Images & Texts

Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717), a native of Frankfurt, was not only a highly prominent naturalist but also one of the most renowned artists of her time. The year 2017 marks the 300th anniversary of her death. On this occasion, the Städel Museum is presenting the special exhibition “Maria Sibylla Merian and the Tradition of Flower Depiction” from 11 October 2017 to 14 January 2018. The show will acquaint visitors with the fascinating and filigree world of flower and plant depiction in drawings and prints of the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries.
Developed in collaboration with the Kupferstichkabinett of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Technische Universität Berlin, the exhibition will feature major works by Maria Sibylla Merian in the context of flower depictions by her forerunners, contemporaries and successors, among them the famous Hortus Eystettensis by the pharmacist Basilius Besler (1561–1629) of Nuremberg, ornament engravings by Martin Schongauer (ca. 1445–1491), pharmacopeia of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, plant studies from the circle of Albrecht Dürer, and studies of nature by Georg Flegel (1566–1638) and Joris (Georg) Hoefnagel (1542–1600/01) of the period around 1600. Flower drawings by Bartholomäus Braun will also be on view, as will floral compositions by Barbara Regina Dietzsch (1706–1783) and her circle of the eighteenth century. “Maria Sibylla Merian and the Tradition of Flower Depiction” will present more than 150 works in all: sheets from the collections of the Städel and the Kupferstichkabinett, but also valuable loans from the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Sächsische Landes- und Universitätsbibliothek in Dresden, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and the Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg in Frankfurt.

The exhibition “Maria Sibylla Merian and the Tradition of Flower Depiction” is being sponsored by the Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain.

“Maria Sibylla Merian is one of Frankfurt am Main’s most famous daughters. It was here that she received her professional training, and here that decisive foundations were laid for her highly exceptional impact as a natural scientist and an artist. All the more delighted are we to have the opportunity presented us by this anniversary year to mount a comprehensive exhibition on Merian and the tradition of flower portrayal – to which she provided such important impulses – here at the Städel Museum”, comments Städel Museum director Philipp Demandt.

“The œuvre of Maria Sibylla Merian is in a class of its own. This results from the genuine and unresolvable ambiguity that at the same time accounts for the special appeal of her works: artistic and scientific aspects are inseparably intertwined in these depictions, which consistently strike a fine balance between high art and the scientific representation of detail”, adds Martin Sonnabend, head of the Städel Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings to 1750.

Maria Sibylla Merian
Maria Sibylla Merian is fascinating not only by virtue of her masterfully executed flower drawings, but also in view of her biography, which testifies to her will to assert herself as a woman in a patriarchal society. She was baptized in Frankfurt am Main on 4 April 1647. Her father, the draughtsman, printmaker and publisher Matthäus Merian the Elder (1593–1650), died when she was still a small child. In the workshop of her stepfather, the painter Jacob Marrel (1614–1681), the young Maria Sibylla trained as a flower painter in the seventeenth-century florilegium tradition. One of Georg Flegel’s few pupils, Marrel had come to specialize in flower depiction and was also active as an art dealer. Merian thus spent her youth in an environment that exposed her to the visual arts and the publishing trade, but also – through the practice of painting flowers – to the keen observation of nature. Maria Sibylla Merian grew up in a Calvinist family. This background and the city of Frankfurt were further significant factors in her development. A major European traffic hub, the free imperial city on the Main was one of the continent’s most important commercial centres, at whose trade fairs books, flowers and art – among many other goods – were bought and sold.
In 1665, Merian married Johann Andreas Graff (1636–1701), a pupil of Marrel’s. Shortly after the birth of their first daughter, the family moved to Nuremberg, Graff’s native town. There he sold maps and topographical views of buildings, and Merian also contributed to the family’s living: with flower paintings in the florilegium tradition, lessons for ladies in the embroidery and drawing of flowers, and the sale of drawing utensils and paints. Her first publication, the New Flower Book, accordingly contained decorative floral motifs intended for use as models for drawings or patterns for embroidery. She also continued to pursue her observations of nature, and in 1679 published her findings in the first volume of her work Caterpillars, Their Wondrous Transformation and Peculiar Nourishment from Flowers. With this book, Maria Sibylla Merian broke new scientific ground: there had never before been such a comprehensive, carefully documented and complete description of the metamorphosis of caterpillars taking the symbiotic relationship between the insects and their host plants into account. The Caterpillar Book not only made Merian famous but was also an economic success. After the death of her stepfather Jacob Marrel, Merian, her husband and their (meanwhile) two daughters moved back to Frankfurt, where her mother still lived, and where she published the second volume of the Caterpillar Book in 1683.
Not many years thereafter, Maria Sibylla Merian made the far-reaching decision to join the radically reformed Labadist community in Wiuwert, Holland, along with her two children and her mother. This brought about her separation, and ultimately her divorce, from her husband. After several years in the Labadist community, and following her mother’s death, Merian revoked her citizenship of Frankfurt and moved to Amsterdam, where she dealt in paints and painting and drawing utensils and collected and sold preserved animal specimens. At the end of the seventeenth century, accompanied by her younger daughter, she embarked on a journey to the Dutch colony of Suriname in South America – an undertaking as adventurous as it was expensive in those days. The two women’s stay in the foreign land, which included numerous expeditions to the rain forest, lasted nearly two years. Merian was thus the first ever to travel the northern South American country for purposes of natural history research, as well as the first woman to devote herself to the study of tropical flora and fauna. In 1705, after her return to Amsterdam, she published her treatise Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium in Latin and Dutch. A third volume of the Caterpillar Book came out shortly after her death on 13 January 1717. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), like Merian a native of Frankfurt, dedicated a few brief but fitting lines to her: in his view, her narrative depictions of plants and insects constantly oscillated “back and forth between art and science, between the contemplation of nature and painterly purposes”.

The exhibition
“Maria Sibylla Merian and the Tradition of Flower Depiction” features Merian’s artistic predecessors, whose tradition she built on, while also shedding light on what constitutes her independence within that tradition and showing how flower depiction developed after her, and under her influence. The exhibition narrative begins considerably before Merian’s own time with a large selection of floral depictions in illuminated books, early prints, engravings, and woodcut illustrations in herbals and pharmacopoeias of the fifteenth century. With his early flower portrayals, Georg Flegel (1566–1638) continued the pioneering depictive tradition – based on the study of nature – of Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) and circle, developed it further, and influenced his pupil Jacob Marrel, Merian’s stepfather. Likewise in Flegel’s day, Joris (Georg) Hoefnagel (1542–1600/01) – a native of Amsterdam who lived in Frankfurt for a time – produced emblematic flower and insect pictures, which his son Jacob Hoefnagel (1573–1632/35) then went on to publish in delicate engravings, thus making them accessible to a larger circle of artists and other interested persons. The show contrasts Hoefnagels’ small-scale artworks with what may have been the most ambitious publication of the time: the Hortus Eystettensis by the pharmacist Basilius Besler (1561–1629), published in 1613. This book would come to serve as a model for numerous florilegia. With the help of such compendia, garden owners could eternalize the wealth and botanical quality of their flower collections. Particularly in the seventeenth century, gardens and valuable plants were a precious asset, a circumstance to which the florilegia of the period – collections of splendid gouache drawings on vellum or exclusively printed volumes of large-scale coloured engravings – bear witness. Accompanied by two further examples – one with flower portraits by the floriegium painter Bartholomäus Braun (ca. 1626–1684) –, the multi-volume Florilegium of Count Johannes von Nassau-Idstein (1603–1677) is one of the show’s major highlights. A small part of this flower book, which has long been known and has already undergone thorough analysis, is in the holdings of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Two further albums, on the other hand, were only discovered a few years ago in the Städel library, having found their way into its holdings during a mid-nineteenth-century inventory and remained there ever since. The two splendid books, still clad in their original red velvet-covered bindings with fire-gilded fittings, were the first acquisition made for the Städel drawing collection. The exhibition is presenting them to the public – and the accompanying catalogue is publishing them – for the first time. Maria Sibylla Merian will hold pride of place in the exhibition with a group of extremely rare early works as well as a number of drawings bearing a direct relation to her scientific publications such as her flower books and the Caterpillar Book. New findings will be presented on the making of the precious gouache drawings on vellum for the Caterpillar Book. Also on view are several works whose traditional attribution to Maria Sibylla Merian has been questioned or disproved in recent years – an indication of the fact that her œuvre has yet to be treated to comprehensive critical study. After Merian, the show continues with the artistic flower depiction of the eighteenth century, represented by the Dietzsches, an artists’ family of Nuremberg whose most prominent member was Barbara Regina Dietzsch (1706–1783). Finally, it offers a look ahead to the incorporation of plant depictions in landscape painting as well as the process by which natural history details took on a life of their own in the study sheets of early German Romanticism.

“Maria Sibylla Merian and the Tradition of Flower Depiction” is accompanied by an extensive museum education programme ranging from general and evening guided tours and events in the framework of the Städel’s “Kunst und Religion”, “Barrierefreies Kunsterlebnis” and “KUNSTKOLLEG” series to studio and school-holiday courses for children. The programme will also feature various events in cooperation with the Frankfurt Palmengarten: ““With a calm hand and a practised eye” in the “KUNSTKOLLEG Aktiv” series (21 October 2017), a guided tour of the Bromeliad House followed by a drawing course taught by the botanical painter Sue Hénon (4 November 2017), a guest commentary with Karin Wittstock, who is in charge of the Palmengarten’s cultural programme (19 November 2017), and a guided tour on the topic of “Maria Sibylla Merian and the Flora of Suriname” with Palmengarten custodian Hilke Steinecke (22 November 2017). On Wednesday, 8 November 2017, the Städel Museum will moreover present a reading with Barbara Beuys in the Metzler Hall, at which the author will introduce her biography of the artist Maria Sibylla Merian recently published by the Insel Verlag. For the complete framework programme, see www.staedelmuseum.de. (Most of these events will be in German.)


Maria Sibylla Merian
And the Tradition of Flower Depiction

Curators: Dr Martin Sonnabend (Head of the Collection of Prints and Drawings to 1750, Städel Museum), Dr Michael Roth (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett)
Exhibition dates: 11 October 2017 to 14 January 2018
Press preview: Monday, 9 October 2017, 12 noon
Location: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main

Catalogue: To accompany the exhibition, the Hirmer Verlag has published a catalogue with 256 pages and approx. 178 illustrations, edited by Michael Roth, Magdalena Bushart and Martin Sonnabend with assistance from Catalina Heroven, with a foreword by Heinrich Schulze Altcappenberg and Philipp Demandt. In German. 29.90 euros (museum edition)

Information: www.staedelmuseum.de, info@staedelmuseum.de, telephone +49(0)69-605098-200, fax +49(0)69-605098-112
Visitor services: telephone +49(0)69-605098-232, besucherdienst@staedelmuseum.de
Opening hours: Tue, Wed, Sat, Sun 10 am – 6 pm, Thu + Fri 10 am – 9 pm, closed Mondays
Special opening hours: 31 Oct. 2017, 10 am – 6 pm; 24 Dec. 2017 closed; 25, 26 Dec. 2017, 10 am – 6 pm; 31 Dec. 2017 closed; 1 Jan. 2018, 11 am – 6 pm; 8 Jan. 2018, 10 am – 6 pm

Admission: Tue–Fri: 14 euros, reduced 12 euros; Sat, Sun and holidays: 16 euros, reduced 14 euros; families 24 euros, free admission for children up to twelve years of age. Groups of at least ten persons who would normally be charged the full admission fee: reduced admission 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.

General guided tours of the exhibition: Fri 6 pm, Sun 2 pm. The number of participants is limited; no previous reservations necessary.

Accompanying programme (excerpt):
KUNSTKOLLEG Aktiv: “With a calm hand and a practised eye”, 21 October 2017, 1 to 5 pm
Maria Sibylla Merian. “Pineapple with Cockroach”: drawing course with guided tour in the Palmengarten, 4 November 2017, 1 to 5 pm, Palmengarten Frankfurt
Guest commentary with Karin Wittstock: “Botanical Painting Between Art and Science”, 19 November 2017, 12 noon, Städel Museum
“Maria Sibylla Merian and the Flora of Suriname”: guided tour in the Palmengarten with Palmengarten custodian Hilke Steinecke, 22 November 2017, 6 pm
Reading with Barbara Beuys, 8 November 2017, 7 pm (admission from 6.30 pm), Metzler Hall, Städel Museum, admission: 14 euros, reduced 12 euros, tickets available online from mid-September at tickets.staedelmuseum.de
(Most of these events will be in German.)

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

Sponsored by: Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain

From 13 September 2017 to 14 January 2018, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt will be presenting two outstanding artists – Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) – in an exhibition that is the first in Germany to bring these key modernist masters together. At the heart of the special exhibition “Matisse – Bonnard. ‘Long Live Painting!’” is the friendship between the two French artists which lasted for over forty years. Both painters shared a preference for the same range of subjects: interiors, still lifes, landscapes and the female nude. With a selection of more than 120 paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints, the exhibition opens 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 selection of works is enriched by a series of photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, who visited the two painters in their country houses on the French Riviera in 1944.

For this year’s major autumn show, the Städel has been able to secure a wide range of outstanding loans from internationally renowned collections, among them the Art Institute of Chicago, Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the State Hermitage in Saint Petersburg and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Also on display will be a host of major works from private collections, which are not normally accessible to the public. An absolute highlight among these are the two paintings which the artists owned from one another: Pierre Bonnard’s Evening in the Living Room (1907, private collection) and Henri Matisse’s The Open Window (1911, private collection). They are being shown together for the first time here in Frankfurt. Another exhibition highlight is Matisse’s Large Reclining Nude of 1935, on loan from the Baltimore Museum of Art, which has not been seen in Germany for more than thirty years. This iconic nude was a milestone on the artist’s journey towards an aesthetic of highly simplified forms and shows his studio assistant and last important model, Lydia Delectorskaya. It is very likely that the painting was inspired by Bonnard’s Reclining Nude against a White and Blue Plaid (ca. 1909), which it closely resembles in composition, and which has been in the collection of the Städel Museum since 1988. The opportunity to show these two paintings in dialogue was key to the planning of this project.

The exhibition is sponsored by the multinational bank Société Générale and supported by the Städelscher Museums-Verein as well as the Georg and Franziska Speyer Foundation.

“Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard are represented in our collection by two marvellous paintings: a nude by Bonnard and a still life by Matisse,” says Philipp Demandt, Director of the Städel Museum. “Taking these two paintings as the starting point, our main exhibition for this year reveals a visual interplay between these two artists, whose influence on each other becomes unmistakable when their works are seen side by side. The exhibition continues the Städel’s successful series, where we present our visitors not only with unique masterpieces but also with new and fresh perspectives on the major protagonists of modern art.”

The exhibition has been curated by Felix Krämer, who will be taking up the post of Director at the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf from October, and co-curator Daniel Zamani (Städel Museum). “Following the exhibition 'Monet and the Birth of Impressionism' (2015), the Städel Museum is turning to another exciting chapter in the history of French art: the friendship between Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard, which lasted over 40 years,” explains Krämer. “The exhibition brings out the creative dialogue between these two exceptional artists. It has been a long time since so many of their major works have been seen in Germany.” As Zamani points out, “Both artists developed an unmistakable and individual pictorial language, driven by their unremitting dedication to their work and life-long delight in experimentation. Even during their own lifetime Matisse and Bonnard were seen as two of the most important pioneers of modern art. With Bonnard’s paintings, in particular, it is only when you come face to face with the originals that you become aware of their full fascination. It is worth visiting the Städel just for that.”

The title of the exhibition, Long Live Painting!, is based on the programmatic exclamation “Vive la peinture!” with which Matisse saluted his friend Bonnard on 13 August 1925. Those three words on a postcard from Amsterdam were the beginning of a correspondence that went on for more than twenty years and that testifies to the depth of the respect and appreciation the two artists felt for each other. In the first decade of the twentieth century, both artists left Paris, then the capital of the avant-garde, for the Côte d’Azur, where they continued to cement their reputation as protagonists of the European art scene. Despite the near-contiguity of their lives and careers, art historians tend to correlate the two artists with opposing trends: Bonnard’s breezy, loose brushwork and scintillating soft pastels give rise to the construct of the painter as the last great heir of Impressionism, while Matisse’s preference for strong colours and flat, heavily contoured compositions earn him the accolade of being named a pioneer of twentieth-century abstraction.

In thematic chapters, the exhibition focuses on different interpretations of major genres: interiors, still lifes, landscapes and nudes. The aim of presenting Matisse and Bonnard together is to allow comparative contemplation, to create a space in which commonalities and differences emerge – but not to engender any kind of competition. Such a thing would be quite at odds with the relationship between the two artists. “When I think of you, I think of a mind cleansed of every old aesthetic convention, and it is that alone that permits a direct view of nature, the greatest joy that can befall a painter. I enjoy a little of that, thanks to you” wrote Bonnard to Matisse in January 1940. The value which the latter attached to the judgement of his friend is documented in a letter of November of the same year: “I need to see someone, and you’re the one I want to see.” Matisse did not want to discuss his pictures with anyone else. Seldom have two artists complemented one another so well.

Exhibition tour
The exhibition extends over two floors and is arranged around a series of different artistic themes: interiors, landscapes/nature, still lifes and women/the nude. An introductory section, occupying the first rooms on the ground floor of the exhibition, is devoted to the friendship between the two artists, featuring portraits by the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, self-portraits, and the two works painted by one artist and owned by the other.

The following rooms are devoted to interiors and, in particular, to the motif of the window, where the close exchange of ideas between the two artist-friends is strikingly apparent. Among the outstanding works here are Bonnard’s paintings The Bowl of Milk (ca. 1919) and The Window (1925), both from the Tate Modern in London, and Matisse’s Large Red Interior (1948), one of his last iconic works in oil, which is on loan from the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The last room on the ground floor is devoted to the letters exchanged between the two artists, a selection of which can be heard in dramatised readings, and all of which can be digitally viewed.

Upstairs, the exhibition continues with the theme of landscape and nature, in which the lifelong fascination of both artists with the light and atmosphere of the French Riviera plays an important role. Here, a highlight of the exhibition is Bonnard’s The Sun-Filled Terrace (1939–1946, private collection). The painting is unusual because of its extremely horizontal format. It shows a terrace, on either side of which a garden landscape stretches away in vibrant, almost pink tones. While many of Bonnard’s late works depict views taken straight from the surroundings of his home at Le Bosquet, this large-scale work has the feeling of a timeless idyll. Matisse was deeply impressed when he saw the as yet unfinished composition in his friend’s studio. In January 1940 he wrote to him: “Your work is still clear in my memory, in all its details. Never before has it seemed to me so complete, and I can still picture quite distinctly the decorative passage with the rose branches. I like it very much.”

Another theme in which the dialogue between the two painters is reflected is still life. Like few other artists of their generation Bonnard and Matisse harboured a lifelong fascination with this centuries-old genre. Taking inspiration from predecessors such as Jean Siméon Chardin and Paul Cézanne, they aimed to release it from a naturalistic depiction of everyday objects and instead used it as a starting point for radical artistic experimentation with colour and form. The works on show here include Matisse’s still life from the Städel Museum, Flowers and Ceramic Plate (1913) – an early masterpiece and a firm favourite of visitors to the collection – and Bonnard’s luminous Bouquet of Mimosas (ca. 1945, private collection), which makes a perfect pendant to it. As in many paintings in Bonnard’s late, almost abstract style, paint itself seems to be the real subject of the composition, in which the thickly applied hues of yellow and orange blend the vibrantly glowing flowers with the surrounding interior.

In their approaches to the female nude, both artists developed their respective “signature paintings": Bonnard’s were sensuous nudes in baths or boudoirs, while Matisse’s were dreamlike odalisques, women of the harem in exotic settings. Bonnard’s model is typically his wife, Marthe, whom he immortalised in almost 400 paintings over a period of more than 50 years and whom he continued to paint even after her death. Her perpetually youthful body appears again and again in oneiric bathing pictures, permeated with a dreamlike and often disconcerting atmosphere of mystery. Matisse’s odalisques are completely different in tone – works of intimate theatricality, full of shimmering colour, where figure and interior are meshed together in vividly ornamental compositions that give vibrant expression to the artist’s vision of an art of perfect harmony.
The exhibition also allows insight into the creative process behind one of Matisse’s masterpieces, Large Reclining Nude. Using a camera, the artist documented the development of the painting from May to October 1935. In a total of 22 black-and-white photographs, we can see how he gradually reworked essential elements of the composition, continually simplifying it and making it and rendering its elements more planar. This work is also one of the very first oil paintings where Matisse used cut-out stripes of paper as aids to composition – a technique which was to become decisive for his late work and which completely superseded his painting on canvas after 1948. Perhaps the best-known work to have been created using these so-called “cut-outs” is Matisse’s artist’s book Jazz (1947), devoted to the brightly-coloured world of the circus, clowns, and the theatre, which is also on display in the exhibition.

MATISSE – BONNARD. “LONG LIVE PAINTING!”
GENERAL INFORMATION

Exhibition duration: 13 September 2017 to 14 January 2018
Curator: Dr. Felix Krämer (Head of Modern Art, Städel Museum)
Co-curator: Dr. Daniel Zamani (Assistant Curator of Modern Art, Städel Museum)
Press preview: Tuesday, 12 September 2017, 11 am

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

Opening hours: Tue, Wed, Sat, Sun & public holidays: 10 am–6 pm, Thurs & Fri: 10 am–9 pm, Mon: closed
Special opening hours: Tue, 3.10.; Tue, 31.10.; Mon 25.12; Tue 26.12; Mon 8.1.2018: 10 am–6 pm; Mon, 1.1.2018: 11 am–6 pm; closed: Sun 24.12.; Sun. 31.12.

Admission: €14; concessions: €12; Sat, Sun, public holidays: €16, concessions: €14; family ticket: €24; free entry for children under 12; groups of more than 10 regular-admission paying people: reduced per person rate. Groups must give notice of visit in advance by calling +49 (0)69-605098-200 or emailing info@staedelmuseum.de.
Members of the Städelscher Museums-Verein enjoy free admission to the special exhibition.

Introductory tours of the exhibition: Tue 3 pm, Wed 1 pm, Thurs 6 pm, Fri 7 pm, Sat 4 pm and Sun 12 pm. On all public holidays (3.10., 31.10., 25.12, 26.12., 1.1.) as well as on 8.1. the tours take place at 4 pm. Places are limited. Tickets for the tours are available from the ticket desk, two hours before the tour is due to commence, priced €5. A portion of tickets for the introductory tours is available via our relaunched online ticketshop; the price of admission is combined in the special price of €18, to book, go to: tickets.staedelmuseum.de.

Catalogue: Accompanying the exhibition, a catalogue with 240 pages and 208 colour illustrations will be published by Prestel. It will include contributions by Dita Amory, Jenny Graser, Margrit Hahnloser-Ingold, Iris Hasler, Felix Krämer, Elena Schroll, Beate Söntgen, and Daniel Zamani. German edition/English edition, €39.90 (museum edition).
Accompanying booklet: a booklet to accompany the exhibition is available in German, price €7.50.

Audiotour and Städel App: An audiotour to the exhibition is available in German and English. The German guide is voiced by the actress Sophie Rois. One audiotour costs €4, two audiotours cost €7. As well as renting the audio equipment at the exhibition, you can download the audiotour conveniently at home with the Städel App. The app is available for free from Google Play and the Apple App Store and downloading the audioguide to current IOS and Android smartphones costs €1: http://www.staedelmuseum.de/de/angebote/staedel-app. The audioguide is supported by the Georg and Franziska Speyer Foundation.

Digitorial: The Digitorial has been made possible by the Aventis Foundation. It can be downloaded at: matissebonnard.staedelmuseum.de/en.

Social Media: The Städel Museum posts updates on the exhibition on social-media platforms using the hashtags #MatisseBonnard and #Staedel.

Exhibition sponsors and partners

Sponsored by: Société Générale, Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V.
With additional support from: Georg und Franziska Speyer’sche Hochschulstiftung
Media partners: Süddeutsche Zeitung, Media Frankfurt, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, ARTE, WirtschaftsWoche, Verkehrsgesellschaft Frankfurt Main
Cultural partner: hr2-kultur

From 22 June to 10 September 2017, the Städel Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings will devote its exhibition hall to the diversity of nineteenth-century French lithography. The invention of this entirely new method of “stone printing” at the end of the eighteenth century ushered in a new era in the reproduction of images. In comparison to older printmaking methods, the range of expressive means offered by lithography was wider, the printing process faster, and the editions larger. In France, prominent artists began experimenting with the new technique around 1820, and over the course of the nineteenth century decisively expanded its artistic possibilities.
The spectrum of works on view includes eloquent compositions by Théodore Géricault, one of the rare lithographs Goya produced during the 1820s in exile in Bordeaux, Eugène Delacroix’s Goethe and Shakespeare illustrations and Honoré Daumier’s comments on politics and society in the form of newspaper caricatures. The show also features Édouard Manet’s virtuoso inventions, Symbolist works by Rodolphe Bresdin and Odilon Redon, and masterworks of colour lithography by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the “Nabis” Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard dating from the end of the nineteenth century. The works on display, numbering about ninety in all, represent highlights of this century and technique and provide insights into the superb holdings of the Städel’s Department of Prints and Drawings. Fifteen new acquisitions of the past years are also on exhibit.

“Our summer exhibition of masterworks of nineteenth-century French lithography shines a spotlight on the considerable quality of the Städel Museum’s collection of prints and drawings. At the same time, it offers a striking impression of our continual efforts to expand our holdings in this area”, comments Städel director Philipp Demandt.

Martin Sonnabend, head of the collection of prints and drawings to 1750 at the Städel Museum, adds: “It is impossible to fully grasp the rich manifestations of nineteenth-century French artistic lithography without an awareness of the technical, economic and artistic advantages of this completely novel method for producing and reproducing images. One of the exhibition’s chief aims is therefore to shed light on the relationships between the works and their production so as to sharpen the viewers’ perception of these works.”

The technique
Alois Senefelder of Munich invented lithography in 1798. Unlike relief and intaglio printing (e.g. woodcut and engraving), it is a planographic method. The areas to be printed and those not to be printed are on the same plane, and separated from one another chemically, through the differing qualities of fat and water. In the nineteenth century, finely pored limestone – which possesses all the physical properties required for the process – was used as a printing plate. The artists drew the image directly on the polished stone surface. As they could choose freely between crayon, pen or brush, they had a wide range of expressive possibilities at their disposal. What is more, because lithography allowed the fast and efficient production of large editions, it played a significant role in the industrial mass reproduction of images that developed over the course of the nineteenth century. At first it was used primarily to print maps and sheet music (Senefelder himself was a singer, musician and composer), and then – in the early nineteenth century – increasingly for pictorial images, especially in the areas of illustration, caricature and reproduction. The first artistically significant lithographs originated in the second decade of the century, above all in France.

The exhibition
“Géricault to Toulouse-Lautrec. French Lithographs of the Nineteenth Century” begins with Francisco de Goya (1746–1828). Goya was already over seventy when he first employed the new printmaking technique for his art. In 1824 he had retreated to Bordeaux in Southern France to escape the repressions of the Spanish restoration government. There he produced the four sheets of the Bulls of Bordeaux series (1825), his only lithographs ever to be published in an edition (of 100 copies each). Goya used crayon to draw directly on the stone, and his Bulls are among the early masterworks in the new technique. Thanks to an acquisition made in 2013, the Städel museum is fortunate enough to have one of these rare and much sought-after lithographs in its holdings.
Over the course of his brief career, Théodore Géricault (1791–1824) produced nearly eighty lithographs in addition to his paintings and drawings. In many cases he used the medium for experiments in printmaking, as was the case with the monumental Retour de Russie (Return from Russia, 1818). His rare Boxeurs (Boxers) – one of Géricault’s early print masterpieces – dates from the same year. In it the artist, who outspokenly advocated the liberation of slaves, depicted the black and the white boxers as equal contenders. During his prolonged stay in London in 1820 and 1821, Géricault had his series of Various Subjects (1821) published by Charles Hullmandel (1789–1850), a prominent pioneer in the field of lithography.
After Goya and Géricault, Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) is the third prominent artist figure among the early lithographers. The painter began creating his first dynamic and innovative works in the technique around 1825. In the context of his lithographic endeavours, he was drawn to demonic aspects in Shakespeare and Goethe (he produced 17 lithographic illustrations on the latter’s Faust in the 1820s alone) as well as to the beauty and ferocity of wild animals, as seen, for instance, in Lion de l’Atlas (Atlas’s Lion, 1829).
The invention of lithography brought in its wake a flowering of a type of topographical illustration known as the travel picture. Influenced by English examples, the genre began to spread in France around 1820. The lithography technique permitted the quick and economical production of scenes of famous and beautiful sights with the appearance of great authenticity – even to the point of virtually photographic realism – as well as their publication in, for example, the impressive Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France (Picturesque and Romantic Journeys in Old France). The aim of these volumes was to publish all of France’s monuments of nature and art. After acquainting the visitor with travel pictures by such artists as Richard Parkes Bonington (1802–1828) or Eugène Isabey (1803–1886/1887), the exhibition turns to the genre of newspaper illustrations. Particularly in the areas of illustration and caricature, the new printmaking technique enabled skilled draughtsmen to market striking images in the form of prints with little effort. The most prominent and diverse exponent of the art of caricature in nineteenth-century France was undeniably Honoré Daumier (1808–1879). He never enjoyed academic training; instead, it was lithography and the emergence of the illustrated satirical newspaper that paved his way to a career as a newspaper caricaturist that earned him a living for more than four decades. Whereas he initially concentrated on political topics, a tightening of the press laws later compelled him to take up genre depiction. His œuvre encompasses a staggering 4,000 lithographs, distinguished as much by their contemporary historical character as by their high and timeless artistic value.
Although Édouard Manet (1832–1883) worked with the lithography technique only briefly, his works in this medium exhibit a remarkable degree of idiosyncrasy and the utmost formal liberty. This is evident in, among other examples, Les courses (The Races, 1872) and the Portrait of Berthe Morisot (1872).
Odilon Redon (1840–1916), an exponent of Symbolism, produced a total of some 200 lithographs that represent a decisive step forward in the development of the printmaking technique as an artistic medium in its own right. Particularly worthy of note is his development of the blacks – which he endowed with an unmistakable, velvety materiality – as a special strength and distinguishing feature of lithography. A striking case in point is his Pégase captif (Captive Pegasus, 1889).
The emergence of colour lithography at the end of the nineteenth century introduced new impulses to the artistic exploration of the medium. One chief factor in the renewed appreciation of art prints was the growing interest in culture within the rapidly developing metropolitan society of Paris. Even people of more modest means began to collect art, and in that way to partake of contemporary art production. The art dealer Ambroise Vollard (1865–1939) responded very cleverly to the needs of the new clientele, and in the 1890s persuaded both Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) and Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) to work with colour lithography. In the same decade, Vollard also commissioned four young artists – Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940), Maurice Denis (1870–1943) and Ker Xavier Roussel (1867–1944) – each to produce a lithograph portfolio with the aim of acquainting a larger public with their work. Bonnard’s portfolio, entitled Quelques aspects de la vie de Paris (1895–1899), is made up of prints showing everyday segments of reality and situations of an unspectacular nature but possessing the charm and gentle humour of intimacy. Vuillard’s Paysages et intérieurs (1899) series manifests his well-developed sense of surface structures that contributes decisively to the impression of density and concentration while at the same time never taking on the character of material. The exhibition features the complete series by Vuillard, thirteen prints in all, as well as excerpts from the portfolios by Bonnard, Denis and Roussel.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) brings the presentation to a close – an artist who executed an impressive 350 colour and black-and-white lithographs. He considered lithography a means of artistic expression entirely on a par with painting, and it contributed more to his fame during his lifetime – and his popularity ever since – than his painted works. In general, Toulouse-Lautrec was little interested in the distinction between free and applied art: he produced his lithographic works for use as posters, menus or theatre programmes as well as for independent editions that sold to a growing circle of devotees.


Géricault to Toulouse-Lautrec. French Lithographs of the Nineteenth Century

Curator: Dr Martin Sonnabend (Head of the Collection of Prints and Drawings to 1750, Städel Museum)
Exhibition dates: 22 June to 10 September 2017
Press preview: Wednesday, 21 June 2017, 11 am

Information: www.staedelmuseum.de, info@staedelmuseum.de, telephone +49(0)69-605098-200, fax +49(0)69-605098-112
Visitor services: telephone +49(0)69-605098-232, besucherdienst@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 euros, reduced 12 euros, families 24 euros; free admission for children under the age of twelve. Groups of at least ten persons: reduced admission 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.

General guided tours of the exhibition: Sun 2 pm. The number of participants is limited; no prior booking required.

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

From 27 April to 13 August 2017, the Städel Museum is staging a comprehensive survey on the Becher Class at the Düsseldorf art academy and the major paradigm shift in the medium of artistic photography with which the Bechers and their students are associated. With the aid of some 200 photographs by Volker Döhne, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Tata Ronkholz, Thomas Ruff, Jörg Sasse, Thomas Struth and Petra Wunderlich – a group of whom some enjoy international renown and others are due for rediscovery –, the exhibition will examine the influence exerted by Bernd and Hilla Becher on their students at the Düsseldorf school. What unites the students’ works with those of their teachers? How do they differ? Is there really such a thing as the “Becher School”, or is it ‘merely’ a matter of several highly successful photographers who happened to be studying at the ‘right place’ at an especially propitious moment in history? And how have those artists influenced our present conception of what a picture is? Taking the artist duo’s work as a point of departure, the exhibition “Photographs Become Pictures. The Becher Class” will acquaint viewers with the radical changes in the mesium of artistic photography that became manifest in the works of the Becher pupils in the eighties and above all the nineties, and investigate the art-historical impact of this development up to the very present. It will feature major large-scale works as well as key early endeavours by the members of what is presumably the most influential generation of German photographers in the field of fine art.

The students of the first in a long line of Becher Classes at the Düsseldorfer art academy introduced elementary changes to contemporary art’s aesthetic, media and economic contexts. They not only contributed decisively to shaping international photography in the 1990s, but also fundamentally redefined the status and perception of artistic photography in general. Their works can be considered as one of the most self-confident emancipations of photography as art in the mediums history, while at the same time reflecting the (not merely digital) moment when the boundaries between the media dissolve.

The presentation is being sponsored by the DZ BANK AG.

“Bernd and Hilla Becher’s first – meanwhile world-famous – students played a tremendously important role in establishing photography as an expressive medium on a par with other art forms. The nine artists featured in our show occupy a realm where the distinction between painting and photography is no longer clear. The permeability of the boundary between the media is deliberate in their work, and in that respect they mirror one of the key focuses of the Städel Museum’s collection of contemporary art”, observes Städel director Dr Philipp Demandt.

And exhibition curator Dr Martin Engler adds: “What the teachings of Bernd and Hilla Becher sparked off – and their students developed further – is a new conception of the artwork according to which the boundaries between sculpture, painting and photography dissolve in terms of media and aesthetics alike. In other words, in the very moment in history when photography emancipated itself to become an independent medium, it sounded its own death knell.”

The founding of a chair for artistic photography at the Düsseldorf art academy in 1976 provided perhaps the single most important impulse for a change in how the medium of photography was perceived. In close cooperation with his wife Hilla Becher, Bernd Becher held that chair until 1996. Even before their appointment to the Düsseldorf school, the Bechers had been taking pictures of historical industrial architecture, subscribing to a work concept that exceeded the scope of a common documantary approach in photography. They portrayed mining headframes, blast furnaces, gas tanks, water towers and other testimonies to a vanishing industrial culture – frontally, in central perspective, with fascinating depth of field, and where possible before the backdrop of a uniformly grey sky. They arranged the individual shots in grids to form large-scale tableaus they called typologies. The concern here was no longer merely the illustration of reality, but its perception. Reality could no longer be depicted singly, but only in a multiplicity of simultaneous images. From the formal aesthetic point of view, the staging of the pictorial subjects was now far more than documentary in nature. The affinity to minimal and concept art – evident in the rigour of the pictorial vocabulary, the industrial aesthetic and the new perception of a work in stages – is unmistakable.

Especially in their early work, the students of the first Becher Class explored their teachers’ artistic strategy with great intensity. Yet as they continued to pursue it in the nineties, they did so ever more independently, and in their own highly individual styles. With the aid of various strategies in terms of scale, presentation and motif, and not least of all with abstract pictorial inventions provoked by digital image techniques, they took the interpenetration of the mediums of painting and photography to an extreme. The result was a new concept of the picture that blurs aesthetic and media distinctions. “The dissolution of media boundaries, but also the use of technical innovations, are characteristic of the works of the first Becher Class. It is here that the impact of a changing media culture is felt”, explains Dr Jana Baumann, the co-curator of the exhibition.

A show devoted to such a complex phenomenon on the one hand, and such productive teaching activities on the other, must inevitably be limited in scope. “Photographs Become Pictures” concentrates deliberately on the students of the early years of the Becher Class, beginning with Höfer, Döhne, Hütte and Struth in 1976 and ending with the completion of Gursky’s and Sasse’s studies in 1987/1988. In retrospect, it is precisely in the heterogeneity of the first Becher Class – with its wide range of approaches that have influenced our present-day understanding of the pictorial image – that the success of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s teachings is evident.

Candida Höfer (b. 1944) is known above all for her pictures of public interiors such as libraries, universities, museums and waiting rooms. Nevertheless, the purely documentary aspect is ultimately of secondary importance to her, as is also true of her teachers. Particularly when she turned to colour photography, she began producing iconically clear shots of meaning-charged interiors extremely striking in their rigorous aesthetic. In composition, repetition and rhythm as well as the sculptural emphasis, Höfer’s formal staging of her interiors is reminiscent of the Becher typologies.
A distinct affinity to the typologies is also evident in early street shots by Thomas Struth (b. 1954), such as West Broadway, Tribeca, New York (1978) or Sommerstrasse, Düsseldorf (1980). He proceeded in a manner similar to his teachers, but broadened his spectrum of motifs. He is concerned in his work with cultural structures; in addition to streets he also depicts museums or religious cult sites and portrays families. With the aid of social and ethnological allusions he reveals orders and interrelationships, thus achieving a universal survey of human and their lifeworld in imagery.
Petra Wunderlich’s (b. 1954) black-and-white series depict details of churches or quarries that the artist has introduced to a new, abstract compositional framework. By this method she reduces architecture visually to its stereometric tectonics in such a way that elementary architectonic forms unexpectedly emerge from the “broken” surfaces of nature. Wunderlich’s photographs, like those by the Bechers, can be read as sociological and historical testimonies.
The workgroups of Volker Döhne (b. 1953) closely resemble Bernd and Hilla Bechers’ typologies with regard to concept and motif alike. He developed series such as Small-Scale Iron Industry (1977/78) or Small Railway Bridges and Underpasses in the Bergisches and Märkisches Land (1979). With his experimental Colour (1979) series, he then emancipated himself from his teachers.
Tata Ronkholz (1940–1997) was interested primarily in factory gates, shop windows, beverage kiosks and snack bars, which she photographed in the even light of grey days. Many aspects of these works are strongly reminiscent of the Becher photographs: the consistent placement of the subject at the pictorial centre, the unchanging size of the prints, but also the serial, typologically comparative approach.
Thomas Ruff (b. 1958) is likewise deeply indebted to his teachers’ serial method, which we encounter in his work in ever-different formulations. His portraits as well as the strongly enlarged nocturnal shots of, in part, found material, convey his fundamentally sceptical attitude towards photography’s claim to truth and documentation. His persistent investigations of new pictorial sources and technologies are perhaps the most impressive demonstrations of the manner in which Ruff continues the approach of Bernd and Hilla Becher.
Axel Hütte’s (b. 1951) early architectural details investigate social situations using a mode of photographic expression distinguished by distance and anonymity. Within this context, he devotes himself as much to spoiled landscapes as to supposedly untouched nature which nevertheless has always been formed by human intervention. A conspicuous aspect of his work is the strong reference to historical landscape painting, whose formal compositional principles he both copies and deconstructs. Whereas the Bechers directed their attention to the sculptural or conceptual potential of their pictures, Hütte focusses on painting as the leading medium of modern art.
Jörg Sasse (b. 1962) initially devoted himself to highly artificial and at the same time prosaic arrangements of petit-bourgeois domestic culture. His later “tableaus” represent a virtual antithesis to the reductive rigour of these early works. Using digital and analogue techniques alike, he began processing found pictures as well as images of his own making, in which context he blurred the distinction between painting and photograph beyond recognition.
Andreas Gursky’s (b. 1955) early photographs are likewise characterised by a keen interest in everyday surroundings – the private as well as the public sphere, the context of work as well as leisure time. Like Sasse, he investigates the aesthetic boundary between photographic and painterly image production. By means of digital manipulations he uses to duplicate and mount the pictorial motif to the point of abstraction, he creates perplexing pictorial architectures that merge construction and reality in large-scale colour prints.

The development of the Becher Class shows how concept art’s expanding notion of the artwork led to a new concept of the pictorial including photgraphy. What the teachers introduced in rudiments was taken by their students and the following generation of artists to a momentous change in the picturing of reality. The realization that photography cannot reproduce reality impartially does not detract from the medium. On the contrary, it means an enhancement in terms of artistic potential. What is more, the lack of focus in the portrayal of reality – in the literal and figurative sense alike – enriches photography’s complexity. It is not least of digital changes that enables innovative pictorial invention. Yet the boundaries of the photographic image also became fluid in the development from individual work to typology and series, and from detail to overall image. The answer to all questions about the significance, classification, doctrine and conception of what we refer to as the “Becher School” can thus be found in an insight as simple as it is surprising: in the very moment in history when photography emancipated itself to become an independent medium, it sounded its own death knell.

Photographs become Pictures. The Becher Class

Featured artists: Bernd and Hilla Becher, Volker Döhne, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Tata Ronkholz, Thomas Ruff, Jörg Sasse, Thomas Struth, Petra Wunderlich

Curator: Dr Martin Engler, Head of the Collection of Contemporary Art, Städel Museum
Co-curator: Dr Jana Baumann, Städel Museum
Exhibition dates: 27 April to 13 August 2017
Press preview: Wednesday, 26. April 2017, 11 am
Location: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt

Catalogue: To accompany the exhibition, the Hirmer Verlag is publishing a catalogue with a foreword by Philipp Demandt, essays by Alexander Alberro, Jana Baumann, Martin Engler and Steffen Siegel, and texts by Lukas Engert, Iris Hasler, Markus Kramer and Kristin Schrader. 256 pages and approx. 178 illustrations. In German. 34.90 EUR (museum edition)

Information: www.staedelmuseum.de, info@staedelmuseum.de, telephone +49(0)69-605098-200, fax +49(0)69-605098-112
Visitor services: telephone +49(0)69-605098-232, besucherdienst@staedelmuseum.de
Opening hours: Tue, Wed, Sat, Sun + holidays 10 am – 6 pm, Thu + Fri 10 am – 9 pm, Mondays closed
Special opening hours: 1 May, 10 am – 6 pm; 25 May, 10 am – 6 pm; 4 Jun, 10 am – 6 pm; 5 Jun, 10 am – 6 pm; 15 Jun, 10 am – 6 pm
Admission: 14 euros, reduced 12 euros, families 24 euros; free admission for children up to twelve years of age. Groups of at least ten persons: reduced admission 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.

Digitorial: Starting on 5 April 2017, an interactive digitorial, elaborately designed to provide comprehensive insights into the exhibition, will be available at becherklasse.staedelmuseum.de. The digitorial is being made possible by the Aventis Foundation.

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

General guided tours of the exhibition: Thu 7 pm, Sat 4 pm and Mon, 1 May, Thu, 25 May, Mon, 5 Jun, Thu, 15 Jun 4 pm. The number of participants is limited.

Sponsored by: DZ BANK AG

The Städel Museum’s programme for 2017 kicks off with an exhibition looking at the representation of spatial concepts in drawing and printmaking. From 15 February to 14 May, "Into the Third Dimension: Spatial Concepts on Paper from the Bauhaus to the Present" will be shown in the Exhibition Hall of the museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings. The show examines how such things as delineation, form, and volume, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ – characteristics that define space and aid orientation – are represented in drawing and printmaking, in essence on flat, two-dimensional surfaces. The exhibition takes visitors on a tour beginning with the geometric compositions created in 1923 by El Lissitzky and László Moholy-Nagy, through to examples of printmaking in contemporary conceptual art. It encompasses works by a total of 13 artists, including Lucio Fontana, Eduardo Chillida, Sol LeWitt, Blinky Palermo, James Turrell, and Michael Riedel. Lithographs depicting Constructivist perspectival representations are displayed alongside embossed prints that emerge out of two-dimensional flatness. Slits revealing imaginary spaces are juxtaposed with designs for wall pieces. Prints evoking three-dimensionality, created by figures of Minimal Art, space art, and light art, can be seen alongside chalk drawings, foldings, and collages by 20th century sculptors. The exhibition does not feature preliminary sketches or documents written in the wake of the artworks themselves. Rather, it features independent works in which artists have executed their spatial concepts within the formal parameters of techniques employed in printmaking and drawing. The exhibition brings together important sheets from the Städel Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings, selected works from the Deutsche Bank Collection at the Städel Museum, long-term loans from the Commerzbank AG, and loans from a private collection.

"Many important artists have used the two-dimensional medium of paper to explore the theme of space and three-dimensionality. The fact that our own collection has provided almost the entire content of the exhibition is testament to the high-calibre quality it encompasses," said the director of the Städel, Dr. Philipp Demandt.

"A close examination of the drawers of our Department of Prints and Drawings reveals that it also includes a number of sculptures," said exhibition curator, Jenny Graser. "During the 20th century, many artists set about challenging the boundaries between the artistic media. The differences between sculpture, drawing, and printmaking consequently became less pronounced." Over seven chapters, the special exhibition presents a wide variety of approaches to the representation of space on paper, in turn highlighting both differences as well as links underscoring works that span decades.

The start of the exhibition invites visitors to ponder a question taken from "Art and Space" (1969) by Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). This work undertakes to determine what distinguishes an artistic investigation of space from one predicated upon mathematical and physical laws. The first chapter of the exhibition immediately breaks down established preconceptions of space. Serving as a prelude to the exhibition are two portfolio works outlining utopian spatial concepts, created respectively by El Lissitzky (1890–1941), a Russian avant-garde artist, and László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), a Hungarian artist and professor at the Bauhaus. Over the course of the 1920s, Lissitzky developed a model for an idealized and universal space based upon notions of measurability grounded in the laws of mathematics. Exhibiting no boundaries, this space is open, undefined. The characteristic features of this spatial structure can be observed in Lissitzky’s portfolio of graphic art, "Proun" (1923). During the same period, Moholy-Nagy was also working on a portfolio of prints, although his focus was upon the phenomenon of light. His investigations into the multifaceted nature of the visual effects engendered by transparency are captured in a portfolio of six lithographs, entitled "Constellations" (1923). The medium of lithography, notable for its wealth of shades and subtle differentiation of tone, enabled the painter to pursue his investigations of transparency by employing what was for him an entirely new technique.

The exhibition’s second chapter looks at the work of artist Hermann Glöckner (1889–1987), a native of Cotta near Dresden. One seemingly simple act of construction, the process of folding, effectively describes the artistic practices that defined his entire body of work. In his "3 Phases" series (1980), he repeatedly folded a sheet to create forms and coloured the resulting surfaces with paint. Glöckner’s investigation of three-dimensional structures formed out of flat surfaces was not limited to paper and canvas, but also employed plastics, as is evident from the work entitled "Pair of Symmetrical Bodies Made from Folded Elements" (1968).

The Constructivist approaches outlined in the first two chapters of the exhibition lead on directly to the linear constructions created by the German sculptor Norbert Kricke (1922–1984) and the American artist Fred Sandback (1943–2003). Kricke used his drawings to investigate the free movement of the line in space. He took the line, typically associated with the medium of drawing, and made it a feature of sculptures created out of bent steel wire. In his quest for a sculptural body lacking solid mass or interior, Fred Sandback similarly found recourse in the line. For his first sculpture, created in 1967, he traced the outlines of a plastic body with steel wire and rubber cords, thus reducing the object to its graphic substance. In the same year, he expanded his sculptural work to incorporate walls and ceilings, stretching cords so that they formed a wide variety of u-shapes, diagonals, right angles, triangles, trapezoids, and polygons. In his portfolio "Twenty-Two Constructions from 1967" (1986), the artist illustrates how he adopted the serial principle and a wide variety of modules.

The clear formal language of geometric figures and the serial principle beloved of Minimal Art continue into the next chapter of the exhibition, where visitors can see prints by Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) and James Turrell (born 1943), who recreate the appearance of three-dimensional bodies primarily through the use of colour and gradations of brightness. LeWitt undertook experiments with grid and spatial structures, and created nearly 300 printmaking projects. Since 1982, the artist has directed the bulk of his energies towards creating representations of three-dimensional forms, to which the linoleum cuts from his 2001 series entitled "Distorted Cubes" (A–E) are testament. The three-dimensional appearance of the distorted cube depicted in this work is due entirely to the visual effect elicited by its use of colour. Since the mid-1960s, the American artist James Turrell has used nothing but projected light to explore the illusionary three-dimensionality of geometric bodies. The aquatint series "Still Light" (1990–1991) grew out of Turrell’s Projection Pieces (1966–1967), a work in which light was cast in the shape of geometric bodies against the corners of darkened rooms. Depending on the spectator’s position relative to the artwork, this created the impression of a dazzlingly luminous object, which would either appear to be positioned on the floor or floating above it. Each of the four prints displayed in the exhibition respectively adopt one of the abstract forms featured in "Projection Pieces": triangle, cube, trapezoid, and rectangular bars.

The sculptural qualities of etching are lent their full expressive potential in the embossed prints created by the Italian sculptor Giò Pomodoro (1930–2002) and the Argentine-born artist Lucio Fontana (1899–1968). Lofty arches and deep furrows pervade Pomodoro’s prints, which seem reminiscent of mountain ranges and rock formations. The reliefs that appear in Lucio Fontana’s etchings from 1964 are characterized by thick layers of dried paint. These works on paper allow both artists to blur the clear distinctions between sculpture and the graphic arts by playing with volume, height, and depth. The embossed prints are juxtaposed with works by the artist Michael Riedel (born 1972 in Rüsselsheim), whose spatially-constructed works encompass nearly every medium, including drawings on tracing paper, fabric wall-hangings, and lettering that covers the surfaces of entire rooms.

The capacity of light and colour to create the appearance of space is a theme that is followed up in the fifth chapter. Like Moholy-Nagy before him, Blinky Palermo (1943–1977) also set about investigating the appearance of space brought about by means of transparent, layered paint-forms. While Palermo’s prints are laid upon delicate, permeable layers of colour, the abstract forms of the "Red Yellow Blue" series of screen prints by his friend Imi Knoebel (born 1940) are printed on thick, opaque layers of paint. The smooth painted surfaces adorn the paper to create a relief made up of concave and convex forms, superimposed on top of each other, and thus transplanting the three-dimensional layers of Knoebel’s wall pieces to a flat surface.

The sculptural qualities of etching are lent their full expressive potential in the embossed prints created by the Italian sculptor Giò Pomodoro (1930–2002) and the Argentine-born artist Lucio Fontana (1899–1968). Lofty arches and deep furrows pervade Pomodoro’s prints, which seem reminiscent of mountain ranges and rock formations. The reliefs that appear in Lucio Fontana’s etchings from 1964 are characterized by thick layers of dried paint. These works on paper allow both artists to blur the clear distinctions between sculpture and the graphic arts by playing with volume, height, and depth. The embossed prints are juxtaposed with works by the artist Michael Riedel (born 1972 in Rüsselsheim), whose spatially-constructed works encompass nearly every medium, including drawings on tracing paper, fabric wall-hangings, and lettering that covers the surfaces of entire rooms.

The final chapter, and highlight of the exhibition, is dedicated to Spanish sculptor Eduardo Chillida (1924–2002) and his artistic/philosophical exchanges with Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). "Art and Space" (1969), a book of collages by Chillida illustrating a text written by Heidegger, achieved particular fame. These collages symbolized Chillida’s spatial concept as formulated in the second and third dimension: spatial transgressions and reductions, the relationships between volume and form, fragmentation and dynamism, emptiness as a material with which to create space. Accompanying the book is a vinyl record containing a reading of Martin Heidegger’s text. Visitors have the opportunity to listen to this recording at an audio-station in the exhibition.

Into the Third Dimension. Spatial Concepts on Paper from the Bauhaus to the Present

Curator: Jenny Graser (Städel Museum)
Exhibition duration: 15 February to 14 May 2017
Press preview: Tuesday, 14 February 2017, 11 am

Information: www.staedelmuseum.de, info@staedelmuseum.de
Telephone: +49(0)69-605098-200, fax +49(0)69-605098-112
Visitor services: telephone +49(0)69-605098-232, besucherdienst@staedelmuseum.de
Location: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main
Opening hours: Tue, Wed, Sat, Sun & public holidays: 10 am – 6 pm, Thu & Fri: 10 am – 9 pm, Mon: closed
Special opening hours: Fri, 14 April, 10 am – 6 pm; Sun, 16 April, 10 am – 6 pm; Mon, 17 April, 10 am – 6 pm; Mon, 1 May, 10 am – 6 pm

Admission: 14 euros; concessions: 12 euros, family ticket: 24 euros; free entry for children under 12; groups of more than 10 regular-admission paying people: reduced per person rate. Groups must give notice of visit in advance by calling +49 (0)69-605098-200 or emailing info@staedelmuseum.de
Pre-sale tickets: tickets.staedelmuseum.de

Introductory tours of the exhibition: Thu 6 pm and Sun 2 pm (price of tour included in admission).

Catalogue: A catalogue, written by Jenny Graser, is due for release from the Städel Museum, in German, 52 pages, priced 9.90 euros.

Social Media: The Städel Museum posts updates on the exhibition on social-media platforms using the hashtags #DritteDimension and #Staedel.