right form. The peculiarly modern, dynamic appearance of Rubens’s creations is frequently indebted to the very deliberate return to identifiable models, which the artist—in the understanding of the concept of ‘aemulatio’ crucial within his era’s theory of art—even tried to outdo. Each of the transformation processes resulted in a work that immediately enthralled the contemporary viewer and still fascinates us today.

The special exhibition is a joint project of the Städel Museum and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, five examples from whose rich holdings of works by Rubens have travelled to Frankfurt. Works by Rubens from the Städel’s collection have also been incorporated into the presentation, among them the oil sketch The Mystic Marriage of St Catherine (1628, draft for the high altarpiece of the Church of St Augustine in Antwerp) as well as several important items from its Department of Prints and Drawings.

It features works from numerous international lenders including the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the National Gallery in London, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Prado and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Louvre in Paris, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the State Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, the Vatican Museums, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

The Artist
Peter Paul Rubens was born the sixth of seven children in the city of Siegen, Westphalia, in 1577 and died in Antwerp on May 30, 1640. When still a young man, Rubens won international renown as an extraordinarily innovative artist. Yet Rubens was not only a painter but also an art theorist and collector, a respected discussion partner of European scholars and princes, and a diplomat in European employ—all this with Antwerp, the centre of his life, as a starting point. With more than fifty works in churches and museums and the Rubenshuis with its living quarters and adjacent studio, the artist and his work are still present in his hometown in an exceptional manner today. Rubens studied under three teachers, among them the Antwerp painter Otto van Veen (1556–1629). At the age of only twenty-one, he entered the Guild of St Luke, the city’s guild of painters, as a master in 1598, getting to know Antwerp’s intellectual circles. In 1600, he travelled to Italy, where he stayed for eight years. This time—and especially the ancient sculptures he became familiar with then—had a lasting effect on his work. After his return to Antwerp in 1608, Rubens was appointed court painter to Albert, Archduke of Austria, and his wife Isabella Clara Eugenia, Catholic sovereigns of the Southern Netherlands, and married Isabella Brant, the city clerk’s daughter. Rubens had become one of Europe’s most sought-after painters, who created paintings for kings and princes, political leaders and diplomats. He decided to buy a house in 1610 for his workshop and his family, which he had converted into a small Italian-style city palace. After his first wife had passed away in 1626 and the Archduke of Austria’s death, Rubens became Isabella’s adviser, travelling through Europe in diplomatic mission from 1625 to 1628 to negotiate a possible peace between Spain and England and to campaign for ending the conflicts between the United Provinces in the north and the Southern Netherlands. It was not least thanks to his skill at negotiating that the Treaty of Madrid between England and Spain could be signed in 1630. In 1630, the artist married again: Hélène Fourment, a young woman from a middle-class family, with whom he had five children. Together with his family, Rubens found his last resting place in the memorial chapel of Antwerp’s Saint James’ Church.

Exhibition catalogue and conference
The comprehensive exhibition catalogue, published by Hirmer Verlag, Munich, deals with all works presented in the two exhibitions in Frankfurt and Vienna and comprises essays by international Rubens experts who familiarise the reader with the widely varied field of subjects.

Accompanying the exhibition, an international conference dedicated to the issue Art & Catholicism in the Dutch Republic focuses on examinations of Rubens and his art.

RUBENS. THE TOWER OF TRANSFORMATION

Press preview: Wednesday, February 7, 2018, 11:00 a.m.
Exhibition dates: February 8 – May 21, 2018

Curators: Prof. Dr. Jochen Sander (exhibition in the Städel Museum Frankfurt), Dr. Gerlinde Gruber (exhibition in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna), and Dr. Stefan Weppelmann (exhibition in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna)

Information: www.staedelmuseum.de, info@staedelmuseum.de, phone +49(0)69-605098-200, fax +49(0)69-605098-112
Visitors’ service: phone +49(0)69-605098-232, besucherdienst@staedelmuseum.de
Venue: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main
Opening hours: Tue, Wed, Sat, Sun + holidays 10:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m., Thur + Fri 10:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m., closed on Mondays
Special opening hours (10:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.): Good Friday, March 30; Easter Sunday, April 1; Easter Monday, April 2; Tue, May 1; Thur, May 10; Whit Sunday, May 20; Whit Monday, May 21.

Admission: 14 euros, reduced 12 euros; Sat, Sun, holidays: 16 euros, reduced 14 euros; family ticket 24 euros; free admission for children under twelve years of age; groups of at least ten regularly paying persons: reduced admission per person. Groups are required to make previous arrangements for their visit: phone +49(0)69-605098-200 or info@staedelmuseum.de.
Admission to the special exhibition is free for members of the Städelsche Museums-Verein.

Survey tours through the exhibition: Tue, 3:00 p.m.; Wed, 1:00 p.m.; Thur, 6:00 p.m.; Fri, 7:00 p.m.; Sat, 4:00 p.m., Sun, 12:00 noon. Tours for the holidays on March 30, April 2, May 10, and May 21 have been scheduled for 4:00 p.m. The number of participants is limited.
Tour tickets will be available starting two hours before each tour for 5 euros each at the cash desk of the Städel Museum.
Early Bird Special: 10 euros (limited offer)
Advance booking: tickets.staedelmuseum.de

Catalogue: A catalogue (312 pages, 304 color illustrations) will be published by Hirmer Verlag to accompany the exhibition. Ed. on behalf of the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, by Jochen Sander and on behalf of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna by Gerlinde Gruber, Sabine Haag, and Stefan Weppelmann, and. Contributions by G. Bisacca, N. Büttner, A. Georgievska-Shine, G. Gruber, F. Healy, N. van Hout, D. Jaffé, E. Oberthaler, G. Prast, J. Sander, I. Slama, A. Vergara, S. Weppelmann, and J. Wood, as well as a preface by Sabine Haag and Philipp Demandt. German and English edition, 39.90 euros (museum edition).
Exhibition booklet: A booklet in German will be forthcoming to accompany the exhibition; 7.50 euros.

Städel App and audio tour: A German and English audio tour will be available. The German version is spoken by the German theatre and film actor Thomas Wlaschiha, who made an international name for himself in his role as Jaqen H'ghar in Game of Thrones. The tour may be comfortably downloaded to the Städel App at home. The Städel App is offered by the Android and Apple stores free of charge; in-app purchases for regular IOS and Android smartphones are 0,99 cent each: app.staedelmuseum.de/en.
Visitors may rent an audio guide for 4 euros (two audio guides for 7 euros) in the museum. The production of the audio tour was supported by the Georg und Franziska Speyer’sche Hochschulstiftung.

Digitorial: The digitorial will be available to be downloaded from mid-January at rubens.staedelmuseum.de.

Social Media: The Städel Museum communicates the exhibition in the social media with the hashtags #Rubens und #Staedel.

Conference accompanying the exhibition in Frankfurt
Art & Catholicism in the Dutch Republic
International conference of the Städel Museum Frankfurt and the Technical University of Dortmund
Thursday, February 22, 2018 – Saturday, February 24, 2018
Sponsored by: Fritz Thyssen Stiftung
All details at: www.staedelmuseum.de/en/art-and-catholicism

Two public lectures (in German) will be held in the context of the conference at the Städel Museum, Metzler Saal, as part of the series Positions on Art:
Thursday, February 22, 2018, 7:00 p.m.
Prof. Dr. Nils Büttner (State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart)
A Matter of Attitude: Art and Catholicism in Rubens, Rembrandt, and Vermeer
Friday, February 23, 2018, 7:00 p.m.
Prof. Dr. Volker Manuth (Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen)
Rembrandt and Rubens

Sponsors and partners of the exhibition
Supported by: Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain gGmbH, Städelscher Museums-Vereins e. V. and Savings Banks Finance Group (represented by Sparkassen-Kulturfonds of the German Savings Banks Association, Deutsche Leasing, Helaba Landesbank Hessen-Thüringen, and Frankfurter Sparkasse)
With additional support from: Georg und Franziska Speyer’sche Hochschulstiftung, the Government of Flanders
Media partner: Süddeutsche Zeitung, Wirtschaftswoche, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, arte
Marketing partner: VISITFLANDERS
Culture partner: hr2-kultur

The Städelkomitee 21. Jahrhundert (‘Städel Committee of the 21st Century’) was established exactly ten years ago in Frankfurt. This committee is unique to the Städel Museum and without parallel among German museums. It has made it possible for the Städel to continuously and strategically develop its collection of contemporary art. Thanks to the unique commitment of its members, who now number over 40, it has been able to acquire 159 important works of contemporary art for the museum’s collection in just ten years. Apart from important works by Hans Hofmann, Philip Guston, and Konrad Klapheck, the acquisitions also include many discoveries and artists outside of the established canon, such as George Karl Pfahler, Marwan, Hermann Glöckner, and Gerhard Hoehme. The Städel’s supporters celebrated the committee’s tenth anniversary yesterday at the Städel Museum with a lecture by Steffen Seibert, member of the Städel Board of Trustees and spokesperson for the German Federal Government, and a number of artist talks. The committee’s latest acquisition, purchased on the occasion of the anniversary, was unveiled to the assembled: the large-scale work Cieszowa III (1973) by the American minimal artist Frank Stella (b. 1936). The Städelkomitee 21. Jahrhundert was created in 2007 as part of the Städel Museum’s expansion by its then director Max Hollein and Sylvia von Metzler, chairperson of the Städelscher Museums-Verein.

Dr. Philipp Demandt, director of the Städel Museum, emphasized that: “An incomparable committee, one which enables us to strategically develop the Städel’s collection of contemporary art, emerged from the civic initiative of several patrons from the local community. The over 60 people who have been part of this circle over the last decade are united by their special passion for contemporary art, their close connection with the Städel Museum, and an awareness of their civic responsibility. We are deeply indebted to them for this exceptional commitment. It is a guarantee for the advancement and continuation of our collections and thus the specific identity of the Städel as the citizen’s museum of Frankfurt par excellence.”

In a statement, Sylvia von Metzler, chairperson of the Städelscher Museums-Verein, said: “The Städelkomitee’s continuous commitment has had a lasting impact. This special initiative, under the direction of Philipp Demandt and Martin Engler, has resulted in an exceptional collection which differs substantially from other collections of contemporary art in that it does not merely follow a canon prescribed by the art market, but rather sets out to determine the course of the history of contemporary art in decades to come.”

Dr. Martin Engler, head of contemporary art, said: “Thanks to the Städelkomitee 21. Jahrhundert, we were able, again and again, to acquire outstanding key works outside of the usual canon in order to complete, internationalize, and create links between important suites of works within the collection. The result is a narrative of contemporary art, which spans from post-war art up to the immediate present and contains surprising juxtapositions and connections between works.”

The Städelkomitee 21. Jahrhundert, which currently counts 45 private individuals among its members, enables the targeted acquisition of important works of contemporary art for the Städel. Those who engage themselves in this exclusive circle of the Städel’s friends afford indispensable financial support and gain unique insights into the Frankfurt museum’s strategic development of its collection. By visiting artist’s studios and galleries to purchase works, and making group trips to art biennales or important fairs and exhibitions at home and abroad, members observe developments in the art world, appraise works, and, perhaps, ultimately decide to acquire them for the Städel’s collection.

Since its establishment in 2007, the Städelkomitee 21. Jahrhundert has been able to acquire for the Städel’s collection a total of 159 works by the following artists:

Hans Peter Adamski; Peter Angermann; John M Armleder; Art & Language; Herbert Aulich; Enrico Baj; Christiane Baumgartner; Thomas Bayrle; Michael Beutler; Dike Blair; Armin Boehm; Robert Breer; Daniel Buren; Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller; David Claerbout; Thomas Demand; Jean Fautrier; Adolf Fleischmann; Otto Freundlich; Bernard Frize; Günter Fruhtrunk; Rupprecht Geiger; Isa Genzken; Hermann Glöckner; Leon Golub; Gotthard Graubner; Tamara Grčić; Philip Guston; Raymond Hains; Mary Heilmann; Philipp Hennevogl; Antonius Höckelmann; Gerhard Hoehme; Hans Hofmann; Jörg Immendorf; Per Kirkeby; Konrad Klapheck; Barbara Klemm; Peter Kogler; Arthur Köpcke; Norbert Kricke; Eugène Leroy; Markus Lüpertz; Adolf Luther; Michel Majerus; Marwan (Marwan Kassab-Bachi); Jonathan Meese; Johannes Molzahn; François Morellet; Reinhard Mucha; Otto Muehl; Olaf Nicolai; A. R. Penck; Georg Karl Pfahler; Arnulf Rainer; Tobias Rehberger; Ad Reinhardt; Daniel Richter; Michael Riedel; Larry Rivers; David Salle; Wilhelm Sasnal; Jörg Sasse; Dierk Schmidt; Julian Schnabel; Thomas Schütte; Dirk Skreber; Leon Polk Smith; Haim Steinbach; Frank Stella; Jessica Stockholder; Jan Svenungsson; Wolfgang Tillmans; Günther Uecker; Victor Vasarely; Wolf Vostell; Franz Erhard Walther; Corinne Wasmuht; Amelie von Wulffen; Erwin Wurm.

Matisse – Bonnard. ‘Long Live Painting!’
Until 14 January 2018
Exhibition house
Two outstanding protagonists of modernism, presented together in Germany for the first time, will continue to take centre stage at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt until 14 January 2018: Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947). The special exhibition highlights the two French painters’ friendship that spanned more than forty years. Both artists shared a marked preference for the same subjects: interiors, still lifes, landscapes, and, above all, female nudes. The selection of about one hundred and twenty paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints unfolds a dialogue between Matisse and Bonnard and offers new perspectives on the development of the European avant-garde from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end of the Second World War. The survey is rounded out with a number of photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, who visited the two artists on the French Riviera in 1944.
Curator: Dr. Felix Krämer (Städel Museum)
Co-curator: Dr. Daniel Zamani (Städel Museum)


Maria Sibylla Merian and the Tradition of Flower Depiction
Until 14 January 2018
Exhibition hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings
Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) ranks among the most important naturalists and renowned artists of her time. Marking the third hundredth anniversary of her death in 2017, the Städel Museum presents the special exhibition ‘Maria Sibylla Merian and the Tradition of Flower Depiction’. The show acquaints visitors with the fascinating and filigree world of flower and plant depiction in drawings and prints from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Conceived in collaboration with the Kupferstichkabinett of the Staatliche Mussen zu Berlin and the Technische Universität Berlin, it features major works by Maria Sibylla Merian in the context of flower depictions of her forerunners, contemporaries, and successors.
Curators: Dr. Martin Sonnabend (Städel Museum), Dr. Michael Roth (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett)


Rubens. The Power of Transformation
8 February to 21 May 2018
Exhibition house
Almost no other artist exercised such a decisive influence on European Baroque painting as Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) did. The Städel Museum in Frankfurt dedicates a comprehensive special exhibition to the world-renowned artist. On show from 8 February to 21 May 2018, ‘Rubens. The Power of Transformation’ comprises about one hundred items—including thirty-one paintings and twenty-three drawings by the master—and explores a hitherto little-regarded aspect in his creative process: it shows how profound the dialogue was into which Rubens entered with his predecessors’ and contemporaries’ achievements and the scope of their impact on the five decades of his production.
Rubens’s extensive œuvre reflects the influences of ancient sculpture as well as that of the later art from Italy and north of the Alps, from the masters toward the close of the fifteenth century to the artists of his own day. Frequently, only a closer look will reveal how Rubens drew on the work of artists of different epochs: the exhibition offers an opportunity to comprehend the sometimes astonishing correlations in detail.
The cross-genre presentation brings together paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and objets d’art. In addition to original sculptures dating from classical antiquity to the Renaissance, the show also encompasses paintings and prints by Rubens’s precursors and contemporaries, among them key works by Titian and Tintoretto, by Goltzius, Rottenhammer, and Elsheimer, as well as by Giambologna, Van Tetrode, and Van der Schardt. It features works from numerous international lenders including the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the National Gallery in London, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Prado and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Louvre in Paris, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the State Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Vatican Museums, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Curators: Prof. Dr. Jochen Sander (Städel Museum), Dr. Gerlinde Gruber (Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien), Stefan Weppelmann (Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien)


Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud: Faces
16 May to 12 August 2018
Exhibition hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings
Both born in Berlin and brought to England as children to save them from the Nazis, Frank Auerbach (b. 1931) and Lucian Freud (1922–2011) shared more than a similar destiny: they were linked in close friendship, and their figurative painting revolutionized the language of modern art. Devoting themselves to the same motifs with the greatest intensity and perseverance over decades, they mostly depicted people from their immediate surroundings. The restriction in terms of contents is rooted in their search for artistic knowledge. The creative process is always a relentless struggle for truth.
Seizing the occasion of the important acquisition of a self-portrait drawing by Auerbach by the Städelsche Museums-Verein e. V. the Städel’s Department of Prints and Drawings presents a selection of Frank Auerbach’s and Lucian Freud’s prints and drawings in spring 2018.
Curator: Dr. Regina Freyberger (Städel Museum)

Colormaster F, 2018. Manuel Franke in the Städel Garden
20 June to 23 September 2018
Städel Garden
Manuel Franke (b. 1964) develops a monumental object as his contribution to the series ‘In the Städel Garden’. Half sculpture, half painting, the object will transform the garden of the Städel Museum on the roof of the Garden Halls into a space-spanning and tangible installation from early summer 2018.
Franke’s Colormaster F takes on the entire garden bounded by buildings on three sides and counters this layout with a corrugated iron ramp in bright colours. Deliberately spoiling the view of the green lawn hill from the street and blocking the way of people visiting the garden as a massive, insurmountable obstacle, it offers a completely new experience of the place. Colormaster F not only changes the garden’s spatial constellation but also creates another, additional space within it that is both open and sealed off. The lawn square and the hill are thus, at least temporarily, enclosed on four sides.
Manuel Franke studied with Tony Cragg and Irmin Kamp at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf as well as with Daniel Buren and Pontus Hulten at the Institut des hautes études en arts plastiques in Paris. His space-spanning and space-transforming installations are characterized by their painterly surfaces and a unique colourfulness.
Curator: Dr. Martin Engler (Städel Museum)


Ursula Schulz-Dornburg. The Land In Between
Photographs from 19080 to 2012 4 July to 9 September 2018
Exhibition house
Born in Berlin in 1938 and based in Düsseldorf today, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg has centred on border landscapes, places of transit, and relics of outmoded cultures since the early 1980s. Her photographs confront us with cult and cultural sites in Europe, Asia, and the Near East and, above all, with the visible and invisible boundaries between these continents and regions. Mostly in black and white and comprising numerous parts, the series of photographs taken there are a testimony to vanished sceneries, past political systems, crumbling civilisations, and disappearing societies. Fuelled by ethnological curiosity and betraying an archaeologist’s eye, her pictures reveal the blurry fringes and points of intersection of today’s life between globalised everyday world and its blind spots on the threshold between conceptual art and enlightened approach.
Assembling thirteen series, the exhibition offers a first institutional overall survey of Ursula Schulz-Dornburg’s artistic development and the photographer’s creative range over the past thirty years.
Curator: Dr. Martin Engler (Städel Museum)
Co-curator: Iris Hasler (Städel Museum)


Städelschule Graduates
11 July to 5 August 2018
Exhibition house
The 2018 exhibition of the graduates from the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule will be presented in the Städel Museum. The show in the Städel’s exhibition house offers solid insights into the multifarious production of the internationally renowned art college’s students.


Lotte Laserstein. Face to Face
19 September 2018 to 17 March 2019
Exhibition hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings
The Berlin painter Lotte Laserstein (1898–1993) made a name for herself with sensitive portraits of her contemporaries in the late years of the Weimar Republic. She successfully participated in numerous exhibitions and competitions. Critics found hymnic words to sing her praise, calling her a ‘passionate painter by nature’ and attesting her ‘skills of remarkable dimensions’. Following the artist’s early recognition, her career came to an abrupt halt, however: the political situation under the National Socialist regime increasingly excluded the painter with a Jewish background from the cultural scene. Laserstein found herself forced to leave Germany in 1937. With the artist cut off from the international arena, her work was largely ostracised from public perception. Today, Laserstein’s œuvre ranks among the major rediscoveries of recent years.
The Städel Museum’s exhibition paying tribute to the painter will be on display in Frankfurt from 19 September 2018 to 13 January 2019 and subsequently in the Moderna Museet Malmö. It will be the first solo presentation of the artist’s work to take place outside of Berlin. The show will build on the Städel’s holdings, which has acquired important works by the artist over the past few years: the paintings Russian Girl with Compact of 1928 and Boy with Kasper Puppet (Wolfgang Karger) of 1933. Assembling about fifty works, the exhibition looks into Laserstein’s development as an artist, focusing on her works of the 1920s and 1930s, which mark the highlight of her production. Laserstein’s central concern was portraiture. She rejected traditional role expectations and developed new, especially female images for identification in many of her works. These images found their expression in athletic and fashion-conscious women in control, who reflected the type of the New Woman. The exhibition offers a unique opportunity to become acquainted with this long-forgotten artist’s fascinating work.
Curators: Dr. Alexander Eiling (Städel Museum), Elena Schroll (Städel Museum)


Victor Vasarely. In the Labyrinth of Modernism
26 September 2018 to 13 January 2019
Exhibition house
The Städel Museum will present a retrospective dedicated to the important artist Victor Vasarely’s work in autumn 2018. A co-founder and main representative of op art, Vasarely (1906–1997) forged a bridge between modern and contemporary art, between the aesthetically enormously productive interwar era and the post-war avant-gardes. His œuvre spans more than six decades and incorporates the most different styles and influences: born in Hungary, Vasarely was an advertising graphic designer and a key figure of French post-war art rooted in the Bauhaus of the 1920s. First and foremost, however, he stood at the beginning of a development that further blurred the boundaries between free and applied art, between ‘high’ and ‘low’, panel painting and poster, museum and teen room.
Conceived in collaboration with the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, ‘Victor Vasarely. In the Labyrinth of Modernism’ traces the roots and genesis of this once-in-a-century œuvre based on key pictures and objects of his major work. Particularly the pictures of his Vega series have informed our notion of the artist to this day: technoid and psychedelically colourful pictures that seem to press into the room by means of optical illusion—a both perfidious and fascinating mixture of minimalist reduction and pop-art motley whose industrial colourfulness, seriality, and simplification became emblematic for a society’s faith in the future and the ‘Swinging Sixties’. Partly still merging figuration and abstraction, Vasarely’s early paintings testify to his ties with the Russian and German avant-gardes of the 1910s and 1920s. Abstract motion studies and other works from these early years, however, leave no doubt about the ambiguous tenor that still informs Vasarely’s œuvre till the end: the rigid geometry is playfully set in motion; the compositions, initially firmly resting in themselves, are thrown out of kilter. What superficially presents itself as a light-hearted delusion of perception is actually one of the most consistent inquiries into the project of modernity and its advancement. Vasarely, whose work is much too willingly reduced to his bewildering op art, is presented in his role as one of the central figures of modern art in the Städel’s show.
Assembling one hundred and twenty works from more than sixty years and from both European and US collections, the exhibition pointedly conveys the mutual penetration and influences of everyday sphere and art, the continuing transition between the aesthetics of pop and modernism in Vasarely’s work. It offers not only a confrontation with one of the first European pop artists but also with a new history of the project of modernity that runs through the entire twentieth century.
Curator: Dr. Martin Engler (Städel Museum)
Co-curator: Dr. Jana Baumann (Städel Museum)


Titles and dates subject to alterations.

The successful and prizewinning digitorial format on exhibitions (which received the Grimme Online Award 2015 in the category “Art and Entertainment,” for example) is undergoing further development on Städel Director Philipp Demandt’s initiative: As of now, the Städel Museum also offers digitorials on subjects whose visual presentation can be based on selected works from the Städel’s rich collection. Digitorials on outstanding artists with works in the Städel Museum will follow. Free of charge for the user, this extension of the Städel’s digital educational offer has been made possible by the FAZIT-Stiftung and starts with a comprehensive theme digitorial on the Reformation.

In line with this year’s quincentennial of Martin Luther’s posting of his theses, the Städel Museum’s first theme digitorial explores the consequences of the renewal of the Church for art: The shift from devotional to didactic image, the emergence of new pictorial subjects, and the interpretation of existing iconographies in the spirit of the Reformation were as much part of this development as the loss of commissions on the part of the Church and the development of a private art market. Drawing on works from the Städel’s holdings, the digitorial highlights the historical differences between the Catholic and the Protestant understanding of images and sheds lights on protagonists of the Reformation such as Luther and Melanchthon or key places like the Wartburg or Rome. The free multimedia educational offer visualizes the decisive impact of Luther’s theological positions like the priority of the word over the image on artists and illustrates how this turn has influenced the way how images are dealt with to this day.

“We are pleased that the FAZIT-Stiftung supports us to tell ‘art history’ in the truest sense of the word and to do so by relying on works from our holdings and for a wide public. Our new digitorials are aimed at contextualizing the wealth of our collection with all its subjects within a historical perspective beyond our special exhibitions and at spanning a wide arch to the present,” says Philipp Demandt, Director of the Städel Museum.

“Our newly conceived theme and artist digitorials serve a better understanding of art—particularly within the historical context of their time. The current anniversary year provides a perfect starting point to digitally visualize art’s function and modes of operation and how these are influenced by religious, political, and social factors,” Chantal Eschenfelder, head of the Städel’s education department, explains the new format.

The new digital educational series will be continued with an artist digitorial on Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510) forthcoming in the first half of 2018. His painting Idealized Portrait of a Lady (Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci as Nymph) ranks among the Städel’s main works and is well known to a wide public.

Theme Digitorial: Art under the Flag of the Reformation
Retrievable under http://reformation.staedelmuseum.de/en without cost, the new digitorial starts with fathoming the religious function of panel painting before the Reformation. The Städel’s fifteenth-century holdings comprise works by Rogier van der Weyden and the “Master of Flémalle”. Such paintings were revered as cult images in their era, catering to the believers’ pleasure in looking; worshipping images of saints was to bring salvation and reduce the time to be spent in the impending Purgatory.

Martin Luther refused to accept this convention. For him, salvation was solely based on inner faith and Christ. This was also why he rejected the worship of other saints. He equally opposed the selling of indulgencies practiced by the Church and came into conflict with the Pope. Luther not only relied on the power of his words for his reformatory plans; he knew about the impact of images and collaborated closely with the painter Lucas Cranach the Elder in Wittenberg. Consequently, a special focus of the digitorial is on Cranach’s works in the Städel’s collection.

The Reformation movement had a decisive impact on the understanding of art. Accordingly, the digitorial likewise centers on other countries where similar reformatory demands were brought forward at the same time. The battle for religious innovation merged with conflicts within the European power-political structure and showed its bloody side: Iconoclasm in the Protestant regions was followed by the Great Peasants’ Revolt as well as by the Huguenot Wars and the Dutch Revolt, which led to the Thirty Years’ War at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Flight and expulsion ensued, to which also artists fell victim.

The Church ceased to be an important patron of the arts particularly in Protestant regions. A free art market with private buyers emerged. Pictorial genres such as still life painting—exemplified by Georg Flegel’s or Jacob van Walscapelle’s works in the digitorial—received a new impetus. Reminding viewers of the transitoriness of life, still lifes appealed to the viewer’s virtuousness and thus fulfilled an educational function according to Protestant conviction.

Starting from Rome from the mid-fifteenth century on, the so-called Counter-Reformation formed in response to the reformatory movements in Europe. This development resulted in a fundamental reform of the Catholic Church itself. Art again came under the influence of theological decisions. The didactic style of Protestant art was countered with an emotional kind of painting that sounded out all possibilities of a mise-en-scène aimed at sensorily overpowering the believer, as works by Guido Reni or Cornelis de Vos evidence.

The consequences of the Reformation movement were still to be felt in the nineteenth century. Illustrating this, the theme digitorial explores an iconoclastic controversy in the early days of the Städelsches Kulturinstitut where conflicts between the Catholic-minded director Philipp Veit and the Protestant-oriented administration arose over acquisitions.

Finally, a work by Hermann Nitsch from 1989 demonstrates an artist’s engagement in archaic rituals and elements of Catholic religious practice. Nitsch emphasizes the shared roots of religious rituals. The digitorial clearly conveys that both the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation continue to exercise their influence to this day, informing art in manifold ways.

The digitorial comprises the following chapters:

1) Art Under the Flag of the Reformation
2) From Cult Image to Didactic Image
3) The Pope Under Fire from All Sides
4) A Bible for Everybody
5) Iconoclasm, War and the Art Market
6) Visual Overpowering—the Counter-Reformation in Art
7) An Iconoclastic Controversy at the Städel

Following the example of the Städel’s hitherto produced exhibition digitorials, the theme digitorial responsively presents enlightening information, overarching contexts, and backgrounds in a new visual way. The multimedia concatenation of image, sound, and text creates a multifaceted web of contents and allows for entirely new forms of presenting, narrating, and communicating art.

THEME DIGITORIAL: ART UNDER THE FLAG OF THE REFORMATION
http://reformation.staedelmuseum.de

Authors: Anne Sulzbach, Anna Huber, Chantal Eschenfelder, Jakob Schwerdtfeger

Made possible by: FAZIT-STIFTUNG

Social media: The Städel Museum uses the hashtag #Reformation to communicate its digitorial in the social media.

Städel Museum:
Information: www.staedelmuseum.de, info@staedelmuseum.de,
phone +49(0)69-605098-200, fax +49(0)69-605098-112
Visitor service: phone +49(0)69-605098-232, besucherdienst@staedelmuseum.de
Venue: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main