Images & Texts

Presenting a focused selection of thirty works, the exhibition at the Städel Museum highlights Sigmar Polke’s (1941–2010) early prints. The artist ranks among the outstanding protagonists of the twentieth-century German art scene. For the works he printed from 1967 to 1979 he preferred offset or silkscreen printing, two rather unsophisticated techniques in terms of craftsmanship and trivial methods from the artistic point of view, to transport and spread seemingly random, irritating comments on art and society. Other works by Polke surprise us because of their unusual blend of different printing techniques and material features: they combine silkscreen printing with blind blocking and punching or feature haptic surface structures, for example. Having a work printed in offset always requires a professional printer. This is why Polke dedicated himself all the more to which motifs and materials he chose. In an era informed by the belief in growth and upheavals critical of society, Polke stuck to his messages grounded on observation, wit, and irony in his printed work. The printed image, circulated by the mass media or photographically staged by the artist, remained an essential foundation of his work as an artist. The presentation in the Exhibition Gallery of the Städel’s Department of Prints and Drawings shows a high-carat and concentrated selection of Polke’s early prints, fathoming the works’ special quality.

Born in the Lower Silesian town of Oels (now Oleśnica in Poland) in 1941, Sigmar Polke began an apprenticeship in a stained glass factory before he enrolled at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Polke already distanced himself from the prevailing tendency to abstraction in his paintings during his time as a student (1961–1967) under Gerhard Hoehme and Karl Otto Götz. He was not concerned with the unrepresentational painterly gesture but with exploring the then accessible pictorial worlds of West Germany’s burgeoning economic miracle as an artist. Together with his elder fellow students Konrad Fischer a.k.a. Konrad Lueg und Gerhard Richter, Polke staged the “Demonstration for Capitalist Realism” in a furniture store in Düsseldorf. While the art scene of Paris was pushed into the background through the increasing influence of American Pop art in the 1960s, Sigmar Polke made the consumer-oriented world of commodities and petty bourgeois post-war idyll of the Federal Republic of Germany manifest in magazines and advertising the foundation of his extraordinarily reflected and nonetheless ostensibly playful production.

The artist also drew on found pictorial material in his printed work. A monochrome advertisement provided the basis for his first print, Girlfriends I, (1967). Polke had already transferred this newspaper print into a painting in 1964/65. In the print the offset technique produces the screen structure imitated in the painting by manually adding dot by dot. The enlargement of the motif emphasizes the screen structure. The screen dots typical of Polke’s work also dominate his silkscreen print Weekend House, which was his contribution to the portfolio Graphics of Capitalist Realism published in 1967.

Apart from pictures culled from print media, Polke also used his own photographs for his prints such as that of a folding rule opened to form a star and taken with a Polaroid camera (Folding Rule Stars, 1970), experimentally treated negatives (Self-Portrait, 1971), visibly damaged enlargements (TV Picture [Soccer Player], 1971), or shots taken in New York City during a trip to the USA (New York Beggars, 1974). Contrary to woodcut, etching, or lithography, the off-set and silkscreen printing methods chosen by Polke are popular techniques in commercial art that allow much higher print runs. Seen against this background it is all the more surprising that the artist had a silkscreen print elaborately blind-blocked and punched for a series of school prints for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1972 and upvalued the individual sheets of the edition by overpainting them with glitter paint, transforming them into unique works.

1973 saw the production of several editions in collaboration with the "Griffelkunst-Vereinigung Hamburg", for which Polke chose high-quality bookbinding papers with a sometimes haptic surface structure as a carrier. The papers were combined with picture and text layers in the printing process. The results of these elaborate overlays ensure a certain unease on the part of the viewer and, in spite of all seemingly promising references, keep him guessing. Polke’s calculated treatment of pictures and text quotations from physics, biology, and mythology unfold a creative game pivoted on science and mystery in subjective trajectories.

Polke answered the question after the inspiration of all forms of artistic practice with the statement “. . . Higher Beings Ordain.” This self-ironic response provided the title for an edition of fourteen offset prints of only fifty copies each published by Edition René Block in 1968. The photo montage of Polke’s later print Mu nieltnam netorruprup (1975), whose scenes are dominated by a huge fly agaric, thematizes the quality of mind-altering substances. The show comes to an end with Polke’s Large Head from 1979, which was purchased by the Städelscher Museums-Verein for the Department of Prints and Drawings in 1989. It is a complex work on paper in which Polke interwove different motifs and techniques such as drawing, stencil printing, and silhouette. Despite the closeness of its multiple approaches, Large Head testifies to the independent qualities of drawing, painting, and printed graphic work deliberately taken account of by the artist.

The presentation in the Exhibition Gallery of the Department of Prints and Drawings offers a comprehensive survey of Sigmar Polke’s early printed work. Thanks to the Deutsche Bank Collection at the Städel Museum, the entire selection of exhibits comes from the Städel’s own holdings. Twenty-eight sheets are part of the complex of six hundred works from the Deutsche Bank Collection transferred to the Städel in 2008.

SIGMAR POLKE. EARLY PRINTS

Curator: Dr. Jutta Schütt, Head of the Städel’s Department of Prints and Drawings after 1750
Exhibition dates: 2 March to 22 May 2016
Press preview: Tuesday, 1 March, 11 am
Location: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt
Information: www.staedelmuseum.de, info@staedelmuseum.de, phone +49(0)69-605098-0, Fax +49(0)69-605098-111

General guided tours through the exhibition: Thu 7 pm, Sun 2 pm
Special guided tours on request: please call +49(0)69-605098-200 or contact info@staedelmuseum.de.
Further offers under www.staedelmuseum.de
Opening hours of the Städel Museum: Tue, Wed, Sat, Sun + holidays 10 am–6 pm, Thu + Fri 10 am–9 pm
Special opening hours: 25, 27, and 28 March 10 am – 6 pm; 1, 5, 15, 16, and 17 May 10 am – 6 pm; 26 May 10 am–6 pm

Admission: 14 euros, reduced 12 euros, family ticket 24 euros; free admission for children under twelve years of age; groups of more than 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
Opening hours of the Study Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings: Wed, Fri 2–5 pm; Thu 2–7 pm

Wall texts "Sigmar Polke. Early Prints"

Starting on 24 February 2016, the Städel Museum will present the large-scale exhibition “Maniera. Pontormo, Bronzino and Medici Florence”. With the aid of some 120 prominent loans, the exhibition will acquaint the German public with a key chapter in the history of Italian art – Florentine Mannerism – in all its diversity for the first time. Works by Jacopo Pontormo, Agnolo Bronzino, Andrea del Sarto, Rosso Fiorentino, Giorgio Vasari and others will be on view. Altogether fifty paintings as well as eighty-one drawings, sculptures and works in other media will offer an experience hitherto possible only in Florence – a broad survey of a stylistically formative epoch characterized by the art historiographer Giorgio Vasari with the colourful term “maniera”. Devoted to Florence as the first centre of European Mannerism, the large-scale special exhibition will cover the period from the return of the Medici to that city in 1512 and the early artistic forays by the new generation around Pontormo and Rosso to the 1568 publication of the second edition of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives, a work still influential today. One of the most exquisite works in the Städel holdings – Bronzino’s famous Portrait of a Lady in Red (Francesca Salviati?) (ca. 1533) – formed the point of departure. The project is being carried out with special support from the museums of Florence, above all the Uffizi, the Galleria dell’Accademia and the Galleria Palatina, which are all contributing exceptional selections of works. Further key loans will come from such prominent institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Paris Louvre, the Prado and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the Szépművészeti Múzeum in Budapest and the Brera in Milan.

The exhibition is being realized with support from the Savings Banks Finance Group and the Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain.

“The Städel is starting 2016 with a true exhibition highlight. For ‘Maniera’ we have succeeded in assembling an especially high-calibre selection of works in Frankfurt. This will give visitors to the Städel an opportunity to experience Italian Mannerism and its creative eccentricity in all its multi-medial diversity. Masterworks by Pontormo, Sarto, Bronzino and many other artists will await discovery”, comments Städel Museum director Max Hollein.

Owing in great part to Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, the High Renaissance of the early sixteenth century is generally considered a zenith in the development of art in Italy. In altogether eight chapters with differing temporal and thematic emphases, the Städel Museum exhibition will now impressively demonstrate that a number of especially outstanding artistic accomplishments can be attributed to the following two generations of artists. “The art of Mannerism in Florence has many facets: it is elegant, cultivated and artificial, but also capricious, extravagant and sometimes even bizarre. Sophisticated elegance and creative eccentricity characterize the painting of the ‘maniera’ as one of the most fascinating phenomena in Italian art”, notes Bastian Eclercy, the show’s curator. Building on the trailblazing Florentine presentations “L’officina della maniera” (1996/97), “Bronzino: Pittore e poeta alla corte dei Medici” (2010/11) and “Pontormo e Rosso Fiorentino: Divergenti vie della ‘maniera’” (2014), the special exhibition at the Städel Museum will present a broad survey of Mannerist painting in Florence within the context of various genres and the city’s history. Chronologically and topographically, the show will pick up where the successful Städel exhibition “Botticelli: Likeness, Myth, Devotion” of 2009/10 left off.

A Tour of the Exhibition
“Maniera” will spread out over both floors of the exhibition annex. To start with, it will focus on the most prominent exponents of a young generation of Florentine painters, Pontormo and Rosso. With the aid of variations on the Florentine pictorial theme of the “Madonna and Child with the Infant St John”, this section will show how Pontormo and Rosso emancipated themselves increasingly from the artistic ideals of the High Renaissance – here represented by Raphael –, deliberately playing with the stylistic rules then in effect. With his Portrait of a Goldsmith (ca. 1518, Musée du Louvre, Paris), Pontormo also commended himself as an innovative portraitist of his time. What is more, his drawings of this phase are distinguished by a virtually unsurpassable dynamic, as is evident, for example, in his Three Studies of a Male Nude (ca. 1517, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille).
Between 1519 and 1525, for example in the Holy Family with the Infant St John Rosso found his way to expressive new means of artistic expression, as will be evident in the following section of the show. His fellow artist Pontormo developed his own very distinctive artistic fingerprint during this phase, strongly inspired by his study of art from north of the Alps, and translated prints by Albrecht Dürer and Lucas van Leyden into a blend of Florentine and German styles. His famous Adoration of the Magi (ca. 1519–23, Galleria Palatina, Florence), which has never been outside Florence until now, is a case in point.
As the next section of the show will illustrate, the history of the Florentine art of those years – and that of the town itself – bear a close relationship to the events unfolding in the papal metropolis of Rome. Under the Medici Pope Clement VII, a number of young talents converged in that town, among them Rosso Fiorentino, Parmigianino, Polidoro da Caravaggio and Perino del Vaga. The pillage of the city by the mercenary troops of Charles V (Sacco di Roma) would bring this productive constellation to an end in 1527. Rosso had arrived in Rome in 1524 and initially produced frescoes and panel paintings. Soon, however, he shifted his artistic focus to printmaking, for example the Gods in Niches (1526) on view here, a series belonging to the Städel Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings. The plundering of Rome also had consequences for Florence. The faction of the Medici’s opponents drove the family out of town and proclaimed the Republic. In the autumn of 1529, however, imperial troops laid siege to the city, ultimately forcing the Republic of Florence to surrender in 1530. This phase of political and societal upheaval was one of the most creative and productive periods in Florentine painting, as is evident in major works such as Andrea del Sarto’s Sacrifice of Isaac (ca. 1529/30, Museo del Prado, Madrid) or Bronzino’s St Sebastian (ca. 1528/29, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid). The historic events taking place in Florence in those years are also mirrored in the four differing versions of the Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand (ca. 1522–30) by Pontormo, Bronzino and Perino del Vaga brought together in a single venue for the first time ever by this exhibition.
Next the show will take a look at Bronzino’s rise to become Florence’s leading portrait painter under its first duke, Alessandro de’ Medici. Here the highlight will be Bronzino’s brilliant Portrait of a Lady in Red (Francesca Salviati?) (ca. 1533) from the Städel collection, a key work of Florentine portrait painting. As a monumental, prestigious likeness of a lady it embodies a new portrait type whose emergence this exhibition reconstructs for the first time, assembling a number of closely related likenesses of women around the Portrait of a Lady in Red.

The prelude to the second floor of the show will be devoted to the so-called “paragone” – the rivalry for pride of place between the media of painting and sculpture that was a topic of lively discussion in the Florentine art scene of the 1540s. Pontormo carried out his monumental painting of Venus and Cupid (ca. 1533, Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence), likewise on display here for the first time outside of Florence, after a design by Michelangelo. By lending the bodies a sculptural quality, he was virtually offering his own artistic argument to the paragone debate. Yet the architecture of Florentine Mannerism likewise competes with sculpture: the stairs of Michelangelo’s Staircase of the Biblioteca Laurenziana (1524–1529) take on sculptural forms. A monumental model of the entire staircase on a scale of 1:3 conveys an impression of the playful elegance of this architectural feat.
Bronzino’s appointment as court painter to the new Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici in 1539 will be the theme of the second room in this part of the show. The artist painted the likenesses of the duke, his consort Eleonora di Toledo and their children, thus creating an entire portrait series. In the process, he shaped the genre of the courtly child’s portrait to a decisive degree, as exemplified by the Portrait of Garzia de’ Medici (ca. 1550, Museo del Prado, Madrid). At the same time, with his frescoes decorating Eleonora’s private chapel in the Palazzo Vecchio as well as his religious panel paintings, he set new standards for the art of the Florentine court. In 1546, Cosimo I founded a tapestry manufactory and commissioned Bronzino to design monumental pictorial tapestries celebrating his ducal sovereignty in complex allegories. Our exhibition will feature the first of these works, the so-called Dovizia (1545, Galleria del Costume, Florence), along with several preparatory drawings.
Finally, the show will shine a spotlight on Giorgio Vasari. Known primarily as an art writer and architect, he will here be introduced as an important painter and draughtsman. From 1555/56 onward, in his capacity as court painter Vasari carried out a great number of fresco decorations in the Palazzo Vecchio, having first designed them in detailed drawings. He also executed a number of his most impressive panel paintings in this phase, for example the Toilet of Venus (ca. 1558, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart). His magnum opus as a writer is the second edition of his Lives of the Artists published in 1568, the first comprehensive history of Italian art from Giotto to Vasari himself. In addition to the biographies of various Florentine Mannerists, the Lives of the Artists also contain the earliest theoretical reflections on the art of the “maniera”. The concluding section of the exhibition will moreover present Pontormo’s diary from the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence. As one of the earliest extant artists’ diaries, it provides authentic insight into the Florentine master’s working process and everyday life.

Maniera. Pontormo, Bronzino and Medici Florence

Curator: Dr Bastian Eclercy, head of the collection of Italian, French and Spanish painting before 1800, Städel Museum.
Exhibition dates: 24 February to 5 June 2016.
Press preview: Tuesday, 23 February 2016, 11 am.

Information: www.staedelmuseum.de, info@staedelmuseum.de, telephone +49(0)69-605098-0, fax +49(0)69-605098-111.
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 + holidays 10 am ‒ 6 pm, Thu, Fri 10 am ‒ 9 pm.
Special opening hours: 25, 27 and 28 Mar. 10 am ‒ 6 pm; 1, 5, 15, 16 and 17 May 10 am ‒ 6 pm, 26 May 10 am ‒ 6 pm.

Admission: 14 EUR, reduced 12 EUR, family ticket 24 EUR; admission free for children to the age of 12; combi-price admission + guided tour 16 EUR (available online only); groups (minimum 10 persons): reduced admission fee per person. Groups are required to book in advance by contacting us at +49(0)69-605098-200 or info@staedelmuseum.de.
Early-Bird tickets: The first 1,000 online tickets are available at a preferential price of 10 EUR instead of the regular 14 EUR at tickets.staedelmuseum.de.
Advance ticket sales online at: tickets.staedelmuseum.de.

Catalogue: The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue published by the Prestel Verlag and edited by Bastian Eclercy, with a foreword by Max Hollein and contributions by Hans Aurenhammer, Nicholas Scott Baker, Katharina Bedenbender, Anne Bloemacher, Gerd Blum, Ralf Bormann, Matteo Burioni, Heiko Damm, Bastian Eclercy, Chris Fischer, David Franklin, Dennis Geronimus, Sefy Hendler, Theresa Holler, Heidi J. Hornik, Fabian Jonietz, Adela Kutschke, Johannes Myssok, Susanne Pollack, Susanne Thürigen and Linda Wolk-Simon. In German and English, 304 pages, 39.90 Euro (museum edition).
Visitor’s guide: A visitor’s guide will be available in German, 40 pages, 7.50 EUR.

Digitorial: The digitorial is being made possible by the Aventis Foundation. Design and programming: Scholz & Volkmer. It will be available from the middle of February 2016 at maniera.staedelmuseum.de.
Städel App: The Städel App is sponsored by the FAZIT-STIFTUNG. The app is optimized for Android and iOS smartphone. Starting on the first day of the exhibition, it will offer the audio tour of the show in the form of a smartphone download for 0.99 EUR.
Audio guide: The audio tour is narrated by Giovanni di Lorenzo, chief editor of the ZEIT. German and English, 4 EUR, two audio guides for 7 EUR.
Social Media: The Städel Museum is communicating the exhibition on the social media with the hashtags #maniera and #staedel.

General guided tours of the exhibition: Tue 3 pm, Wed 1 pm, Thu 6 pm, Fri 7 pm, Sat 4 pm, Sun 11 am, Fri. 25 Mar., Mon. 28 Mar., Thu 5 May, Mon. 16 May, Thu 26 May 4 pm. Tickets for the general guided tours are available for 4 EUR starting two hours before the tour begins (Sundays from 10:00 am) at the Städel cashier’s desk, or in advance at a preferential price of 16 EUR (admission + guided tour) online at tickets.staedelmuseum.de. The number of participants is limited; previous booking is not required.

Sponsored by: Savings Banks Finance Group, represented by Sparkassen-Kulturfonds of the German Savings Banks Association, Deutsche Leasing and Frankfurter Sparkasse; Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain gGmbH.

Media partners: Süddeutsche Zeitung; Verkehrsgesellschaft Frankfurt am Main
Mobility partner: Deutsche Bahn AG
Cultural partner: hr2-kultur

The Städel Museum will usher in the coming exhibition year with a high-calibre show: starting on 24 February 2016, the Frankfurt museum will present "Maniera. Pontormo, Bronzino and Medici Florence". With the aid of some 120 prominent loans, the exhibition will acquaint the German public with a key chapter in the history of Italian art – Florentine Mannerism – in all its diversity for the first time. Works by Jacopo Pontormo, Agnolo Bronzino, Andrea del Sarto, Rosso Fiorentino, Giorgio Vasari and others will be on view. Chronologically and topographically, the show will pick up where the successful Städel exhibition "Botticelli. Likeness, Myth, Devotion" of 2009/10 left off. Advance ticket sales have already begun. Flexible "Early-Bird-Tickets", redeemable at the holder’s convenience, can be booked online at a preferential price of 10 EUR starting immediately.

The exhibition is being realized with support from the Savings Banks Finance Group and the Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain.

Devoted to Florence as the first centre of European Mannerism, the large-scale special exhibition will cover the period from the return of the Medici to that city in 1512 and the early artistic forays by the new generation around Pontormo and Rosso to the 1568 publication of the second edition of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists a work still influential today. More than fifty paintings, but also over fifty drawings and eight sculptures will offer an experience hitherto possible only in Florence – a broad survey of a stylistically formative epoch characterized by the art historiographer Giorgio Vasari with the colourful term "maniera". One of the most exquisite works in the Städel holdings – Bronzino’s famous Portrait of a Lady in Red (Francesca Salviati?) (ca. 1533) – formed the point of departure for this show. The project is being carried out with special support from the museums of Florence, above all the Uffizi, the Galleria dell’Accademia and the Galleria Palatina, which are all contributing exceptional selections of works. Further key loans will come from such prominent institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Paris Louvre, the Prado and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the Szépművészeti Múzeum in Budapest and the Brera in Milan.

Owing in great part to Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, the High Renaissance of the early sixteenth century is generally considered a zenith in the development of art in Italy. In altogether eight chapters with differing temporal and thematic emphases, the Städel Museum exhibition will now impressively demonstrate that a number of especially outstanding artistic accomplishments can be attributed to the following two generations of artists. The art of Mannerism has many facets: it is elegant, cultivated and artificial, but also capricious, extravagant and sometimes even bizarre. Sophisticated elegance and creative eccentricity characterize the painting of the "maniera" as one of the most fascinating phenomena in Italian art. Building on the trailblazing Florentine presentations "L’officina della maniera" (1996/97), "Bronzino. Pittore e poeta alla corte dei Medici" (2010/11) and "Pontormo e Rosso Fiorentino. Divergenti vie della ‘maniera’" (2014), the Städel Museum’s comprehensive special exhibition will present a broad survey of Mannerist painting in Florence within the context of various genres and the city’s history.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue published by the Prestel Verlag and edited by Bastian Eclercy, with a foreword by Max Hollein and texts by Hans Aurenhammer, Nicholas Scott Baker, Katharina Bedenbender, Anne Bloemacher, Gerd Blum, Ralf Bormann, Matteo Burioni, Heiko Damm, Bastian Eclercy, Chris Fischer, David Franklin, Dennis Geronimus, Sefy Hendler, Theresa Holler, Heidi J. Hornik, Fabian Jonietz, Adela Kutschke, Johannes Myssok, Susanne Pollack, Susanne Thürigen and Linda Wolk-Simon. In German and English, 304 pages, 39.90 EUR (museum edition).

MANIERA. PONTORMO, BRONZINO AND MEDICI FLORENCE

Curator: Dr Bastian Eclercy, head of the collection of Italian, French and Spanish paintings before 1800, Städel Museum.
Exhibition dates: 24 February to 5 June 2016.
Press preview: Tuesday, 23 February 2016, 11 am.
Location: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main.

Information: www.staedelmuseum.de, info@staedelmuseum.de, telephone +49(0)69-605098-0, fax +49(0)69-605098-111.
Visitor services: telephone +49(0)69-605098-232, besucherdienst@staedelmuseum.de.
Opening hours: Tue, Wed, Sat, Sun + holidays 10am ‒ 6 pm, Thu, Fri 10 am ‒ 9 pm.
Special opening hours: 25, 27 and 28 Mar. 10 am ‒ 6 pm, 1 May closed, 5, 15, 16 and 17 May 10 am ‒ 6 pm, 26 May 10 am ‒ 6 pm.

Admission: 14 EUR, reduced 12 EUR, family ticket 24 EUR; admission free for children to the age of 12; combi-price admission + guided tour 16 EUR (available online only); groups (minimum 10 persons): reduced admission fee per person. Groups are required to book in advance by contacting us at +49(0)69-605098-200 or info@staedelmuseum.de.
Early-Bird-Ticket: The first 1,000 online tickets are available at a preferential price of 10 EUR instead of the regular 14 EUR at tickets.staedelmuseum.de.
Advance ticket sales online at: tickets.staedelmuseum.de.

Catalogue: The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue published by the Prestel Verlag and edited by Bastian Eclercy, with a foreword by Max Hollein and contributions by Hans Aurenhammer, Nicholas Scott Baker, Katharina Bedenbender, Anne Bloemacher, Gerd Blum, Ralf Bormann, Matteo Burioni, Heiko Damm, Bastian Eclercy, Chris Fischer, David Franklin, Dennis Geronimus, Sefy Hendler, Theresa Holler, Heidi J. Hornik, Fabian Jonietz, Adela Kutschke, Johannes Myssok, Susanne Pollack, Susanne Thürigen and Linda Wolk-Simon. In German and English, 304 pages, 39.90 Euro (museum edition).
Visitor’s guide: A visitor’s guide will be available in German, 40 pages, 7.50 EUR.

Digitorial: The digitorial is being made possible by the Aventis Foundation. Design and programming: Scholz & Volkmer. It will be available from February 2016 at maniera.staedelmuseum.de.
Städel App: The Städel App is sponsored by the FAZIT-STIFTUNG. The app is optimized for Android and iOS smartphone. Starting on the first day of the exhibition, it will offer the audio tour of the show in the form of a smartphone download.
Audio guide: The audio tour is narrated by Giovanni di Lorenzo, chief editor of the ZEIT. German and English, 4 EUR, two audio guides for 7 EUR.
Social Media: The Städel Museum is communicating the exhibition on the social media with the hashtags #maniera and #staedel.

General guided tours of the exhibition: Tue 3 pm, Wed 1 pm, Thu 6 pm, Fri 7 pm, Sat 4 pm, Sun 11 am, Fri. 25 Mar., Mon. 28 Mar., Thu 5 May, Mon. 16 May, Thu 26 May 4 pm. Tickets for the general guided tours are available for 4 EUR starting two hours before the tour begins (Sundays from 10 am) at the Städel cashier’s desk, or in advance at a preferential price of 16 EUR (admission + guided tour) online at tickets.staedelmuseum.de. The number of participants is limited; previous booking is not required.

Sponsored by: Savings Banks Finance Group, represented by Sparkassen-Kulturfonds of the German Savings Banks Association, Deutsche Leasing and Frankfurter Sparkasse;
Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain gGmbH.

Media partner: Verkehrsgesellschaft Frankfurt am Main
Mobility partner: Deutsche Bahn AG
Cultural partner: hr2-kultur

Exhibition Program

Maniera: Pontormo, Bronzino and Medici Florence
24 February to 5 June 2016
Exhibition annex
Jacopo Pontormo, Agnolo Bronzino, Andrea del Sarto, Rosso Fiorentino, Giorgio Vasari – in 2016, the Städel Museum will stage a major exhibition of superb works presenting the distinguished painters of Florentine Mannerism for the first time in Germany. With the aid of prominent loans, the show will acquaint the public with a key chapter in the history of Italian art in all its diversity. Spanning the period from the return of the Medici to Florence in 1512 and the initial artistic endeavours of the new generation around Pontormo and Rosso to the 1568 publication of Vasari’s Lives – artist biographies that still bear an influence today –, “Maniera” will be devoted to Florence as the first centre of European Mannerism. More than 120 precious loans, including paintings as well as drawings and sculptures, will provide an unprecedented overview of a stylistically formative epoch for which the art historiographer Giorgio Vasari coined the colourful term “maniera”. Elegant, cultivated and artificial, but also capricious, extravagant and sometimes even bizarre: the art of Mannerism exhibits many facets. In 1967, the art historian John Shearman summed it up in a catchy formula – "the stylish style". Its sophisticated grace and creative tenacity make the “maniera” one of the most fascinating phenomena in the art of Italy.
One of the most exquisite works in the Städel holdings – Bronzino’s famous Portrait of a Lady in Red (Francesca Salviati?) (ca. 1533) – formed the point of departure for this ambitious show. The project is being carried out with special support from the museums of Florence, above all the Uffizi, the Galleria dell’Accademia and the Galleria Palatina. Further key loans will come from such prominent museums as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Paris Louvre, the Prado and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the Szépművészeti Múzeum in Budapest and the Brera in Milan.
The art-historical development of the decades from 1512 to 1568 will be presented in close relation to Florentine city history and Medici rule – themes to be investigated in both the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue.
Curator: Dr. Bastian Eclercy

Sigmar Polke: Early Prints
2 March to 22 May 2016
Exhibition gallery of the Department of Prints and Drawings
The printed image, circulated by the mass media or photographically staged by the artist himself, represents a fundamental principle in the work of Sigmar Polke (1941–2010). As early as 1967, towards the end of his studies at the Düsseldorf art academy, Polke published his first print: Girlfriends. To this end he chose offset printing, a rather unsophisticated technique in terms of craftsmanship, and trivial from the artistic point of view. It would remain his favourite printmaking medium, which he would use to transport and disseminate seemingly incidental – but nonetheless disconcerting – commentaries on art and society.
The presentation in the exhibition gallery of the Department of Prints and Drawings will feature a selection of Sigmar Polke’s early prints as precious as it is concentrated, and inquire into the special quality of his work with the medium. Thanks to the Deutsche Bank Collection at the Städel Museum, the exhibits can be chosen entirely from within the Städel’s own holdings.
Curator: Dr. Jutta Schütt

Heaven on Display: The Altenberg Altar and Its Imagery
22 June to 25 September 2016
Exhibition gallery of the Department of Prints and Drawings
Owing to fortunate circumstances, a unique ensemble of late thirteenth and early fourteenth-century liturgical and paraliturgical objects has come down to us from a former convent at Altenberg an der Lahn. Every one of these objects alone can already be considered among the absolute gems of the period. For the first time since the convent’s secularization in the early nineteenth century, they will now be brought together again in the exhibition “Heaven on Display”, granting visitors the opportunity to experience one of the qualitatively most superb choir ensembles of the Middle Ages.
At its centre, the exhibition will feature a folding altarpiece measuring some 4.9 metres in width. Consisting of a shrine cabinet, a statue of the Madonna and wings, it unites works of painting, sculpture, textile art and goldsmithery in a complex inter-referential system of altar imagery. From about 1330 onward, this retable, which forms the core of the ensemble, decorated the main altar of the convent church built between 1260 and 1270. The altarpiece wings already entered the Städel collection and its superb holdings of Early German painting in 1925. The presentation in the exhibition gallery of the Department of Prints and Drawings will allow visitors to experience first-hand the fascinating interplay between various pictorial media in an ensemble of early fourteenth-century choir furnishings. Within this context, particularly in view of the sophisticated iconography of the linen embroideries and the recently rediscovered original paintings on the sides and back of the shrine cabinet, questions arise as to the accessibility of the imagery on and around the high altar and its reception from close quarters.
In preparation for the exhibition, the Städel is hosting an international Passavant Colloquium on 13 and 14 November 2015. The latest research insights will be presented by altogether seventeen guest speakers, whose contributions will be further elaborated within the framework of the exhibition “Heaven on Display: The Altenberg Altar and Its Imagery”.
Curator: Prof. Dr. Jochen Sander

Georg Baselitz – The Heroes
30 June to 23 October 2016
Exhibition annex
Georg Baselitz (b. 1938) is without question one of the most influential painters and sculptors of our time. In 1965/66, in a virtually explosive spurt of productivity, he developed his dramatic and paradoxical Hero paintings. The forceful workgroup of the Heroes and New Types is today regarded worldwide as a key example of the German art of the 1960s. In the summer of 2016, in a monographic exhibition curated by Städel director Max Hollein, it will be comprehensively presented for the first time. Some seventy paintings and works on paper will be on view, distinguished by aggressively and defiantly painted monumental figures that have lost nothing of their ambiguous, portentous and vulnerable quality to this day.
In 1965, Georg Baselitz perceived the order of post-war Germany in its state of multifaceted destruction – ideologies and political systems, but also artistic styles were up for discussion. This lack of order was very much in keeping with the artist’s own nature: appropriation through artistic categorization was something that remained foreign to him all his life. From the perspective of his fundamentally sceptical attitude he therefore emphasized the equivocal aspects of his time. His monumental Heroes in their tattered battle dress, figures marked as much by failure as they are by resignation, possess an accordingly contradictory character. The fact that the artist – who was a mere twenty-seven years of age at the time – devoted himself to the subject of "heroes" or "types" at all was provocative per se. (Male) heroism and its onetime exponents had been called into question by the war and the post-war period. The fragile and paradoxical character of the Heroes with regard to content finds its equivalent in their form. The consistently frontal depiction and central placement of the clearly outlined figure contrast with the wildness of the palette and the vehemence of the painting style. Baselitz thus illustrated a reality unwelcome in the German Federal Republican success story of the economic miracle – and what is more, to do so he availed himself of figuration, a supposedly obsolete form.
Yet Baselitz was concerned here with far more than general social issues – he was also reflecting on his own position in relation to society. The result is a forceful assertion of the self and definition of identity that runs contrary to all of the currents of the period in question.
The travelling exhibition’s subsequent venues will be the Moderna Museet Stockholm, the Palazzo delle Esposizioni Rom and the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao.
Curator: Max Hollein
Co-curator: Dr. Eva Mongi-Vollmer

David Claerbout. Die reine Notwendigkeit
28 September to 23 October 2016
Städel Garden
From 28 September to 23 October 2016 – on the occasion of the Frankfurt Book Fair, whose guests of honour will be the Netherlands and Flanders – the Städel will present a new work by the Belgian artist David Claerbout (b. 1969) within the framework of the series “In the Städel Garden”. At first sight, the sixty-minute video Die reine Notwendigkeit developed especially for the Städel Museum looks like a direct appropriation of the popular animated film The Jungle Book by Wolfgang Reithermann from 1967. For his work, Claerbout had the drawings re-created in an elaborate process – the major difference being that he eliminated the humanized character of the familiar animals the Bear, the Panther, the Snake, the Tiger etc. and therefore all narrative thread. They now move through the jungle like members of their species in an animal documentary, undisturbed by humanity’s stories. Rather than telling the tale of a young boy, the video culminates every hour on the hour in the final scene of the 1967 original: the singing girl who has come to the jungle to fetch water. For Claerbout, this scene serves as the beginning and end of the loop dividing time into one-hour units on a large LED screen in the Städel Garden. In his photographic and filmic installations, David Claerbout employs visual material ranging from found historical photographs and reconstructed images to films shot according to his instructions. He processes this material digitally in such a way that the boundary between photography and film becomes fluid. Claerbout deconstructs linear courses of time, thus inquiring into how we tell stories with images.
Curator: Dr. Martin Engler

Antoine Watteau. The Draughtsman
19 October 2016 to 15 January 2017
Exhibition gallery of the Department of Prints and Drawings
The French painter Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) is among the great masters of draughtsmanship. His sensitive studies in red, black and white chalk capture female and male models, observations of details and spontaneous ideas, and develop that world of cheerful companies and mutually attentive conviviality that would come to be called “fêtes galantes” (“courtship parties”).
In cooperation with the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, the Städel Museum is planning an exhibition of drawings by Antoine Watteau for the autumn of 2016. Both institutions have in their possession substantial holdings of works by the artist, who can be considered one of the most outstanding draughtsmen in the history of French art. His innovative style – characterized by a combination of spontaneity, ease and intimacy on the one hand and observation of the utmost precision on the other – contrasts starkly with the formal tradition of the academically oriented artists of his time. With its psychological sensitivity, the new, virtuoso art reflects the spirit of the dawning Enlightenment.
Watteau is relatively little known in Germany, despite the fact that in the eighteenth century he was one of the Frederick the Great’s favourite artists. The last exhibition to be devoted here to Watteau took place in 1984. Among the works in the Städel Museum’s painting collection is the earliest version of the Embarkation for Cythera, which – owing in part to the two further versions in the Louvre and Charlottenburg Palace – represents what is presumably the artist’s most famous pictorial invention. Enhanced by a small selection of further paintings, the Städel Museum’s Embarkation for Cythera will form the core of the presentation of approximately fifty choice drawings from the holdings of the participating institutions as well as a number of other prominent German, Dutch and French collections. Approximately twenty drawings by such artists as François Boucher, Nicolas Lancret or Jean-Honoré Fragonard will supplement this selection, bearing testimony to Watteau’s impact on later generations of artists.
Following its presentation at the Städel Museum, the exhibition will be shown at the Teylers Museum in Haarlem from 2 February to 14 May 2017.
Curator: Dr. Martin Sonnabend

Battle of the Sexes: From Franz von Stuck to Frida Kahlo
24 November 2016 to 19 March 2017
Exhibition annex
The exhibition “Battle of the Sexes: From Franz von Stuck to Frida Kahlo” will shed light on the artistic investigation of gender roles from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of World War II. The traditional definition of male and female as active/passive, rational/emotional, culture/nature was heavily debated in modern art: many artists presented their viewers with overstated gender characteristics and cemented stereotypical role models in their works. Others challenged established clichés and endeavoured to subvert them with strategies such as irony, exaggeration, masquerade and blending. Featuring a selection of some 150 works of painting, sculpture, graphic art, photography and film, the large-scale exhibition project aims to single out the especially concise artistic positions and open up a dialogue between them.
The show will draw from the Städel Museum holdings which – with paintings by Max Liebermann, Edvard Munch and Franz von Stuck, sculptures by Auguste Rodin and photographs by Frank Eugene, Man Ray and others – include important works on the subject. With the additional aid of important loans, the presentation will place works by well-known names in art history – for example Hannah Höch, Édouard Manet, Gustav Klimt, Otto Dix or Frida Kahlo – side by side with discoveries that expand the canon with the strong outlooks of such artists as Leonor Fini, John Collier or Gustav Adolf Mossa. Against the background of the intense discussion on the topic and the constantly evolving roles of woman and man, the project will offer insights into the complexity of gender issues and shed light on the art historical dimension of a highly relevant socio-politic subject.
Curators: Felicity Korn, Dr. Felix Krämer

Subject to alterations.