Images & Texts

“200 Years Städel”, the bicentennial celebrations of Frankfurt’s Städel Museum, are culminating with a solo exhibition of works by the internationally renowned American artist John Baldessari (b. 1931) taking place from 5 November 2015 to 24 January 2016. For “John Baldessari. The Städel Paintings”, the artist – one of the most influential alive today – executed a total of sixteen new pieces related explicitly to the Städel Museum collection, which spans seven hundred years of European art. A number of very different works from the Städel holdings – masterpieces, but also unusual finds in the storage depots, by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Agnolo Bronzino, Dirck van Baburen, Bartolomeo Veneto, Justus Juncker, Erró, Maria Lassnig and others – served him as visual material for his large-scale collages. Taking these selected works as his point of departure, the artist explores the relationship between painting and photography, but also that between image and language. In the process he not only isolates specific details of the Städel paintings but also partially overpaints those details and combines them with texts formally reminiscent of excerpts from Hollywood film scripts to create large horizontally or vertically divided diptychs. The result is a suspenseful and complex consonance/dissonance that queries old and new art alike and breaks with established patterns of perception. The catalogue being published in German and English to accompany the show broadens the spectrum further and places Baldessari’s most recent workgroup in the context of the extremely diverse œuvre of this prominent pioneer of American concept art.

“I couldn’t imagine a better way of bringing the Städel’s two-hundredth anniversary year to a close. The fact that John Baldessari – a true icon of the contemporary art world – has devoted himself to our collection on such a profound level underscores the international appeal of the Städel and its programme. We are extremely proud to have this opportunity to show Baldessari’s new works at the Städel Museum”, comments Städel director Max Hollein.

It was in the late 1960s that John Baldessari (born in National City, California in 1931) began addressing himself to the conflation of image and text so characteristic of his art. In 1970 he decided to burn a substantial proportion of his œuvre ‒ all of the paintings in his possession executed between 1953 and 1966 ‒ in a symbolically charged action he titled the “Cremation Project”. What followed this radical gesture, however, was not the end of his artistic activity, but on the contrary a fresh start in his intense pictorial production. For his art Baldessari draws on contemporary American mass culture but also on the canon of art history. In his works he responds to artistic strategies of the Classical Modern period such as montage or the integration of everyday elements, and combines them with themes introduced by the post-war avant-gardes, for example the discourses on consumption or the media. He uses found footage from films and other mass media, which he combines anew and in part subjects to painterly processing. In addition to image and language, Baldessari also already began at an early stage to link painting and photography by experimenting with photo emulsion on canvas. With his interdisciplinary approach as well as his merging of widely differing motifs, media and materials, he creates entirely new contexts of meaning. Among other distinctions, John Baldessari has been awarded the Golden Lion of the 53rd Venice Biennale and, in 2012, the Kaiserring, the art prize of the city of Goslar.

“Baldessari’s Städel Paintings bear witness to a sense of both respect and irony towards the history of painting, as well as to that different, better world promised us by painting over centuries – and at the same time they cannot but mistrust that promise”, observes Martin Engler, curator of the exhibition and head of the Städel Museum’s contemporary art collection.

With the workgroup of the sixteen diptychs to be shown at the Städel Museum in the framework of “John Baldessari: The Städel Paintings”, the artist negotiates fundamental issues related to the execution and reception, value and valuation of art. The collage Movie Scripts / Art: Hang in there (2014) shows a section of Agnolo Bronzino’s (1503–1572) Portrait of a Lady with a Lapdog (1537–1540), a key work of the Städel Museum’s Old Masters collection. Apart from the lady’s hands, all we see is part of the little dog sitting on her lap. Monochrome overpainting covers small areas, which thus represent an abstract counterpart to the illusionary space created by Bronzino’s composition. The brief text appearing underneath in screenplay style revolves around a fictional auction at Sotheby’s in New York. The two protagonists, Arthur and Hans, are sitting in the VIP lounge and competing for a work; Arthur has just bid 1.2 million dollars. Hans hesitates for a moment and asks the person accompanying him for advice. She reminds him that he already owns a yacht in which he could hang the painting.
For Movie Scripts / Art: I wouldn’t even try (2014) Baldessari used a fragment from Ideal Portrait of a Courtesan as Flora (ca. 1520) by Bartolomeo Veneto (1502–1531). The film script text in the left-hand half of the picture is about a couple travelling by car in the vicinity of Albuquerque, New Mexico. They drive towards a huge billboard. The short description of the image on the billboard seems to be directly related to a detail of the Veneto work. In the conversation, the woman in the car remarks that she wishes she could also paint like that, but she wouldn’t even dare to try. The man replies outright: “I’m thinking about it, baby!” Clichés about art, quality and craftsmanship here encounter a symbol of everyday American culture and the widespread assumption that art is based solely on expertise and artistic skill.

Like these two works, the entire series takes a critical and pointed look at the institutions and mechanisms of the ‘art operating system’. In the process, it reflects on the complex and often absurd excesses in the contemporary art world and its market.

Edited by Martin Engler and published by the Hirmer Verlag, the catalogue accompanying the exhibition ‒ “John Baldessari: The Städel Paintings” ‒ places the series on view in the Städel in the context of Baldessari’s overall multifaceted œuvre while at the same time shedding light on decisive art-historical and institutional references. The publication introduces this outstanding exponent of concept and media art as a key figure representing an important chapter in recent art history.

With this show of current works by John Baldessari based on the Städel collection, the Frankfurt museum is also inquiring into the present status of painting. At the end of its bicentennial year, the Städel – as a “painting museum” ‒ thus builds a bridge from the past to the immediate present and takes a suspenseful look ahead to the future.

John Baldessari. The Städel Paintings

Curator: Dr. Martin Engler (head of the collection of contemporary art, Städel Museum)
Exhibition dates: 5 November 2015 to 24 January 2016
Press preview: Wednesday, 4 November 2015, 11 am
Location: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt

Information: www.staedelmuseum.de, info@staedelmuseum.de, telephone +49(0)69-605098-0, fax +49(0)69-605098-111
Visitor services: +49(0)69-605098-232, besucherdienst@staedelmuseum.de

Opening hours: Tue, Wed, Sat, Sun 10 am ‒ 6 pm, Thu, Fri 10 am ‒ 9 pm, closed Mondays
Special opening hours: 3 Oct. 2015, 10 am – 6 pm, 24 Dec. 2015 closed, 25, 26 and 28 Dec. 2015 10 am ‒ 6 pm, 31 Dec. 2015 closed, 1 Jan. 2016 11 am ‒ 6 pm, 4 Jan. 2016 10 am ‒ 6 pm

Admission: 14 EUR, reduced 12 EUR, family ticket 24 EUR; admission free for children to the age of 12; 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.
Advance ticket sales online at: tickets.staedelmuseum.de

Catalogue: The exhibition catalogue, published by Hirmer Verlag and edited by Martin Engler, contains contributions by Jana Baumann, Martin Engler, David Salle, Philipp Kaiser; German/English, 184 pp., approx. 35 EUR (museum edition).

Social media: The Städel Museum is communicating the exhibition on the social media with the hashtags #baldessari and #staedel.

General guided tours of the exhibition (included in admission fee): Thu 7 pm; Sun 2 pm
Special guided tours on request, please contact: +49(0)69-605098-200, info@staedelmuseum.de
Further events and activities: www.staedelmuseum.de

Media partners: Andy Warhol's INTERVIEW magazine, Verkehrsgesellschaft Frankfurt am Main

By seating works from its collection “on the couch”, Frankfurt’s Städel Museum has produced a completely new web film format. Starting immediately, “Talk im Rahmen” (“Talk in Framework”) is available on the Städel Museum’s YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/staedelmuseum). As entertaining as it is informative and innovative, the new film series avails itself of the classical TV talk show format. The well-known TV host Gert Scobel (3sat) discusses selected topics with guests at the Städel. What makes this talk show different is: the studio guests are artworks from all areas of the museum’s collection. In approximately ten-minute episodes, “Old Masters” engage in heated discussion with works of modern and contemporary art. Voice-over artists lend the works fictive personalities and distinctive voices. The series parodies talk show clichés such as the classical studio with the water glass for the host and conservative furniture for the guests, or the stereotypical point-of-view shots that follow the conversation. The “Talk in Rahmen” (“Talk in Framework”) guests are introduced in short film clips in which the audience makes their acquaintance and learns who created them when and under what circumstances. By way of this information, but also the guests’ pointedly formulated remarks, the viewer learns about key aspects of all the participating artworks in a completely unconventional, innovative and entertaining manner.

In every episode, three paintings from various eras have been invited to talk about a topic they share – and often disagree on. The subject of emancipation, for example, is discussed by Lucas Cranach’s Venus (1532) as a “femme fatale” who makes deliberate use of her charms to reach her goals, Ottilie W. Roederstein’s Self-Portrait with Folded Arms (1926) as a work by a self-confident artist who knew how to hold her ground in the male-dominated art world of her time, and Carl Spitzweg’s The Widower (1844), who doesn’t think much of Roederstein’s plea for strong women. In this episode, Sonja Deutsch – British actress Helen Mirren’s ‘German voice’ – speaks the part of Ottilie W. Roederstein’s self-portrait.

The new web film format was produced by the Städel Museum and Readymade-Films of Berlin within the context of the Frankfurt museum’s digital expansion. The idea behind “Talk im Rahmen” (“Talk in Framework”) is based on the fact that the Städel Museum is currently developing completely new formats for various target groups and channels.

“Our new web film series ‘Talk im Rahmen’ (‘Talk in Framework’) is a fascinating new and completely unprecedented educational, entertainment and mediation format. Artworks that talk about the major issues of our time – that makes for an innovative, surprising and playful approach to the works in the Städel collection. Even more importantly, though, in a whole new way it brings out the controversial themes addressed by the works, and their continued relevance for us today. ‘Talk im Rahmen’ (‘Talk in Framework’) is a further fundamental element of our comprehensive digital museum-education initiative and, offered as a YouTube format, will appeal to entirely new target groups in addition to our already existing public”, explains Städel Museum director Max Hollein.

Talking about his experience during the show’s shooting, host Gert Scobel comments: “The ‘Talk im Rahmen’ (‘Talk in Framework’) project presented me with completely new challenges in my role as talk show host. Imagine you had to conduct an animated, controversial discussion with someone who simply didn’t answer and just sat there mutely. What’s worse, that person is not a person at all but a painting. Together, the film series’ producers and I have embarked on an exciting filmic experiment. We’ll find out from the public response whether or not it’s a success, and I can hardly wait. My hope is that this innovative new art format will be able to convey to its audience something of the experience of spending a long time in a room with the original paintings and actually trying to converse with them, something of the inimitable aura of an original.”

The Städel’s digital expansion The production of the new web film format is embedded in the Städel Museum’s digital expansion programme. The Städel, Germany’s oldest museum foundation, is taking its 200th birthday this year as an occasion for a fundamental redefinition of its diverse educational programme as well as the museum visitor’s experience. Against the background of the increasing digitalization of everyday life, the expansion of its educational responsibility into the digital realm is a key concern for the Frankfurt museum. Within the context of this digital expansion, one component is the substantial development of the Städel’s web film programme. In addition to already established formats such as classical exhibition films on special exhibitions, films about artists represented in the Städel collection, and event documentations, the museum is presently also producing additional formats to be released on Städel communication channels.

The host
Gert Scobel (b. Aachen 1959) leads the way through the format in the role of host. From 1995 to 2007, Scobel hosted the 3sat programme “Kulturzeit”. Since April 2008 he has presented “scobel”, which is broadcast weekly on 3sat. Having already been nominated for the Adolf Grimme Prize in 1999 and 2001, in 2005 he was awarded that distinction for his performance as host of “Kulturzeit” and “delta” and elected “culture journalist of the year” by “Medium Magazin”.

The topics and guests of the episodes

Is emancipation still up to date? – featuring:
Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553): Venus (1532)
Ottilie W. Roederstein (1859–1937): Self-Portrait with Folded Arms (1926)
Carl Spitzweg (1808–1885): The Widower (1844)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocSS_Km502U

I post, therefore I am – authenticity, selfies and the web – featuring:
Maria Lassnig (1919–2014): Self-Portrait with Monkey (2001)
Gerhard Hoehme (1920–1989): Zimbal (1966)
Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98–1543): Portrait of Simon George of Cornwall (ca. 1535–1540)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xcrma-9OLdU

TALK IM RAHMEN (TALK IN FRAMEWORK)

URL: www.youtube.de/staedelmuseum.de

Playlist with all episodes: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2P7h0ecB-f_SxBUagvb1NmegMIXv2EY8

Edited by: Städel Museum, Readymade-Films
Host: Gert Scobel
Sound track: Wolfram Gruss
Set construction: set:art GmbH
Production: www.readymade-films.com
Post-production: www.goodguys.de
Sound mixing: www.hofkapellmeister.com

Social media: The Städel Museum is communicating the web film series with the hashtags #TalkImRahmen and #staedel.

For its two-hundredth birthday the Städel Museum is expecting eminent guests: from 7 October 2015 to 24 January 2016, selected Städel works will host sixty-five masterpieces from the world’s most renowned museums for an anniversary exhibition entitled “Masterworks in Dialogue”. The outstanding Städel works will represent a cross-section of the museum’s history while at the same time offering insights into a collection that has evolved over two-hundred years. Companions from far and wide will join them in temporary partnerships and long-awaited unions. Planned by all of the Städel’s curators, the show will be the first ever to spread throughout the galleries of the museum’s collections. Loans from the Albertina in Vienna, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, the Mauritshuis in The Hague, the Tate in London, the Vatican Museums, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and elsewhere will travel to Frankfurt am Main for this special occasion. The superb “anniversary guests” will allow us to draw surprising art-historical references and to illuminate and examine the Städel holdings – spanning seven-hundred years of art – anew. “Masterworks in Dialogue: Eminent Guests for the Anniversary” will be accompanied by a series of lectures given by the Städel curators on the history of the museum; the writer Daniel Kehlmann will deliver the introductory talk at the exhibition opening.

This anniversary project is being made possible with financial support from the DZ Bank as corporate sponsor, as well as funds from the Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain gGmbH, the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne, and the Kulturstiftung der Länder.

“In the bicentennial year, Städel favourites are meeting with stars from all over the world! This major anniversary project is an ideal occasion both to rediscover our collection – which constitutes the Städel’s identity and core – and to experience yet another highlight in the museum’s exhibition history in the form of intriguing and art-historically unique dialogues between the masterworks. Unparalleled in quality, number and heterogeneity, the exceptional loans are also a token of international esteem for the Städel. We are especially grateful for this phenomenal support from the world’s most famous collections on the occasion of our two-hundredth birthday”, comments Städel Museum director Max Hollein.

The anniversary exhibition will spread out on all four floors and in all areas of the Städel collection. The visitor embarking on a tour of the museum will encounter, for example, prominent “anniversary guests” by such artists as Jan van Eyck, Fra Angelico, Johannes Vermeer or Nicolas Poussin bearing close relationships to works from the Städel’s Old Masters collection. Masterworks by Edgar Degas, Max Liebermann, Pablo Picasso and Franz Marc will sojourn in the Modern Art collection, and examples by Martin Kippenberger, Georg Baselitz, Thomas Struth, Daniel Richter and Corinne Wasmuht will await discovery in the collection of Contemporary Art. The Department of Prints and Drawings will present opera magna by Adam Elsheimer, Edgar Degas, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann and Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn side by side with Städel treasures. The thematic pairs and groups thus formed – numbering forty in all – will be displayed on specially designed coloured pedestals serving not only to explain the ensuing dialogues but also to give them special prominence within the collection presentations.

Dialogues in the Old Masters Collection
In the Old Masters gallery, for instance, the Annunciation (ca. 1434/36) by Jan van Eyck (1390–1441) from the National Gallery of Art in Washington will encounter the same artist’s Lucca Madonna (1437) from the Städel. The two paintings are among the most beautiful and, in terms of content, most complex Marian images by the most well-known Early Netherlandish artist. Works distinguished by their stunning realism of detail and elaborate spatial and temporal structures, they are still admired for their exquisite artistic rendering today, nearly six hundred years after their execution. Until 1850, both belonged to the splendid Old Masters collection of King William II of the Netherlands; now they will be on view side by side for the first time again in 165 years.
Two portraits of women, one of the fifteenth and one of the nineteenth century, will come together in no less spectacular a meeting: Sandro Botticelli’s (1445–1510) Idealized Portrait of a Lady (Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci as a Nymph) of ca. 1480/85 from the Städel and Fazio’s Mistress (Aurelia) (1863) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) from the London Tate will form companion pieces. Not only will one of the most famous works from each of these museums’ collections thus be united, but the direct comparison will shed light on astonishing similarities despite the temporal distance of nearly four centuries. The complex manner in which the painting by the Pre-Raphaelite Rossetti reflects on Botticelli’s Simonetta, compositionally speaking, has hitherto gone unrecognized and will now become strikingly evident in the joint display. Both paintings bear a relation to a literary and artistic discourse on the ideal image of female beauty that was revived by the Pre-Raphaelites in the context of studying the works of their Italian idols.

Dialogues in the Modern Art Collection
Hardly any of the Städel Museum’s paintings is as well-known to the public as Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein’s (1751–1829) portrait of Goethe in the Roman Campagna of 1787. Surrounded by testimonies to antiquity, the “prince of poets”, wrapped in a travelling cloak, reposes contemplatively in an ideal Arcadian landscape. On the occasion of the show, this centrepiece of the Frankfurt collection will be presented along with several preliminary studies. What is more, works making reference to the painting will once again bear witness to the popularity of the iconic, world-famous portrait of Goethe. Tischbein began the portrait in 1786, when Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was sharing living quarters with him and other artists in Rome during his travels in Italy. In later depictions the painting was quoted again and again – now reverently, now tongue-in-cheek – for example in a proposal by Adolf von Donndorf (1835–1916) for the Goethe monument in Berlin and in Andy Warhol’s (1928–1987) silkscreen of 1982, which has been in the Städel collection since 2000.
Three closely interrelated works by the Expressionist artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938), Max Pechstein (1881–1955) and Erich Heckel (1883–1970) will also be assembled in the Modern Art gallery. The three bathing scenes were presumably executed in 1910 during a joint excursion to the Moritzburg Ponds near Dresden. Painted in a synchronous working process, they represent a kind of contest among equals in which each of the painters had a chance to measure his own potential against that of his colleagues. Kirchner’s version, later reworked, is on a canvas painted on both sides and was only discovered in 2010. Within the framework of the exhibition, the works are being shown together for the first time, thus offering a unique opportunity for what promises to be a suspenseful comparison between the protagonists of the Brücke group.

Dialogues in the Collection of Contemporary Art
By assembling the works Sex with Dumplings (1963) and Big Night Down the Drain (1962/63) (loans from private collections) with the painting Field (1962) from the Städel Museum holdings, the exhibition will present the early work of the painter Georg Baselitz (b. 1938) as an important window on the history of West German painting of the twentieth century. The three works to be shown within the framework of the “Masterworks in Dialogue” were all featured in Baselitz’s first solo exhibition in 1963. Owing to their radical painterly qualities they sparked a scandal that would prove legendary. The debate even took on a political dimension: works such as Big Night Down the Drain (1962/63) were confiscated. The ideological controversy over abstract versus representational painting in the young Federal German Republic culminated in Baselitz’s provocative compositions in which carnality took centre stage – both formally and with regard to content – and the sensitivities of the German post-war period seemed mirrored. A striking encounter with Georg Baselitz’s epoch-making early phase will here be made possible.
Another group of works to be placed on view in the Contemporary Art collection in the Städel’s anniversary year will address the topic of the museum as an institution. From the perspective of the photographer Thomas Struth (b. 1954), the museum is not just a place for the preservation of art but also one in which art is created. On the occasion of the bicentennial exhibition, the photo Louvre 3, Paris 1989 (1989) from the Städel holdings will be joined by five further works (loans from the Atelier Thomas Struth) from his Museum Photographs series photographed in the National Gallery in London, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the Art Institute of Chicago. The series focusses on the visitors’ behaviour and their relationship to the art on exhibit. The spectrum of scenes ranges from the indifferent attitudes of tourist groups to the meditative immersion of an individual art viewer seen, for example in Kunsthistorisches Museum 3, Vienna of 1989. The juxtaposition makes the works’ serial character particularly evident.

Dialogues in the Department of Prints and Drawings
In the gallery of the Department of Prints and Drawings, the exhibition will bring together a number of outstanding drawings, paintings and prints. Among the encounters, for example, will be two works by Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617), an engraver and draughtsman highly admired in the late sixteenth century – works that testify to the astounding development in Goltzius’s mastery of the drawing technique within just a few years. The virtuoso Portrait of Gillis van Breen drawn by Goltzius in coloured chalk in 1588 was already in the collection of the museum’s founder Johann Friedrich Städel. The Portrait of Giambologna from the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, executed three years later, provides evidence of the amazingly painterly effect Goltzius was capable of achieving with the sparsest of means.
Two graphic works by the exceptional artist Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) will likewise enter into dialogue. The artist made reference to his eventful and productive life with depictions of his alter ego: the Minotaur, which he staged in drawings and prints. He was captivated not so much by the myth as by the figure’s masculine creatureliness, which he conveyed now as brutish, libidinous, and powerful, now as tender and needy. The two prints from the Suite Vollard on view at the Städel will offer a superb illustration of the dichotomy between strength and weakness in Picasso’s Minotaur. In the Minotaur Caressing a Sleeping Woman of the year 1933, on loan from a private collection, the beast kneels before a peacefully slumbering female figure, bending his muscular body over her. The threatening look of the bull’s head contrasts with the disconcertingly gentle gesture with which he touches the woman’s hand. This work will be placed on display with the Blind Minotaur Being Led through the Night by a Young Girl (1934), a print from the Städel collection which, from the point of view of technique, is one of the artist’s most ambitious prints. Reminiscent of a theatre stage, the composition is borne by the contrast between light and dark.

200 Years Städel
The exhibition is one of the major events on the comprehensive anniversary programme in honour of the Städel bicentennial in 2015. On 15 March 1815, the Frankfurt banker and businessman Johann Friedrich Städel signed the final version of his will, thus bequeathing his wealth and art collection to a foundation that was to bear his name. Two-hundred years later, the Städel Museum is considered the oldest and most renowned museum foundation in Germany. The Old Masters, Modern Art and Contemporary Art collections as well as the Department of Prints and Drawings offer an overview of seven hundred years of European art from the early fourteenth century to the very present. The collection encompasses some 3,000 paintings, 600 sculptures, over 4,000 photographs and more than 100,000 drawings and prints. The Städel is celebrating its bicentennial with first-rate exhibition and research projects, major additions to its collection, and the large-scale expansion of its digital mediation programme.

LENDERS TO THE EXHIBITION
Lindenau-Museum, Altenburg; Musée de Picardie, Amiens, France; Atelier Thomas Struth, Berlin; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin; Schlossmuseum, Braunfels; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Davids Samling, Copenhagen, Denmark; Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden; National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, Ireland; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Freies Deutsches Hochstift / Frankfurter Goethe-Museum, Frankfurt am Main; Teylers Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands; Deichtorhallen Hamburg / Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Klosterkammer Hannover / Ev. Damenstift Kloster Ebstorf; Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery (Collection von Willebrand), Helsinki, Finland; Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe; Franz Marc Museum, Kochel am See; Hessische Hausstiftung, Kronberg im Taunus / Museum Schloss Fasanerie, Schloss Fasanerie; Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, Leipzig; Tate, London, United Kingdom; The Fine Art Society Contemporary, London, United Kingdom; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain; Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich; Museo e Gallerie Nazionali di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy; Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Staatsgalerie Neuburg an der Donau, Neuburg an der Donau; Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France; Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck / Sammlung Rau für UNICEF, Remagen; Vatikanische Museen, Rome, Italy; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, France; Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden; Mauritshuis, The Hague, Netherlands; Museum Sønderjylland – Kunstmuseet i Tønder, Tønder, Denmark; Albertina, Vienna, Austria; Muntean / Rosenblum & Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria; National Gallery of Art, Washington, USA; Goethe-Nationalmuseum, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Weimar; Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland; Martin von Wagner-Museum der Universität Würzburg, Würzburg; Friedrich Christian Flick Collection; Merzbacher Kunststiftung; Sammlung Prof. Dr A.-W. Scheer and private lenders who wish to remain anonymous

MASTERWORKS IN DIALOGUE. EMINENT GUESTS FOR THE ANNIVERSARY

Curators: Dr Bastian Eclercy, Dr Martin Engler, Dr Felix Krämer, Prof Dr Jochen Sander, Dr Jutta Schütt, Dr Martin Sonnabend
Project supervision: Dr Eva Mongi-Vollmer, curator for special projects
Exhibition dates: 7 October 2015 to 24 January 2016
Press preview: Tuesday, 6 October 2015, 11 am

Information:www.staedelmuseum.de, info@staedelmuseum.de, phone +49(0)69-605098-0, fax +49(0)69-605098-111
Visitor services: +49(0)69-605098-232, besucherdienst@staedelmuseum.de
Location: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main

Opening hours: Tue, Wed, Sat, Sun, holidays 10:00 am ‒ 6:00 pm, Thu + Fri 10:00 am ‒ 9:00 pm
Special opening hours: 24 Dec. 2015 closed, 25, 26 and 28 Dec. 2015 10:00 am ‒ 6:00 pm, 31 Dec. 2015 closed, 1 Jan. 2016 11:00 am ‒ 6:00 pm, 4 Jan. 2016 10:00 am ‒ 6:00 pm

Admission: 14 EUR, reduced 12 EUR, family ticket 24 EUR; admission free for children to the age of 12; 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.
Advance ticket sales online at: tickets.staedelmuseum.de

Catalogue: The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue published by Wienand Verlag and edited by Max Hollein. With a foreword by Max Hollein and texts by Jana Baumann, Bastian Eclercy, Martin Engler, Anna Helfer, Felicity Korn, Felix Krämer, Kristina Lemke, Eva Mongi-Vollmer, Maureen Ogrocki, Susanne Pollack, Almut Pollmer-Schmidt, Annabel Ruckdeschel, Jochen Sander, Jutta Schütt, Martin Sonnabend, Fabian Wolf and Daniel Zamani,. In German and English, 280 pages, 34.90 EUR (museum edition)
Guide to the exhibition: An exhibition guide will be published in German, 40 pages, 7.50 EUR.
Digitorial: The digitorial is being made possible by the Aventis Foundation. Design and programming: Scholz & Volkmer. Available at: meisterwerke.staedelmuseum.de; online from early September 2015
Audio guide: The audio tour is being made available with support from the Georg und Franziska Speyer’sche Hochschulstiftung. 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 #dialogdermeisterwerke, #starstreffenstars and #200jahrestaedel.

General guided tours of the exhibition: Tue 3 pm, Thu 6 pm, Fri 7 pm, Sa 4 pm, Sun 11 am, also Fri 25 Dec. 2015 and Fri 1 Jan. 2016 3 pm, Sat 2 Jan. 2016 4 pm.
Tickets: 4 EUR in addition to the admission fee, available starting two hours before the tour begins (Sundays from 10 am at the Städel cashier’s desk). The number of participants is limited, previous booking is not required. Offer available online only: Admission + guided tour of the special exhibition 16 EUR (tickets.staedelmuseum.de)
Corporate Sponsor: DZ Bank
Funding from: Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain gGmbH, Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne, Kulturstiftung der Länder

Media partners: Deutschlandfunk, Deutschlandradio Kultur, Verkehrsgesellschaft Frankfurt am Main

Altogether 432,121 visitors saw the Monet exhibition that closed last night at the Städel Museum. That number makes “Monet and the Birth of Impressionism” by far the most successful show in the museum’s two-hundred-year history. On this past weekend alone, 20,000 had the opportunity to visit the unparalleled special exhibition in Frankfurt am Main. The Städel shows hitherto achieving the highest visitor numbers were Botticelli (2009/2010, 367,033 visitors), followed by Dürer (2013/2014, 258,577 visitors). The average visitor number per day for the Monet exhibition was 4,278; some 150,000 visitors took advantage of the online advance ticket sales, which offered convenient admission to the show without long waiting times. Over the course of the exhibition’s fifteen-week duration (11 March to 28 June 2015), altogether 3,513 guided tours were conducted, including 2,232 special guided tours for groups and 595 for school classes, child day-care centres and universities. Some 25 per cent of the visitors made use of the audio guide narrated by actress Diane Kruger.

The museum’s digital presence also reports record user numbers. The newly developed Städel App has already been downloaded more than 25,000 times, and the Monet “digitorial” (http://monet.staedelmuseum.de), with which the Städel offered a multi-media online preparation course for one of its own exhibitions, has been invoked 260,000 times to date. The museum’s presence in the social networks also proved extremely popular during the exhibition runtime, as is mirrored in the steadily growing user numbers and ranges.

On the whole, with “Monet and the Birth of Impressionism” the Städel Museum succeeded in appealing to a broad public as well as the scholarly community in its endeavour to place a fresh new focus on the early years of Impressionism and elucidate Claude Monet’s special position within the history of French art. The bicentennial exhibition within the framework of “200 Years Städel” was accompanied by a wide-ranging media echo. “Monet and the Birth of Impressionism” met with an exceedingly broad and positive response – in the local, regional, national and international press.

“The Städel is more popular than ever. The immense success of the exhibition more than confirms that, with our work and our objectives, we are on the right path. The Städel has once again proven itself a place of art-historical research as well as an identity-establishing centre of society accessible to many different target groups. At the same time, the impressive reception of the digital offers accompanying the show demonstrates clearly that we will continue to carry the original notion of a citizens’ foundation into the future in a manner that upholds tradition while keeping pace with the times” comments Städel director Max Hollein.

The exhibition was made possible by the Commerzbank-Stiftung.

The next special exhibition to be presented by the Städel Museum in its anniversary year will be “The 80s: Figurative Painting in West Germany”, to take place from 22 July to 18 October 2015. Featuring approximately 100 works by altogether 27 artists, the show will shed light on the novel, disconcerting, and extremely dynamic figural painting that developed in the 1980s in Germany almost simultaneously in the centres Berlin, Hamburg, the Rhineland and elsewhere. Works by Ina Barfuss, Werner Büttner, Walter Dahn, Jiří Georg Dokoupil, Rainer Fetting, Georg Herold, Martin Kippenberger, Helmut Middendorf, Christa Näher, Albert Oehlen, Salomé, Andreas Schulze and many others will be on view.

MONET AND THE BIRTH OF IMPRESSIONISM

Curator: Dr Felix Krämer, Head of the Department of Modern Art
Project director: Dr Nerina Santorius, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Modern Art

Exhibition dates: 11 March to 21 June 2015

Location: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main

Catalogue: The exhibition was accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue edited by Felix Krämer and published by Prestel Verlag. With a foreword by Max Hollein and texts by Christoph Asendorf, Eva Bader, Marlene Bielefeld, Hollis Clayson, André Dombrowski, Chantal Eschenfelder, Dorothee Hansen, Felicity Korn, Felix Krämer, Svenja Mordhorst, Ingrid Pfeiffer, Isolde Pludermacher, Nele Putz, Nerina Santorius, Beate Söntgen and Maria Zinser. German and English edition, approx. 300 pages, 39.90 EUR (museum edition).

Digitorial: The digitorial is supported by the Aventis Foundation. Even now – after the exhibition has closed – it can be accessed at monet.staedelmuseum.de. Design and programming: Scholz & Volkmer.

Audio guide: The audio guide was supported by the Georg und Franziska Speyer’sche Hochschulstiftung. Narrated by the actress Diane Kruger, it provided a guided tour of the exhibition in German and English.

Städel App: The Städel App is supported by the FAZIT-STIFTUNG. The app has been optimized for the newest generation of Android and iOS smartphones. It offered the audio guide to the exhibition in the form of a smartphone download. Available for downloading at www.staedelmuseum.de/de/angebote/staedel-app.

Social Media: The Städel Museum communicated the exhibition in the social media with the hashtags #monet and #staedel.

Supported by: Commerzbank-Stiftung

Media partners: Alnatura, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Verkehrsgesellschaft Frankfurt am Main
Mobility partner: Deutsche Bahn AG
Cultural partner: hr2-kultur
The exhibition advertising campaign at Frankfurt Airport was realized with support from Fraport AG and Media Frankfurt.

From 22 July to 18 October 2015, the Städel Museum will be presenting “The 80s. Figurative Painting in West Germany” in a major special exhibition. With 90 works by altogether twenty-seven artists, the show will illuminate the novel, disconcerting and enormously dynamic approach to figurative painting that developed in the 1980s almost simultaneously in Berlin, Hamburg and the Rhineland. Works by Ina Barfuss, Werner Büttner, Walter Dahn, Jiří Georg Dokoupil, Rainer Fetting, Georg Herold, Martin Kippenberger, Helmut Middendorf, Christa Näher, Albert Oehlen, Salomé, Andreas Schulze and many others will be on view. The exhibition will shed light on the West German art centres – for example Moritzplatz in Berlin or Mülheimer Freiheit in Cologne – while at the same time providing insights into the figurative painting of those years in all its complexity and diversity. The artists who turned the art world topsy-turvy with unbridled intensity and a fast painterly tempo in the years around 1980 produced figurative paintings that ventured a critical examination of the tradition of painting, the post-war avant-gardes and their own immediate present. They drew their themes primarily from their surroundings. As a result, the established art scene became as much a subject of their works as homosexual emancipation and the intoxicating pace of the international club and music world conveyed by New Wave and Punk from the mid seventies onward. The protagonists of the time were nevertheless anything but a homogeneous painterly movement. On the contrary, the painting of a decade demarcated by student revolts on one end and a reunified Germany on the other is distinguished by a multi-faceted and often contradictory coexistence of various currents, influences and sensitivities. With its specific focus on post-1945 painting, the Städel Museum’s collection of contemporary art offers an ideal framework for the presentation of this eventful decade.

The exhibition is being sponsored by the Deutsche Bank AG.

“With this exhibition, the Städel is unearthing a vast treasure chest of paintings that have been viewed through the spectacles of traditional clichés for too long – works that belong to our collective pictorial memory on the one hand, but can well stand to be reassessed and perceived anew in their painterly potency and conceptual complexity on the other”, observes Städel Museum director Max Hollein.

The contemporary, historicizing perspective on this indisputably complex aesthetic phenomenon offers a means of discerning structural similarities and testing new art-historical approaches and inquiries without overlooking the diversity of the art it produced. Without negating the originality and diversity of these paintings, the show will pose the question as to where this painting came from, what stance it takes on its own tradition in the so-called post-modern environment, and what role it might play for the present through a new or more discerning localization in its own time: “What we are dealing with here is a generation of artists who, in a clearly defined period, triggered a tremendously controversial response with the sheer vehemence of their presence and the novelty of their painting. At the same time, to this day there is no coherent narrative that meaningfully links these paintings with what came before and what came after. This complex set of circumstances makes it necessary to characterize – from the art-historical and museological points of view – the significance of these paintings for the subsequent generation of artists as well as their relationship to their own tradition”, comments Dr Martin Engler, head of the Städel’s collection of contemporary art and curator of the exhibition.

The show “The 80s. Figurative Painting in West Germany” aims to pave new, unobstructed access to an era in the history of painting that has all too often fallen through the cracks of discourse, and whose special qualities have been overshadowed by their pop-cultural context – however important and formative the latter may have been. Without wanting to disregard this specific context, the show will endeavour an art-historical perspective that also takes the connection to post-war painting into account. The West German and West Berlin painting of the 1980s is by no means to be regarded as isolated from artistic forerunners such as Georg Baselitz, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke; at the same time, it clearly dissociated itself from those influences. The generation that emerged around 1980 in Germany’s art centres ‒ Berlin, Hamburg and the Rhineland ‒ produced paintings whose energy, intensity and directness distinguishes their art from everything that had preceded it. Owing to the unusual expressive force characterizing the artists of the eighties, contemporary art criticism associated them with German Expressionism and the French Fauves. They were given numerous labels such as the “Junge Wilde” (“Wild Youth”) or “Neo-Expressionists”, and they themselves exhibited their works under the heading “Heftige Malerei” (“Fierce Painting”). None of these designations ever really took hold, however, not least of all because of the fact that the movement was unquestionably heterogeneous in nature. Despite the critics’ scepticism, the artists soon made it big on the art market, even if that success ebbed after a few years with the perspective of time. In view of the fast pace of that eventful decade, little time remained for art history. The large-scale survey “The 80s. Figurative Painting in West Germany” will bring home to its visitors that – even today, thirty years later –, however familiar we are with it, the representational painting of that era still has a disconcertingly alien quality.

The exhibition will present superb loans, among them works from museum collections such as the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Neues Museum Weimar or the Berlinische Galerie – Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, numerous private loans, works from the Deutsche Bank collection, and nine examples from the Städel’s own holdings, including three paintings that made their way into the museum in 2008 as part of a group of altogether six hundred works from the Deutsche Bank collection.

A tour of the exhibition

Arranged both geographically and thematically, the presentation will spread out over both floors of the Städel’s exhibition annex. The respective West German art centres will thus on the one hand be mirrored along with their distinguishing and contradictory affinities and diversities; on the other hand, their shared thematic or motivic interests will be featured as a way of shedding light on the connections between them. The show will get underway with the classical genre of portrait painting. Particularly the self-portraits, for example Albert Oehlen’s Self-Portrait with Palette (1984); Werner Büttner’s Self-Portrait Masturbating at the Cinema (1980), Luciano Castelli’s Berlin Nite (1979) or Walter Dahn’s Self Double (1982), mirror the artists’ intense investigation of the painting medium. Still frequently drawing on traditional painterly themes, the “Neue Welle” (“New Wave”) of painting in the eighties was characterized above all by its experimental and dynamic stylistic pluralism. Even if, with his self-portrait, Albert Oehlen subscribed to an astonishingly traditional variation on this pictorial subject, it remains unclear whether he was affirming, reviewing, caricaturing or meaninglessly repeating it, or all of the above.

The confrontation with the artist ego in the first room is followed by a geographically defined group in the second. The painters associated with the Galerie am Moritzplatz, which was founded in the West Berlin district of Kreuzberg in 1977 by Rainer Fetting, Helmut Middendorf, and Salomé and Bernd Zimmer, formed the core. G. L. Gabriel became a member in 1979, and exhibited in group and solo shows at Moritzplatz until the gallery’s dissolution in 1981. The Berlin of that period – a liberal, chaotic city beyond the reaches of the Bundeswehr (Federal German armed forces) and the conservative West German province – was the principle motif for these painters, who had come to the metropolis from the West German states. Rainer Fetting painted the Berlin Wall in a wide range of variations. For him, however, the Wall was initially just a part of everyday life and the view from his studio window, and not the political statement it is perceived as from the perspective of viewers some three decades later. Whereas artists such as Fetting, Gabriel or Middendorf addressed themselves to the urban architecture, Bernd Zimmer executed landscape paintings in which he examined the boundary between figure and abstraction. The juxtaposition of Zimmer’s Field, Rape (1979) and Fetting’s Van Gogh and Wall Sun (1979) demonstrates the diversity of the painterly approaches ‒ from colour-field to an almost purely gestural, disintegrative style. A fundamental element in the work of the Berlin artists was the Punk and sub-culture scene forming in those years, whose dynamic and rawness they adopted in their work. This is especially vivid, for example, in Electric Night (1979) by Helmut Middendorf. Not just the schematically depicted figures in the colourful jungle of the night are “electrified” here, but to the same degree the painting itself, already in the colour combination alone: intensely vibrant ultramarine and gaudily bright red.

The “electrified big-city natives” reappear in Big Shower (1981) by Rainer Fetting, in a certain sense as classical nude models in various poses. The body discourse thus introduced was carried forward in Salomé’s paintings. His works confront the viewer with homo-erotic nude depictions that were drastic, as political as they were radical, and above all explicit, and clearly transcended the social norms of the period in question. They will be joined by such works as Golden Man Beating Slut (1980) by Albert Oehlen or Christa Näher’s mystical-looking works visualizing encounters of hermaphroditic creatures, half-human and half-animal. One theme here is the role played by the sexes in the partner relationship, another the permissive depiction of erotic fantasies far removed from middle-class morals. Middendorf, for example, translated the intensity and crudeness of the subculture into his series Big-City Natives with a fierce brushstroke, thus introducing his surroundings into his works in a wholly different manner.

While on the ground floor the body discourse will already allude indirectly to political aspects, the second part of the presentation on the first floor will begin with a number of works of clearly political motivation. In addition to icons such as Albert Oehlen’s Fuehrer’s Headquarters (1982), the room will also feature Fetting’s First Painting of the Wall (1977), Salomé’s Haematorrhoea (1979) or Hans Peter Adamski’s MAO portrait (1983). Also on view will be paintings like Dokoupil’s Star in Distress, (1982), which no sooner make use of political symbols than they dissolve the accompanying contexts of meaning. This description also applies to Kippenberger’s key work With the Best Will in the World, I Can't See a Swastika (1984). The swastika, both visible and invisible, undermines, questions and ironizes the political symbol to equal degrees. The title gives the viewer of the work a reference to its subject but never really comes through on the visual level. Kippenberger arranged abstract geometric forms in such a way that they seem on the verge of forming ideologically charged symbols, but never actually do. The works presented in this section of the show will demonstrate that the political aspects of the paintings are just one meta level, one of many constantly oscillating thematic set-pieces producing ever new contexts of meaning.

The paintings of the Hamburg scene around Werner Büttner, Georg Herold, Martin Kippenberger, and Albert and Markus Oehlen will pick up the thread of the political discourse in the following room. The group is not as clearly definable in geographical terms; what they shared, rather, was their association with Sigmar Polke’s academy class in Hamburg and Max Hetzler’s gallery. Unlike the “Moritz boys” in Berlin, the Hamburg group did not form primarily as an exhibition collective, but rather as an alliance of friends. Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen and Büttner first met in Hamburg in 1977; Georg Herold came to Hamburg from Munich the same year. Ina Barfuss and Thomas Wachweger, who had already been friends of Martin Kippenberger’s since the early 1970s, left the Hansa city in 1978 with Kippenberger to go to Berlin. Whereas the Berliners around Fetting and Middendorf cultivated a direct, unequivocal approach to painting, that of the artists around Oehlen and Kippenberger was less straightforward, devoted, as it was, to questioning the image, subject and contents of painting again and again. Their works are in a category somewhere between painting and text, between pathos, cliché and banality, and consistently treat social and political themes with an ironic/sarcastic undertone. The artists showed their paintings in Berlin as early as 1979 in the exhibition “Elend” (“Misery”) organized by Kippenberger and taking place in “Kippenbergers Büro”. As the artist stressed, the chief concern was “to do something together” and not to work isolated from one another. Kippenberger pursued this idea of community not only in organized group shows but also in other actions in his “office” or at the Club SO36 he ran from 1978 onward; it culminated in 1981 in the major group exhibition “Rundschau Deutschland I” (“Germany Review I”) in Munich. In the Städel exhibition, it will be reflected in the third room on the first floor in the works of the so-called satellites or mavericks. Examples by Ina Barfuss and Thomas Wachweger, by Bettina Semmer, Volker Tannert, Andreas Schulze and the group “Normal”, consisting of Peter Angermann, Jan Knap and Milan Kunc, will be on display here.

The third geographically oriented room will follow, featuring the “Mülheimer Freiheit”. From 1980 onward, Hans Peter Adamski, Peter Bömmels, Walter Dahn, Jiří Georg Dokoupil, Gerard Kever and Gerhard Naschberger worked in a joint studio in the street by that name in the Deutz district of Cologne. Dahn recorded the group’s founding on canvas in his work The Birth of the Mülheimer Freiheit (1981). Though academically trained, none of the six artists had undergone classical training as a painter. Their subjects were the art scene itself, as well as the banalities of everyday life, which they discussed and ‘processed’ artistically. The “Mülheimer Freiheit” cultivated a deliberately aestheticized dilettantism that manifested itself in clichéd, kitschy and banal ‒ but from the painterly point of view always fascinating ‒ works. This directness and lack of scruple also found expression in joint works by Dahn and Dokoupil such as Untitled (Vomiter II) (1980). The works produced by the “Mülheimer Freiheit” are particularly vivid illustrations of the stylistic pluralism that distinguished new art around 1980 in general.

This fascinating multifariousness is evident not only in the comparison between the various groups and artists, but even within the œuvres of the individual artists. Their works are characterized by the same openness, the same heterogeneity, with regard to form and content alike. What links these artists above and beyond their diversity, however, is their capacity to bring even the greatest aesthetic as well as thematic contrasts together to create entirely cohesive compositions. Their paintings can be read as poetic pictorial metaphors whose meaning changes with every reading.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue edited by Martin Engler and published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, with a foreword by Max Hollein, texts by Zdenek Felix, Walter Grasskamp, Martin Engler and Franziska Leuthäusser, and a panel discussion with Walter Grasskamp, Max Hetzler and Ingrid Raab.

List of artists: Hans Peter Adamski, Peter Angermann, Elvira Bach, Ina Barfuss, Peter Bömmels, Werner Büttner, Luciano Castelli, Walter Dahn, Jiří Georg Dokoupil, Rainer Fetting, G. L. Gabriel, Georg Herold, Gerard Kever, Jan Knap, Milan Kunc, Martin Kippenberger, Helmut Middendorf, Christa Näher, Gerhard Naschberger, Albert Oehlen, Markus Oehlen, Salomé, Andreas Schulze, Bettina Semmer, Volker Tannert, Thomas Wachweger and Bernd Zimmer.

The exhibition digitorial
With the digitorial developed especially for the show, the Städel is offering an additional digital mediation format. The responsive website conveys background information, art and cultural-historical contexts, and themes of fundamental relevance for the exhibition. Sponsored by the Aventis Foundation and available in German and English, this digital offer is free of charge and provides the public with a means of tuning in to the exhibition before coming to the museum. With image, sound, film and text, the multimedia application combines the contents in a multifaceted presentation and opens up entirely new paths in the depiction, narration and mediation of art. The digitorial is available on 80er.staedelmuseum.de.

THE 80s. FIGURATIVE PAINTING IN WEST GERMANY

Curators: Dr Martin Engler, head of the collection of contemporary art; Franziska Leuthäußer, assistant curator of contemporary art
Exhibition dates: 22 July to 18 October 2015
Press preview: Tuesday, 21 July 2015, 11 am

Information: www.staedelmuseum.de, info@staedelmuseum.de, telephone +49(0)69-605098-0, fax +49(0)69-605098-111
Visitor services: +49(0)69-605098-232, besucherdienst@staedelmuseum.de
Location: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main

Opening hours: Tue, Wed, Sat, Sun and holidays 10 am ‒ 6 pm, Thu + Fri 10 am ‒ 9 pm
Special opening hours: Sat, 3 Oct. 205: 10 am ‒ 6 pm
Admission: 14 EUR, reduced 12 EUR, family ticket 24 EUR; admission free for children to the age of 12; 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.
Advance ticket sales online at: tickets.staedelmuseum.de

Catalogue: The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue published by Hatje Cantz Verlag and edited by Martin Engler. With a foreword by Max Hollein and texts by Martin Engler, Zdenek Felix, Walter Grasskamp, Franziska Leuthäusser and others, and a panel discussion with Walter Grasskamp, Max Hetzler and Ingrid Raab. In German, 264 pages, 276 illustrations, 34.90 EUR (museum edition)

Digitorial: The digitorial is being made possible by the Aventis Foundation. Design and programming: Scholz & Volkmer. Available on: 80er.staedelmuseum.de

Social Media: The Städel Museum is communicating the exhibition on the social media with the hashtags #80er and #staedel.

General guided tours of the exhibition: Tue 5 pm, Sun 11 am. Tickets: 4 EUR in addition to the admission fee, available starting two hours before the tour begins (Sundays from 10 am) at the Städel cashier’s desk

Afternoon special: Admission + guided tour of the special exhibition (offer available online only), Saturdays at 3 pm, 16 EUR, tickets.staedelmuseum.de.
Evening special: Admission + guided tour of the special exhibition (offer available online only), Thursdays at 7 pm, 16 EUR, tickets.staedelmuseum.de.

Sponsored by: Deutsche Bank AG

Media partners: Cicero – Magazin für politische Kultur, Verkehrsgesellschaft Frankfurt am Main
Cultural partner: hr2-kultur

From 10 June to 6 September 2015 ‒ in its bicentennial year “200 Years Städel” ‒ Frankfurt’s Städel Museum will be presenting prints by the English painter, engraver and etcher William Hogarth (1697‒1764). Altogether seventy works including the famous printmaking series A Harlot’s Progress (1732), A Rake’s Progress (1735) and Marriage à la Mode (1745) will be on view in the exhibition hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings. These visual novels from the Städel holdings take the fashions, vices and downsides of modern life in the London metropolis as their themes. Hogarth conceived of his artworks as printed theatre of his times and with them he laid the cornerstone for socio-critical caricature in England. The prints owe their special quality to the keen powers of perception and caustic humour of an artist who contributed so greatly to shaping the image of his era that it is still referred to as “Hogarth’s England” today. Executed during Johann Friedrich Städel’s lifetime, the engravings are among the Städel’s oldest holdings and mirror the critical spirit inherent to this institution since its founding.

The exhibition is being sponsored by the Hessische Kulturstiftung.

William Hogarth was born in London in 1697. In keeping with an early eighteenth-century fashion, his father Richard opened a coffee house at which only Latin was spoken. The business failed, and Richard Hogarth had to serve five years in London’s notorious Fleet Prison for failure to pay his debts. As was usual at the time, his wife and children had to accompany him. In 1713, after his father’s release, William Hogarth began an apprenticeship as a silver engraver where he also learned the rudiments of the complex techniques of intaglio printing ‒ engraving and etching. Following his seven-year training, he went into business for himself as an engraver and attended the privately run St Martin’s Lane Academy, an art school in London, to acquire the art of painting. In 1724 he also became a member of the academy of royal court painter James Thornhill (1675‒1734), whose daughter Jane he married in 1729. It was not with his paintings, however, that Hogarth achieved a breakthrough with the public, but with the prints made after his works on canvas. With the series A Harlot’s Progress, produced in the early 1730s, he founded a new genre he later dubbed modern moral subjects. Hogarth conceived of these subjects as contemporary, moral-didactic history scenes. He thus took a stand against the hierarchization of the visual arts, a firmly entrenched principle of academy doctrine which granted classical history painting pride of place. With his printmaking works, he succeeded in creating a new, up-to-date genre based on the keen observation of reality. In 1755 Hogarth was elected to the Royal Society of Arts, which he quit again just two years later on account of artistic and personal differences. His appointment as royal court painter followed in 1757, but never led to any commissions. The final years of the artist’s life were overshadowed by bitter disputes between himself and his critics. A stroke in 1763 left Hogarth severely handicapped and he died the following year in his home in Leicester Fields, a district of London.

The presentation in the exhibition gallery of the Department of Prints and Drawings focuses primarily on those of William Hogarth’s printmaking series that earned him international fame: A Harlot’s Progress, A Rake’s Progress und Marriage à la Mode. There is a very simple reason for the fact that his works on paper secured him a place in art history: prints can be circulated far better than paintings. It was by these means that the artist reached the enlightened and educated public of his day in large numbers. Already the first edition of A Harlot’s Progress (1732) comprised 1,240 sold copies. In six episodes, this series describes the rise and fall of a young woman who has come from the country to the city to find work. To earn a living she ends up as a prostitute and lands in prison as a result. The final scene shows the wretched funeral of the protagonist, whose life has already come to an end at the age of twenty-three. Hogarth had numerous real and literary models to look to for his creation of this figure. Inspired by his great interest in the social characterization of his time, he directed his critical, ironical gaze to all strata of society, from the highest nobility to the most abject circumstances. The sick and needy of all generations formed the downside of the economic boom enjoyed by the colonial and commercial metropolis and its many profiteers.

In his second series, A Rake’s Progress (1735), consisting of eight prints, Hogarth tells the story of the social decline of Tom Rakewell, who brainlessly squanders his inheritance and is thrown first into debtors’ prison and then the madhouse. Rakewell’s incarceration on grounds of indebtedness is reminiscent of the artist’s own biography. Entirely unlike his father, however, William Hogarth was an excellent businessman and very clever at taking advantage of the London press ‒ which was flourishing in his day ‒ and its public impact for his own purposes. In newspapers such as the London Daily Post, the General Advertiser or the London Journal he published announcements of his prints and advertised them for subscription.

Hogarth borrowed the title of his third major series, published in 1745, from a comedy by John Dryden (1631‒1700). Marriage à la Mode is about an espousal arranged by the two spouses’ fathers. Neither the bride nor the groom is the least bit interested in the other, both amuse themselves on the side, and the situation comes to a dramatic conclusion. Hogarth’s protagonists feign innocence and practise deception, abandon themselves to their passions and founder on their false ideals. Looking to true stories for orientation and integrating well-known persons and recognizable sites, he warned his public of the dangers of modern life ‒ dangers still very real today. In 1751, with his popular prints Beer Street and Gin Lane, he supported a public campaign against the excessive consumption of gin. The former scene presents the enjoyment of beer as healthy and beneficial in contrast to the destructive effects of gin portrayed in the latter.

From mid century onward, in addition to socio-critical themes Hogarth also devoted himself to matters of national and political relevance, which represent a further focus of the exhibition. In several works, the artist addressed the relationship between France and England, which were at war. The Gate of Calais (1748) was his response to his arrest on suspicion of espionage during one of his trips to France. In 1756, in The Invasion, he again caricatured the French as grotesque, haggard figures who are after the tasty beer and luscious roast beef of the English. Some fifteen years later, in the print The Times, Plate 1 (1762), Hogarth made an urgent appeal for the cessation of the Seven Years’ War.

In 1753, Hogarth published his own art-theoretical deliberations in the book The Analysis of Beauty. In it he concerned himself with the foundations of visual-artistic production and particularly the matter of how to achieve beauty and grace. Hogarth considered the study of nature to be the key to beauty. He called upon his readers to perceive the objects of nature with their own eyes and judge them according to rational criteria. The German writer Christlob Mylius (1722–1754) was in London when Hogarth’s Analysis came out, and he translated it into German the very next year. Johann Friedrich Städel had a copy of this translation in his library, and it will be on display in the show.

The exhibition “Vices of Life. The Prints of William Hogarth” will be accompanied by a catalogue. Following its presentation at the Städel Museum, the show will be on view at Neuhardenberg Castle.

Vices of Life. The Prints of William Hogarth

Curator: Annett Gerlach (Städel Museum)
Exhibition dates: 10 June to 6 September 2015
Press preview: Tuesday, 9 June 2015, 11:00 am
Location: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt

Information: www.staedelmuseum.de, info@staedelmuseum.de,
telephone +49(0)69-605098-0, fax +49(0)69-605098-111
Visitor services: +49(0)69-605098-232, besucherdienst@staedelmuseum.de

General guided tours of the exhibition: Fri 7:00 pm, Sun 3:00 pm (participation in the guided tour is included in the admission fee)
Special guided tours on request; please contact: +49(0)69-605098-200 or info@staedelmuseum.de
Information on further events and activities: www.staedelmuseum.de

Catalogue: In conjunction with the exhibition, the Städel Museum is publishing a catalogue by Annett Gerlach. Approx. 50 pages, 9.90 EUR

Städel Museum opening hours:
Tue, Wed, Sat, Sun and holidays 10:00 am ‒ 7:00 pm, Thu + Fri 10:00 am ‒ 9:00 pm
Special opening hours: 24 May, 25 May, 4 June 10:00 am ‒ 7:00 pm
From Tuesday, 9 June to Sunday, 28 June: open daily, including Mondays 10:00 am ‒ 9:00 pm

Admission: 14 EUR, reduced 12 EUR, family ticket 24 EUR; admission free for children to the age of 12; 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.

Advance ticket sales: tickets.staedelmuseum.de

Department of Prints and Drawings, Study Hall opening hours:
Wed, Fri 2:00 ‒ 5:00 pm, Thu 2:00 ‒ 7:00 pm

Sponsored by: Hessische Kulturstiftung

The Städel Museum, Germany’s oldest museum foundation, is taking its 200th birthday this year as an occasion for a fundamental redefinition of its diverse educational programme as well as the museum visitor’s experience. Against the background of the increasing digitalization of everyday life, the extension of its educational responsibility into the digital realm is a key building block for the Frankfurt museum.

Download the complete press text here.