Images & Texts

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


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


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


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


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


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


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

Titles and exhibition dates subject to alteration.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BATTLE OF THE SEXES. FRANZ VON STUCK BIS FRIDA KAHLO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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