Images & Texts

Exhibition Program

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subject to alterations.

“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