Images & Texts

Watteau. The Draughtsman
to 15 January 2017
Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings
The Städel Museum’s comprehensive exhibition of the work of Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) – one of the most outstanding draughtsmen in the history of French art – runs until 15 January 2017. The exhibition, held in the Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings, brings together fifty of Watteau’s drawings, complemented by six of his paintings, and a small selection of drawings by contemporaries and followers. “Watteau –The Draughtsman” was developed in collaboration with the Teylers Museum in Haarlem in the Netherlands. It is the first monographic exhibition on the artist to be held in Germany for more than thirty years, and it will be the first in this country ever devoted to the phenomenon of Watteau the draughtsman, in all his many facets. The drawings, which the artist completed in large numbers and in a wide variety of contexts, were the basis for his work as a painter.
Curators: Dr. Martin Sonnabend (Städel Museum), Dr. Michiel Plomp (Teylers Museum)


Battle of the Sexes. Franz von Stuck to Frida Kahlo
to 19 March 2017
Exhibition House
The exhibition deals with the artistic investigation of gender roles from the mid-19th century to the end of the Second World War. The traditional definition of male and female as active/passive, rational/emotional, culture/nature was a crucial theme in modern art: many artists presented audiences with exaggerated gender characteristics, reinforcing stereotypical models of behaviour. But others attacked commonplace clichés, attempting to subvert them with strategies including irony, exaggeration, masquerade, and hybridisation. This major exhibition uses 140 works of painting, sculpture, graphic art, photography, and films to present particularly incisive artistic statements, putting them in dialogue with one other. Important artworks on the topic were selected from the Städel Museum’s permanent collection, including paintings by Max Liebermann, Edvard Munch, and Franz von Stuck, sculptures by Auguste Rodin, and photographs by Frank Eugene and Man Ray. In addition, carefully-chosen loans of important works mean canonical names – like Gustave Moreau, Édouard Manet, Gustav Klimt, Otto Dix, Meret Oppenheim, and Frida Kahlo – can be juxtaposed with discoveries that extend the canon with bold but lesser-known artists, including Leonor Fini, Jeanne Mammen, Rudolf Jettmar, and Gustav Adolf Mossa. Against a background of intensive discussion of gender questions and the constant evolution of men’s and women’s roles, the project offers insights into the complexity of the problem, while exploring art-historical aspects of this highly relevant social and political theme.
Curators: Felicity Korn (Städel Museum), Dr. Felix Krämer (Städel Museum)


Into the Third Dimension. Spatial Concepts on Paper from the Bauhaus to the Present
15 February to– 14 May 2017
Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings
Apparently familiar characteristics – including form, volume, delineation, emptiness, and structure – produce depth and space and thus allow the viewer to orient his gaze through the image. But how do drawings and prints – in other words, flat, two-dimensional representations – depict these elements of the third dimension? These questions are addressed by the exhibition “Into the Third Dimension. Spatial Concepts on Paper from the Bauhaus to Contemporary Conceptual Art” at the Städel Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings. Selected works by thirteen artists are on display, including Lucio Fontana, Eduardo Chillida, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Giò Pomodoro, Blinky Palermo, James Turrell, and Michael Riedel. The show begins with geometrical compositions from 1923 by El Lissitzky and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, continuing through the century to prints made by contemporary conceptual artists. In this way, lithographs with Constructivist perspectival representations are juxtaposed with embossed prints emerging out of two-dimensional flatness. Lacerated surfaces which open onto imaginative spaces encounter sketches made for wall pieces. Sculptural and object-like prints by artists working in the tradition of Minimal Art, installation art, and light art are juxtaposed with chalk drawings, foldings, and collages by 20th century sculptors. To enable a greater range of spatial experiences, the display combines prints and drawings with sculpture in the round. The exhibition brings together significant works from the Department of Prints and Drawings with selected pieces from the Deutsche Bank Collection in the Städel Museum.
Curator: Jenny Graser (Städel Museum)


Photographs Become Pictures. The Becher Class
27 April to– 13 August 2017
Exhibition House
One of the most radical changes in art’s relation to its aesthetic, media, and economic contexts is closely associated with the names Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff, Jörg Sasse, and Thomas Struth – but even more so with the names of their teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher. This group of artists – to which names like Volker Döhne, Tata Ronkholz and Petra Wunderlich should be added – formed the first of a long line of ‘Becher Classes’ at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. “Photographs Become Pictures. The Becher Class” brings together over 180 major works, some in large format, by these important artists, as well as a selection of their early works. This generation not only shaped the international photography scene of the 1990s, they went one further, and helped to transform the way artistic photography is perceived. Their visual creations make arguments in both formal and conceptual terms, interrogating human beings in their natural and cultural habitat, investigating their immediate surroundings and their private and global dimensions, examining their principles of social and aesthetic organisation. For all the heterogeneity of these artists’ work, their oeuvres are always characterised by an ambivalent relation to painting, shifting between appropriation and differentiation. Their works are an expression of a self-conscious emancipation of photography as an artistic medium, while also reflecting the (not merely digital) moment, when the boundaries between these two previously competing media dissolve.
Curator: Dr. Martin Engler (Städel Museum)
Co-curator: Dr. Jana Baumann (Städel Museum)


Géricault to Toulouse-Lautrec. French Lithographs of the Nineteenth Century
22 June to 10 September 2017
Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings
This summer, the Städel Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings is devoting an exhibition to French lithography in all its abundant diversity. The invention of this ‘stone printing’ technique at the end of the eighteenth century ushered in an entirely new epoch in printmaking: as compared to other methods in use until then, it offered more variety in the means of artistic expression, made the printing process faster, and allowed larger editions. In France, prominent artists began experimenting with lithography around 1820, and over the course of the century substantially broadened its range of artistic possibilities.
The spectrum of works on display will include expressive compositions by Théodore Géricault, one of the rare lithographs executed by Goya when he was in exile in Bordeaux in the 1820s, Eugène Delacroix’s masterful Goethe and Shakespeare illustrations, and Honoré Daumier’s political and social commentaries in the form of newspaper caricatures. Works of the later nineteenth century such as Edouard 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” Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard will also be on view. The prints, about eighty in all, represent highlights of lithography of the period in question, but also the superb quality and wide diversity of the Städel’s holdings in this area.
Curator: Dr. Martin Sonnabend (Städel Museum)


Matisse – Bonnard. ‘Long live Painting!’
13 September 2017 to– 14 January 2018
Exhibition House
‘Long live Painting!’ – this was the rallying cry with which Henri Matisse (1869–1954) greeted his friend Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) on 13 August 1925. The postcard from Amsterdam bearing these words marked the beginning of an important correspondence between the two painters. The exchange of letters, which lasted until 1946, makes their mutual appreciation very clear. The Städel’s large-scale special exhibition sheds light on a friendship lasting more than forty years, presenting the relationship in the context of their contribution to modern art and revealing its broader significance for their work. With over 100 paintings, sculptures, and drawings, the show opens a dialogue between the two artists, offering new perspectives on the development of the European avant-garde from the beginning of the 20th century to the end of the Second World War. The closeness of the relationship is underlined by the two painters’ intense engagement with very similar subjects. A number of chapters addressing these central themes – including Interiors, Still Life, Landscape, and Nude – illustrate the sheer variety of the artistic results. The exhibits on display include masterpieces from leading international collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art, Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. This extensive selection of works is enhanced by a series of photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, who visited both Bonnard and Matisse in the south of France in 1944.
Curator: Dr. Felix Krämer (Städel Museum)
Co-curator: Dr. Daniel Zamani (Städel Museum)


Maria Sibylla Merian and the Tradition of Flower Depiction
11 October 2017 to– 14 January 2018
Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings
Born and raised in Frankfurt, Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) is one of Frankfurt’s most famous daughters. 2017 marks the 300th anniversary of her death. To mark the occasion, the Städel Museum, in cooperation with the Kupferstichkabinett of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, will present an exhibition devoted to flower illustration in drawings and prints from the 15th to the 18th century. At its centre is the extraordinary figure of Maria Sibylla Merian: a copperplate engraver, a painter of flowers and insects, a naturalist, and an explorer. Educated in the tradition of ‘florilegia’ (flower books) and tulip books, Merian became a naturalist, first investigating the metamorphosis of caterpillars and butterflies, later the symbiosis of insects and plants. She published the results of her research in illustrated books containing copperplates and etchings, as well as body-colour drawings of the highest artistic quality. The central works of this exceptional artist will be shown in the context of flower representations by her predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. In the 18th century, gardens and valuable plants, above all tulips, were valuable goods. ‘Florilegia’ from the time communicate their particular importance: the images were produced as splendidly colourful drawings on vellum, or as large-scale hand-coloured copperplate engravings, produced in exclusive small editions, such as the famous Hortus Eystettensis by Basilius Besler. The exhibition also includes ornamental engravings with floral motifs, for example by Martin Schongauer, apothecary books from the 15th and 16th century, plant studies from the circle of Albrecht Dürer, and nature studies by Georg Flegel and Georg Hoefnagel from around 1600. Also included are a group of flower drawings by Bartholomäus Braun, who – like Maria Sibylla Merian – worked in Nuremburg, as well as 18th century flower portraits by Barbara Regina Dietzsch and her circle.
Curators: Dr. Martin Sonnabend (Städel Museum), Dr. Michael Roth (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett)

Titles and exhibition dates subject to alteration.

From 24 November 2016 to 19 March 2017, visitors to the Städel Museum in Frankfurt will have the opportunity to see a major exhibition that explores a timeless theme: the emotionally charged relationship between man and woman and its representation in art. “Battle of the Sexes. Franz von Stuck to Frida Kahlo” illuminates the artistic exploration of gender roles and gender relations from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War. Featuring over 150 works, the exhibition reveals just how controversial both male and female modern artists were in their reaction towards the construction of gender identities and bears witness to the ways they used painting, sculpture, graphic art, photography and film to tackle stereotypes and role models. Some used their work to confront their audiences with exaggerated gender traits or else sought to undermine stereotypical role models. Others attacked common clichés and aimed to deconstruct them via strategies such as irony, exaggeration, masquerade and hybridization. Gender distinctions – based upon traditional associations of male and female with categories such as active/passive, rational/emotional, culture/nature, state/family – became increasingly defined over the course of the nineteenth century, not only influencing economic, social and political structures, but also art. The exhibition builds upon the Städel’s own collection of artworks with direct relevance to the show’s theme, including paintings by Max Liebermann, Edvard Munch, and Franz von Stuck, sculptures by Auguste Rodin, and photographs by Frank Eugene and Claude Cahun. Significant loans mean that famous names such as Hannah Höch, Édouard Manet, Gustav Klimt, Otto Dix and Frida Kahlo can be featured in meaningful juxtaposition with lesser-known artists, including works by Leonor Fini, John Collier, and Gustav Adolf Mossa. Works from the canon of modern art are thus complemented by similarly apposite, though somewhat neglected exhibits. The exhibition takes up the intense debates that have come to surround the respective roles played by women and men, offering nuanced insights into the complexity of this often problematic cultural issue, while highlighting the art-historical dimension of a socio-political theme that remains just as relevant in our own contemporary context.

The exhibition is funded by the Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain and has received additional support from the Georg und Franziska Speyer’schen Hochschulstiftung.

In a statement, Dr. Philipp Demandt, director of the Städel Museum, announced: “Our exhibition highlight at the turn of the year explores a subject that loomed particularly large in the art of the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth century: the debate surrounding gender roles and gender relations. The avowed aim of this large-scale project is to select outstanding and keenly observed artworks and put them in dialogue with one another. As the various works displayed in the show illustrate, the scrutiny brought to bear upon the construction of male and female identities has lost none of its power to captivate contemporary audiences.”

In twelve chapters overall, the exhibition contains an unprecedented range of artistic subjects, which highlight some of the key aspects characterizing art in its exploration of the interrelationship of women and men. From the mythological representations of Gustave Moreau through to the fantastical images that emerged out of Surrealism, the displays aim to bring into focus modern art’s ever-changing visions of male and female role models, observing the developments they underwent within the context of comprehensive historical and social transformations: from the beginnings of the Women’s Movement in the second half of the nineteenth century, via the debates on gender and sexual controversies that characterized the Weimar Republic, through to the end of the Second World War. The works are arranged chronologically in a display that encompasses both floors of the exhibition house. However, this thematic sequence is interrupted by five monographic chapters, each of which is dedicated to a particular male or female artist whose oeuvre gives special prominence to the theme of the battle of the sexes: Franz von Stuck, Jeanne Mammen, Félicien Rops, Edvard Munch and Lee Miller.

The exhibition is curated by Felicity Korn and Dr. Felix Krämer. In a curatorial statement, Felicity Korn said: “It is especially important for us that the exhibition should include works by both male and female artists, so as to shed as much light as possible on the often highly charged relationship between men and women. It bears mentioning that considerably fewer female artists broached the subject – particularly in the nineteenth century – which is of course also due to the disparities in their educational and professional opportunities. This makes the works by women featured in the exhibition all the more tantalizing: remarkably, female artists often engaged with the theme through irony and humour – even though they were themselves more directly affected by the battle of the sexes.”

“The aim of our exhibition is to encourage people to reflect upon the theme of gender conflict while offering historical insights into this complex topic. The exhibition follows on from the success of the Städel Museum’s 2012 show “Dark Romanticism”, with which we established a precedent for taking on a contemporary theme that resonated with the social attitudes of modern audiences and examined it from an art-historical perspective. While the post-war history of the battle of the sexes is well documented and well-known to many contemporaries, this is less the case with earlier historical periods. Yet for many modern artists, the battle of the sexes was a recurrent theme throughout their life’s work,” said Felix Krämer.

The exhibition “Battle of the Sexes” takes as its historical starting point the emergence of a growing groundswell of voices (led by the Women’s Liberation Movement) demanding social equality between man and woman, which in the nineteenth century made itself heard throughout Europe. For the first time, prevailing models of male and female identity were discussed by the wider public – a debate which from the 1860s onwards also left its mark on the visual arts.

The exhibition begins with an introductory section on Adam and Eve, the biblical story to which the battle of the sexes traditionally traces its origins. There emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century a large number of depictions of the first human couple, anticipating the range and diversity of artistic responses that gender-related themes would subsequently elicit. Visitors can see evocative works by Franz von Stuck, Julius Paulsen, and Suzanne Valadon – whose partner, André Utter (20 years her junior), sat as the model for her Adam.

As women’s position in society began to strengthen, fin de siècle art gave rise to a parallel development whereby representations emphasized the guilt of original sin and female powers of seduction. This produced an increasingly important strand of art, predicated upon a particularly destructive and ruinous form of femininity, with the femme fatale (French: the fateful woman) coming to denote men’s humiliation and thus serving simultaneously as a projection of male anxieties and sexual desire. In the eyes of many (primarily) male artists, the figure of a woman with aspirations to social equality represented an existential threat. Their work stylized members of the female sex as figures of evil who deliberately courted their powers of sexual attraction to emasculate men. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, strong biblical characters such as Salome, Judith, and Delilah attained cult status, providing subjects for works by numerous artists, including Gustave Moreau, Jean Benner, Lovis Corinth, and Aubrey Beardsley.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the emerging academic discipline of sexual research upturned bourgeois conceptions of clearly delineated gender roles, and opened up topics such as the libido and sexual preferences for public discussion – albeit one that was almost exclusively conducted by men. Artists such as Alfred Kubin, Thomas Theodor Heine, and Félicien Rops no longer had to refer back in their work to mythological and biblical figures, but instead translated stereotypical notions of gender into exaggerated visual ideas. The period gave rise to a large number of artistic representations in which the woman appears as helpless victim, entirely at the mercy of a man who exerts over her the full force of his sexual and social prowess. The exhibition includes a prime example of this sort of imagery in the shape of Emmanuel Frémiet’s sculpture Gorilla Abducting a Woman (1887), which nearly half a century later inspired Merian C. Cooper’s famous film King Kong (1936).

A quite different perspective is offered by Jeanne Mammen, whose early work is exhibited for the first time at the Städel Museum, and provides the subject for one of the shows’s monographic chapters. The artist’s work engages extensively with the fantastical world of ideas and dreams that grew out of literary Symbolism. Mammen thus created a series of works themed upon Gustave Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874), as well as various depictions of strong female figures, including Medusa and Salome. Another artist whose oeuvre accords particular prominence to themes relating to the battle of the sexes is Edvard Munch (who also features in one of the monographic displays). In his pictures, the Norwegian artist depicted the ambivalence haunting the relationship between men and woman, frequently associating eroticism and love with pain and death. In so doing, he typically put the observer in the position of a male voyeur-lover, doomed to fall victim to the seductive power of the woman’s physical beauty.

The liberal climate of the Weimar Republic gave rise to a swathe of new nightclubs, strip joints and drag clubs, to which city dwellers flocked in the hope of suppressing the trauma of the First World War by indulging in different kinds of sensual pleasure. Accompanying this new mood was an abiding fascination in art for such subjects as sexually motivated murders, sexual violence, and prostitution. Male proponents of the New Objectivity, including Otto Dix, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen and Karl Hubbuch, depicted ravaged female bodies in the most gruesomely explicit ways and presented them as fetishized objects. Artists used this new and shocking sensibility to shift their focus towards depictions of human depravity and social marginalization, which were duly understood as references to the encroaching brutalization of the social climate and as metaphors for the moribund political system. The period’s fascination for sexual crimes transcended genres. Franz Wedekind’s drama Lulu: Earth Spirit/Pandora’s Box, for example, served as the template for Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s film Pandora’s Box (1928/29). In both versions, Lulu falls victim to the murderer Jack the Ripper. Both female and male artists working in Berlin’s dadaist circles, such as Hannah Höch and Hans Bellmer, created pictures of distorted, mechanical, and monstrous figures that risked scandalizing audiences, but whose primary purpose was nevertheless to operate as a critique of bourgeois sexual mores.

In addition to these deliberately subversive acts of radical excess, the period was also notable for its preoccupation with the theme of the “New Woman”. Amidst the social upheavals precipitated by the First World War, women working on the “home front” found that they had gained in self-confidence as new social and professional freedoms opened up to them. As men returned from the war, often traumatized by their experiences, they were confronted by a generation of women whose understanding of gender roles had been completely transformed. With women having won the right to vote in 1919, the German Women’s Movement had reached an important milestone on the road towards achieving political, social and civil rights as citizens. This led to the development of a self-confident and active model of femininity. Portraits by Otto Dix, Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, Jeanne Mammen and Christian Schad reflect the transformations undergone by society in its understanding of gender roles.

A different emphasis was evident in the surrealist circles of André Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, whose art was characterized by a liberal attitude towards sexuality and at the same time a playfully subversive approach to bourgeois society’s gender stereotypes. Inspired by Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical studies, many surrealists sought to break down gender boundaries. They demonstrated a particular fascination for the figure of the androgyne, a mythological hermaphrodite with both male and female sexual characteristics. For the surrealists, the androgyne symbolized both the transgression of conventional modes of behaviour and the synthesis of the male and female sex. Surrealism’s influence was also felt in the realm of cinema. Artists such as Maya Deren and Alexander Hamid, who were close to the Paris Surrealists, strove to construct a sexual identity, as for example in the 1943 film Meshes of the Afternoon.

Female artists working among the surrealists made ongoing efforts to forge an alternative model of womanhood vis-à-vis their male counterparts. These attempts to reconstruct gender had a precedent in cinema: male and female roles were swapped to comic effect in Alice Guy’s 1906 film Les Résultats du féminisme (The Consequences of Feminism). Meret Oppenheim later employed similarly humorous methods, playing upon the preconception that the woman’s role was that of a passive object of sexual desire by presenting viewers with a pair of high-heeled shoes, trussed up like a roast goose on a tray. Meanwhile Frida Kahlo created a highly personal and symbol-laden representation in her self-portrait The Little Deer.

BATTLE OF THE SEXES. FRANZ VON STUCK BIS FRIDA KAHLO

Curators: Felicity Korn (Assistant Curator of Modern Art, Städel Museum), Dr. Felix Krämer (Head of Modern Art, Städel Museum)
Exhibition period: 24 November 2016 to 19 March 2017
Press preview: Wednesday, 23 November 2016, 11 a.m.

Information: www.staedelmuseum.de, info@staedelmuseum.de, telephone +49(0)69-605098-200, fax +49(0)69-605098-112
Visitor service: telephone +49(0)69-605098-232, besucherdienst@staedelmuseum.de
Address: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main
Opening times: Tue, Wed, Sat, Sun & public holidays: 10 a.m. – 6 p.m., Thu & Fri: 10 a.m. – 9 p.m., Mon: closed
Special opening times: Sat 24 Dec: closed; Sun 25 Dec: 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.; Mon 26 Dec: 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.; Sat 31 Dec: closed; Sun 1 Jan 2017: 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.; Mon 2 Jan: 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Entrance: 14 euros; concessions: 12 euros, family ticket: 24 euros; free entry for children under 12; groups of more than 10 people: reduced per person rate. Groups must register in advance by calling +49 (0)69-605098-200 or emailing info@staedelmuseum.de
Advance ticket sales online at: tickets.staedelmuseum.de (until 10 November 2016, Early Bird Tickets will be available from the online shop at a price of 10 euros).

Digitorial: The Digitorial is a project developed by the Aventis Foundation. It can be visited at geschlechterkampf.staedelmuseum.de.
Audio tour and the Städel app: The audio tour is supported by the Georg und Franziska Speyer’schen Hochschulstiftung. It offers tours of the exhibition in German and English. The German audio tour is read by Constanze Becker and Felix Rech (both of the Schauspiel Theatre, Frankfurt). The price for an audio guide is 4 euros, or 7 euros for two. In addition to being available for loan at the museum, the audio tour can also be downloaded via the Städel app from the comfort of your own home. The Städel app is free of charge from the Android and Apple Store, and costs 1 euro for the current IOS and Android smartphones: http://www.staedelmuseum.de/de/angebote/staedel-app

Social media: The Städel Museum communicates the exhibition in the social media with the hashtags #Geschlechterkampf and #Staedel.

**General guided tours of the exhibition: Tue 3 p.m., Wed 1 p.m., Thu 7 p.m., Fri 7 p.m., Sat 4 p.m., and Sun 12 p.m.; additionally on 26 Dec at 4 p.m. Please note there is limited space on the tours. Tickets for tours are available from two hours before the start of the tour at the ticket office, or can be ordered online in advance at a special rate of 16 euro (including entrance and tour) at tickets.staedelmuseum.de

Catalogue: A catalogue is being published by Prestel Verlag to accompany the exhibition, containing 336 pages and approximately 400 illustrations. It features an introductory discussion between Felicity Korn, Felix Krämer, and Rose-Maria Gropp, essays by Andreas Beyer and Ute Frevert, and articles by Ingo Borges, Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Katharina Ferus, Miriam Halwani, Kristina Lemke, Nele Putz, Elena Schroll, Svetlana Svyatskaya, Melanie Ulz, Anne Vieth, and Daniel Zamani, and a foreword by Philipp Demandt.
German edition/English edition: 39.90 euros (museum edition).
Visitor’s guide: A German-language booklet to accompany the exhibition is available for 7.50 euro.

Sponsored by: Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain
With additional support from: Georg und Franziska Speyer’schen Hochschulstiftung
Media partners: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Verkehrsgesellschaft Frankfurt am Main, Cicero – Magazin für politische Kultur
Mobility partner: Deutsche Bahn
Culture partner: hr2-kultur

The Städel Museum, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung have a new director. On 1 October 2016, Dr Philipp Demandt will begin his work at the head of the three cultural institutions of Frankfurt. The art historian was chosen within the framework of an intensive national and international search for a successor to Max Hollein. He was previously the director of the Alte Nationalgalerie, a museum of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preussischer Kulturbesitz. At the press conference held today on the occasion of his assumption of office, Demandt (b. 1971) was introduced by Prof Dr Nikolaus Schweickart, chairman of the Städel Museum administration, and Dr Ina Hartwig, deputy mayor in charge of culture of the city of Frankfurt am Main.

The chairman of the Städel Museum administration Prof Dr Nikolaus Schweickart, who presided over the search, commented: “Philipp Demandt was the candidate we most favoured for this position. It was his comprehensive experience with modern culture management and his qualified expertise as an art historian and curator with a keen instinct for special themes and discoveries that made him the candidate of choice for the job. We look forward to working with him.”

“I am delighted we were able to win the renowned art historian Philipp Demandt for the post of director of the three institutions. The Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is one of the leading exhibition halls, and its clear and distinctive profile is appreciated far beyond the boundaries of Frankfurt and Germany. It represents an outstanding complement to the collection focuses of the richly traditional Städel Museum and Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung. The continuation of the effective interaction between these three large art institutions is sensible and important for the cultural development of the city and the region. I wish Philipp Demandt all the best and much success for his new work”, added Dr Ina Hartwig, Frankfurt’s mayor in charge of culture.

Dr Philipp Demandt himself took advantage of the opportunity offered by the press conference to introduce himself to the gathering of media representatives as the new director of the three Frankfurt art institutions: “To head the Städel, Schirn and Liebieghaus as director and develop their successful work further in all its diversity is a challenge I accept with great pleasure. I thank the magistrate of the city of Frankfurt and the administration of the Städel Museum for the confidence they are placing in me. The Städel Museum, the Schirn and the Liebieghaus are three prominent art institutions that delight the public with their progressive exhibitions and projects and demonstrate again and again how we can – and must – conceive of vibrant engagement with art in today’s times. The preservation of the three institutions’ strong and distinct profiles and the continued exploitation of the synergies between them are matters beyond debate. All three have broadly qualified teams whose outstanding work you are familiar with and will encounter once again in the coming weeks in our large autumn exhibitions. I am greatly looking forward to this cooperation.”

Born in Constance in 1971, Demandt studied art history, classical archaeology and media science and gained his doctorate in 2001 at the Institute of History and Cultural Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin with a thesis on the execution and reception of the portraits of Queen Louise by Johann Gottfried Schadow and Christian Daniel Rauch and the historical mythology of the Prussian state as mirrored in the “Queen Louise cult”. After serving as exhibition assistant at the Bröhan Museum in 2002, Demandt became a department head with the Kulturstiftung der Länder. There his responsibilities included advising and supporting German culture institutions on the purchase and financing of artworks from pre- and early history to the nineteenth century as well as on exhibition projects. From 2007 to 2010 he also co-curated the Stiftung Preussische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg Prussian exhibition “Louise: Life and Myth of the Queen”. He planned and directed the magazine “Arsprototo” published by the Kulturstiftung der Länder, as well as the foundation’s scholarly publication series “Patrimonia”, and published numerous articles on the history of art and culture, for example in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Welt.

In January 2012, Demandt was appointed director of the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. There he drew attention to himself with a comprehensive new concept for the display collection and a number of exhibitions that were as innovative as they were successful. Among the highlights of the shows staged under his direction were “Rembrandt Bugatti”, “Impressionism – Expressionism: Art at a Turning Point” and, most recently, “The Monk Has Returned”, a special presentation on the restoration of Caspar David Friedrich’s masterworks Monk by the Sea and The Abbey in the Oakwood. The Alte Nationalgalerie holds paintings and sculptures dating from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Its collection is part of the Nationalgalerie, which also encompasses the Neue Nationalgalerie, the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, the Museum Berggruen and the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg.

In Frankfurt Dr Philipp Demandt is succeeding Max Hollein, who assumed his post as director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) on 1 June 2016.

From 19 October 2016 to 15 January 2017, the Städel Museum will present a comprehensive exhibition on one of the most outstanding draughtsmen in the history of French art – Antoine Watteau (1684–1721). The show in the Exhibition Gallery of the Department of Prints and Drawings will bring together fifty drawings by Watteau, enhanced by six of his paintings and a small selection of drawings by contemporaries and successors. Organized in cooperation with Teylers Museum in Haarlem, Holland, the exhibition “Watteau. The Draughtsman” will be the first monographic presentation of the artist’s work in Germany for more than thirty years. It will moreover be the first in this country devoted specifically to the phenomenon of Watteau in all his many facets as a draughtsman. Drawings served him as a basis for his painterly work. He drew continually and habitually, and in the most varied situations. The Städel has in its holdings altogether seven works from different phases of his career – and thus one of the most prominent Watteau collections in Germany. The precious sheets from the two institutions will form the exhibition’s core, and be supplemented by loans of high quality from collections in Germany, Holland, France and other European countries. Following its presentation at the Städel, the exhibition will be on view at Teylers Museum in Haarlem from 2 February to 14 May 2017.

“Already the spectacular purchase of the painting The Embarkation for Cythera (ca. 1709–1712) in 1982 prepared the ground for the scholarly investigation of the works of Antoine Watteau at the Städel Museum. Our present comprehensive special exhibition on Watteau as an eminent draughtsman provides us with an opportunity to address ourselves to a further central aspect of his œuvre”, comments Dr Martin Sonnabend, curator of the exhibition and head of the Städel’s department of prints and drawings to 1750.

The French artist Antoine Watteau is one of the great masters of draughtsmanship. He was born in 1684 in the Flemish city of Valenciennes, which had been conquered by the troops of Louis XIV only shortly beforehand. Nothing is known about his early artistic training. In about 1702 he went to Paris, where he eked out a living for several years as an assistant to various artists, interior decorators and art dealers. It was around 1709 that he began to call attention to himself as a painter of works of his own. In 1712 the Paris academy admitted him to its ranks. From that time onward, he was highly successful above all with bourgeois connoisseurs and collectors, for whom he carried out paintings – for the most part small in format – of a novel subject, the fête galante (courtship party). The compositions show gatherings of young, elegantly dressed women and men in park-like landscapes, conversing, making music or contemplating nature. With their mix of reality and ideality, they catered to the taste of a generation that no longer found artistic appeal in the ponderous history paintings of the age of Louis XIV, works designed to represent the interests of the state. In Watteau’s courtship scenes, arcadian themes and traditions of Dutch genre painting join with motifs taken from the theatre of the artist’s time to create a reality considered free, indebted to sensory perception, and as immediately real as it was permeated with artistry. It took the generation following Watteau – who died of tuberculosis at the young age of thirty-six – to develop his approach further into the art that later came to be called “Rococo”.

Drawings were the prerequisite for Watteau’s artistic production. His ability to capture his observations rapidly and confidently in red chalk enabled him to amass an extensive repertoire of motifs – primarily figural studies, but also landscape drawings and copies of works by other artists –; he then drew from this rich stock to devise the compositions of his paintings. Over time, by employing white and black chalk in addition to the red, he developed a virtuoso technique of stunning painterly effect. The immediacy of drawing provided him with an essential means of recording the fine nuances of reality that found their way into his scenes of courtship gatherings. Already his contemporaries recognized this special quality and collected Watteau’s drawings. His innovative style, characterized by a combination of precise observation, spontaneity, facility and intimacy, contrasts distinctly with the rigorous tradition to which the academically oriented artists of his time adhered. With its psychological sensitivity, the new, virtuoso art reflected the spirit of the incipient Enlightenment. The French Romanticists and the Impressionists considered Antoine Watteau one of their forerunners, and to this day we are amazed by the modernity of his works – especially his drawings.

The Städel Museum has in its painting collection the earliest version of the famous The Embarkation for Cythera (ca. 1709–1712) which – also thanks to the other two versions in the Louvre and Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin – is presumably the artist’s single most famous composition.

“Watteau. The Draughtsman” will enhance this work with five further paintings and fifty selected drawings. The presentation will begin with early drawings by Watteau showing figures from the realm of theatre as well as fairs and folk festivals. His early theatre studies of ca. 1709 to 1712 bear a direct thematic connection to the The Embarkation for (or Pilgrimage to) Cythera. In addition to the Städel Museum painting, this section will also feature preliminary studies of male and female models in pilgrims’ costumes. Watteau also devoted himself to other popular themes of his time, as seen in his soldier and hunting scenes. His drawings of members of a Persian delegation that visited Paris in 1715 testify to the draughtsman Watteau’s sublime mastery of the “three-chalk” technique. It was also around this time that he made his studies of the “Savoyards”, destitute street performers and merchants of the French capital. Following a section presenting Watteau’s drawings after works by other artists, the show will return to the most important theme in his œuvre. After first appearing in the The Embarkation for Cythera, the subject of the fête galante continued to play a decisive role, characterizing Watteau’s work to such an extent that it came to be closely associated with his name. In his paintings he also turned his attention again and again to theatre as a medium that can present the world of feelings without the constraints imposed by societal or natural reality, and as an element combining the artificial and the real. The reflection on emotional events that already played a role in the artist’s investigation of theatre is also the theme of a further section of the exhibition. Here the focus is on drawings in which Watteau captured the gazes, thoughts and feelings of his models. The show “Watteau. The Draughtsman” will conclude with thirteen drawings by successors to the artist – among them Antoine Coypel (1661–1722), Nicolas Lancret (1690–1743), François Boucher (1703–1770) and Jean Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) – from the Städel Museum holdings. A publication of the years 1726–1728 containing 350 etchings after Watteau drawings (by, among others, François Boucher) will also be on display.

A catalogue accompanying the exhibition will be published by the Hirmer Verlag with a foreword by Philipp Demandt and Marjan Scharloo. The publication will offer an introduction to the art of Watteau by Martin Sonnabend. Michiel Plomp (Teylers Museum, Haarlem) will investigate the artist’s exploration of the works of those “Old Masters” he chose – in the context of the drawing medium – as examples to emulate, and the Watteau expert Christoph Martin Vogtherr (Wallace Collection, London and designated director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle) will analyse various aspects of the specific strategies Watteau pursued as a draughtsman, which differed distinctly from the practices otherwise common in his day.

WATTEAU. THE DRAUGHTSMAN

Curators: Dr Martin Sonnabend (Head of the Department of Prints and Drawings to 1750, Städel Museum), Dr Michiel Plomp (Chief Conservator of the Art Collections, Teylers Museum)
Exhibition dates: 19 October 2016 to 15 January 2017
Press preview: Monday, 17 October 2016, 11 am

Information: www.staedelmuseum.de, info@staedelmuseum.de, phone +49(0)69-605098-200, fax +49(0)69-605098-112
Visitor services: phone +49(0)69-605098-232, besucherdienst@staedelmuseum.de
Location: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main
Opening hours: Tue, Wed, Sat, Sun + holidays 10 am – 6 pm, Thu + Fri 10 am – 9 pm, mondays closed
Special opening hours: Sat 24 Dec. 2016, closed, Sun 25 Dec., 10 am ‒ 6 pm, Mon 26 Dec., 10 am ‒ 6 pm, Sat 31 Dec. 2016, closed, Sun 1 Jan. 2017, 11 am ‒ 6 pm; Mon 2 Jan. 2017, 10 am ‒ 6 pm
Admission: 14 euros, reduced tickets 12 euros, family ticket 24 euros; free admission for children under 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.

General guided tours of the exhibition: Thu 6 pm, Sun 2 pm and Mon 26 Dec. 2 pm. The number of participants is limited; previous booking is not required.

Catalogue: A catalogue accompanying the exhibition will be published by the Hirmer Verlag, with approx. 260 pages and approx. 185 illustrations, with texts by Martin Sonnabend, Michiel Plomp and Christoph Martin Vogtherr and a foreword by Philipp Demandt and Marjan Scharloo. German edition, 34.90 Euro (museum edition).

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

An exhibition of the Städel Museum, Frankfurt and the Teylers Museum, Haarlem.

In the framework of the “In the Städel Garden” series and as part of the programme offered by Flanders & the Netherlands Guest of Honour at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, the Städel Museum will present a work produced by the Belgian artist David Claerbout (b. 1969) especially for this occasion. The film Die reine Notwendigkeit (2016) is a surprising adaptation of the animated movie classic The Jungle Book of 1967. Claerbout’s one-hour loop turns the sentimental and comical story about dancing, singing, and trumpet-playing jungle animals into a film that has dispensed all ‘humanization’ of the animals – but also its young protagonist Mowgli – and portrays them instead in a manner befitting their species. Baloo, Bagheera and Kaa, whose songs and slapstick acts have been delighting children and adults alike for decades, are now back to being pure bear, panther and python. For Die reine Notwendigkeit, the artist painstakingly redrew the frames of Wolfgang Reitherman’s prototype by hand, one by one, and then assembled them to create an entirely new film. Now no more than shadowy outlines, the animals move around before a jungle backdrop. Claerbout alludes to the original only in the work’s title, Die reine Notwendigkeit, a reference to Baloo the Bear’s song about the “bare necessities of life”.

The exhibition “David Claerbout. Die reine Notwendigkeit” is being carried out with support from Flanders & the Netherlands Guest of Honour at the Frankfurter Buchmesse 2016, the Government of Flanders and the Städel Gartengesellschaft.

“In the œuvre he has produced over the past twenty years, David Claerbout has developed fascinating mastery in transforming even the most reductive photographic or filmic postulations – however decelerated, void, or free of all narration they might seem at first sight – into artworks highly complex from the point of view of aesthetics and content alike. Over the years, his time-based works have developed a wholly independent and distinctive aesthetic”, observes Martin Engler, head of the Städel’s collection of contemporary art and curator of the show.

Despite the fact that David Claerbout’s Die reine Notwendigkeit completely eliminates the narrative of the original, it holds a fascination all its own. It is the viewer’s associations that account for this quality, but also the oddly stiff and jerky movements of animals as strange to us as they are familiar. The ambiguity and incongruity of the protagonists, on whom a human ego was first imposed, only to be deprived of it again in Claerbout’s adaptation, serve to charge the completely eventless film narrative with a suggestive tension virtually impossible to put a finger on.

Rather than telling the story of a little boy abandoned, far from civilization, in the middle of a jungle and in the midst of its fauna, Claerbout’s film loop culminates anew every hour on the hour – somewhat like a clock – in the final scene of the original animated film. It is the moment in which a young girl comes to the edge of the jungle to fetch water. Mowgli is so beguiled by her singing that he leaves his animal wonderworld and is lured back to the order of civilization. “An ending that already didn’t make sense to us back when we were kids”, as Engler comments.

The film, coproduced by the Städel Museum, will be shown throughout the exhibition on a six-by-four-metre LED screen. Generous support from Dr. Mathias Boehringer has made it possible to purchase the work for the Städel collection.

A public conversation between David Claerbout and Martin Engler will take place on the occasion of the show’s opening at 7 pm on Tuesday, 27 September 2016.

David Claerbout
Born in Kortrijk, Belgium in 1969, David Claerbout studied at the Artesis University College in Antwerp and the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam from 1992 to 1995. He has been honoured with the Will-Grohmann-Preis of the Berlin Akademie der Künste and the Peill-Preis of the Günther-Peill-Stiftung, and is one of the world’s most important contemporary artists. Solo exhibitions of his work have been staged at the Wiener Secession, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Pinakothek der Moderne and the Lenbachhaus in Munich, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique and the WIELS in Brussels, the De Pont Museum in Tilburg and elsewhere.

The point of departure for Claerbout’s photographic and filmic installations is visual material ranging from historical photographs and reconstructed images to film recordings shot according to his instructions. In elaborate digital processes he transforms this material into works that blur the boundaries between photography and film. He deconstructs linear temporal progressions, for example, and questions the manner in which stories are told with the aid of pictures.

“In the Städel Garden”
“In the Städel Garden” is an initiative carried out with the support of the Städel Gartengesellschaft. With this series, the Städel Museum pursues the aim of offering its freely accessible garden grounds as a venue for changing installations, performances and events in the area of 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) and Franz Erhard Walther (“Walking Pedestals and Places to Stand”, 2014).


David Claerbout. Die reine Notwendigkeit
From the “In the Städel Garden” series

Curator: Dr. Martin Engler, Head of the Contemporary Art Collection
Exhibition dates: 28 September to 23 October 2016
Press talk: Tuesday, 27 September 2016, 11 am
Location: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main

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
Special opening hours: Mon, 3 October, 10 am – 6 pm

The Städel Garden may be visited free of charge.

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

Supported by: Flanders & the Netherlands Guest of Honour at the Frankfurter Buchmesse 2016, the Government of Flanders and the Städel Gartengesellschaft

David Claerbout’s Die reine Notwendigkeit was made in coproduction with the Städel Museum and with generous support from Dr. Mathias Boehringer.

The search for a director for the Städel Museum and the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung is over. The graduated art historian Dr. Philipp Demandt (45) will take charge of the two museums on 1 October 2016. Demandt has been the director of the Alte Nationalgalerie, a museum of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preussischer Kulturbesitz, since January 2012 and is one of Germany’s most renowned art historians and exhibition curators. He has comprehensive experience with modern culture management.

This decision was preceded by an intensive national and international search carried out by the Städel Museum administration under the chairmanship of Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Schweickart. Peter Feldmann, the mayor of Frankfurt and chairman of the supervisory board of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Prof. Dr. Felix Semmelroth, the outgoing deputy mayor in charge of culture, and Dr. Ina Hartwig, the designated deputy mayor in charge of culture, welcome the decision.

"We are very happy about the fact that, so soon after Max Hollein’s departure, we have succeeded in recruiting one of the most creative minds in the German museum world to direct the two institutions. As the director of one of Germany’s most prominent museums and a key player in the Berlin museum scene, he has demonstrated his abilities many times over – and is therefore exactly the right person for this major responsibility in Frankfurt", commented Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Schweickart, the chairman of the Städel Museum administration.

Frankfurt’s Mayor Peter Feldmann, the chairman of the supervisory board of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, pointed out: "Frankfurt and Philipp Demandt: a perfect fit. I am delighted that Philipp Demandt has decided to direct the Städel Museum and the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung. He is an outstanding scholar and art mediator – a museum man of distinction. I am certain that Demandt will make a sustainable and future-oriented contribution to shaping and expanding culture in Frankfurt."

The director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt will be decided on by the relevant political bodies after Dr. Ina Hartwig has taken office as Frankfurt’s deputy mayor in charge of culture. Both the mayor and Dr. Hartwig regard the joint direction of the three institutions as a sensible and forward-looking constellation that has hitherto proven highly advantageous for Frankfurt as a city of culture.

"The successful work at the Städel Museum and the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in cooperation with all colleagues is a challenge I anticipate with suspense. At the same time, I look back on five fulfilling years at the Nationalgalerie with deep gratitude. I am greatly looking forward to Frankfurt – professionally because it has developed to become one of the most exciting art centres in Germany and beyond, and personally because I have long been well acquainted with the city and the surrounding region", commented Dr. Philipp Demandt on his call to Frankfurt.

Born in Constance in 1971, Demandt studied art history, classical archaeology and media science and gained his doctorate in 2001 at the Institute of History and Cultural Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin with a thesis on the execution and reception of the portraits of Queen Louise by Johann Gottfried Schadow and Christian Daniel Rauch and the historical mythology of the Prussian state as mirrored in the "Queen Louise cult". After serving as exhibition assistant at the Bröhan Museum in 2002, Demandt became a department head with the Kulturstiftung der Länder. There his responsibilities included advising and supporting German culture institutions on the purchase and financing of artworks from pre- and early history to the nineteenth century as well as on exhibition projects. From 2007 to 2010 he also co-curated the Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg Prussian exhibition "Louise: Life and Myth of the Queen". He planned and directed the magazine "Arsprototo" published by the Kulturstiftung der Länder, as well as the foundation’s scholarly publication series "Patrimonia", and published numerous articles on the history of art and culture, for example in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Welt.

In January 2012, Demandt was appointed director of the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. There he drew attention to himself with a comprehensive new concept for the display collection and a number of exhibitions that were as innovative as they were successful. Among the highlights of the shows staged under his direction were "Rembrandt Bugatti", "Impressionism – Expressionism: Art at a Turning Point" and, most recently, "The Monk Has Returned", a special presentation on the restoration of Caspar David Friedrich’s masterworks Monk by the Sea and The Abbey in the Oakwood. The Alte Nationalgalerie holds paintings and sculptures dating from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Its collection is part of the Nationalgalerie, which also encompasses the Neue Nationalgalerie, the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, the Museum Berggruen and the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg.

In Frankfurt Dr. Philipp Demandt will succeed Max Hollein, who assumed his post as director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) on 1 June 2016.

Press contact:
Axel Braun (Head of Press and Public Relations)
Städel Museum, Dürerstrasse 2, D-60596 Frankfurt, e-mail: braun@staedelmuseum.de;
telephone: +49 (0)69 60 50 98-170, mobile +49 (0)171 5644061, fax: +49 (0)69 60 50 98-188