Images & Texts

The Städel Museum in Frankfurt has developed an innovative educational format that seeks to set a new standard in the realm of online education: “Art History Online – The Städel Course on Modern Art” is a comprehensive, free online course, made up of films, texts, interactive tasks and an additional timeline covering more than two hundred years of art history, from the eighteenth century to the present day. The large-scale project has been realized in cooperation with the Art History Chair and the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University of Lüneburg. Based on more than 250 works from the Städel Museum’s collection, this online course provides users with an enriching learning experience. In contrast to so-called Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), “Art History Online” supports flexible self-study in European art history, accompanied by the noted German actor Sebastian Blomberg. The varied multimedia programme addresses a broad, international audience with an interest in art, teaching both a toolset of visual skills and background knowledge to further enrich their encounters with modern art. Along with introductory and explanatory films on various major topics, users will find hands-on learning formats, detailed texts, and a comprehensive timeline of historical events, artists, and key works of modern art. In total the course offers up to forty hours of material which users can delve into at varying depths, depending on their individual interests. Whereas Sebastian Blomberg serves as a guide through the course, the sound was designed by the Berlin musician Boys Noize.
The new digital offer is designed for all who wish to attain a knowledge of art history and iconography in an appealing manner and on their own schedule. It responds to a growing international interest in understanding the history of modern art while at the same time shedding light on historical developments in society at large. Serving as both introduction and follow-up, the online course is as attractive to users who know nothing at all about art history as for those with basic knowledge. It can be used in combination with school and college courses or professional training, or simply as an entertaining and informative look at art history for its own sake. This offer is in keeping with the Städel Museum’s overriding desire to extend its educational efforts far beyond the physical boundaries of the museum and, in an up-to-date and innovative way, inspire various target groups to engage with art and culture.

The online course was sponsored by the Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V.

Course method and structure
The Städel Museum’s online course provides a varied learning environment for guided self-study. In doing so, it makes use of the possibilities offered by the digital realm, for example a range of textual links in different mediums. Based on roughly 250 works selected from the Städel’s own collection, the programme effectively combines films, texts, a comprehensive timeline and interactive tasks in which users can put their newly acquired knowledge to the test. Questions and problems that introduce multiple perspectives on specific works and subject matter guide the users’ approach to art. Instead of presenting art-historical facts in a dry, chronological sequence, the Städel Museum’s online course reveals relationships between artists and works, even those of very different epochs. It teaches how to understand the visible iconography and how to discover hidden meanings. Users develop a sense of the different contexts in which works are created, they see how and why artists and artists’ groups come together and make reference to each other, and how different institutions deal with art. The programme ultimately enables those who complete it to appreciate art more independently and critically.

The course is divided into five modules. Instead of following a chronological order, these modules focus on important topics, each building on the last:

• Module 1 – Learning to see: analysis of pictorial forms and motifs
• Module 2 – Discovering what is hidden: the different contexts in which artworks are created
• Module 3 – Exploring positions: artistic programmes and classification systems
• Module 4 – Finding connections: correspondences between artists and their works
• Module 5 – Collecting and presenting: the museum and its role in the world of art

A roughly five-minute film at the beginning of each module introduces its main theme. These films are entertainingly moderated by the stage and screen actor Sebastian Blomberg. Along with detailed texts, each building on the one before, films on individual works and topics provide relevant art-historical and iconographic information on which the user can draw while working on the tasks. The timeline, with information about works, artists, styles and schools as well as historical and cultural contexts, can be consulted at any time. Each module ends with a wrap-up review of its major focus. Users can progress through the five modules at their own pace, stopping to explore a topic in greater detail or moving on to the next. An in-depth study of the course takes around forty hours.

Signing up
Interested parties need only register at the website onlinecourse.staedelmuseum.de – and can then start the course immediately. It is offered at no cost, and can be used on computers and tablets. It is optimized for modern browsers.

Art education in digital space
“Art History Online – The Städel Course on Modern Art” was sponsored by the Städelscher Museums-Verein, a society of friends of the museum established in 1899. In addition to facilitating new acquisitions and ensuring the growth of the museum’s collection, this association is strongly involved in the promotion of scholarly work and educational projects like the present one. The realization of the Städel’s first online course has been a joint effort of the society and the museum. Given the increasing digitalization of everyday life, it is crucial for cultural institutions to expand their educational mandate to include the digital realm and provide free programmes offering all potential users new access to art and culture. When the Frankfurt museum celebrated its two-hundred-year jubilee in 2015, it pledged to pursue a course of “digital extension.” This online course in modern art is a first demonstration of how up-to-the-minute, innovative, and – best of all – entertaining digital education in the field of art can be.


Art History Online –
The Städel Course on Modern Art

URL: http://onlinecourse.staedelmuseum.de
Launch: 16 November 2016
Technical requirements: The course can be used on computers and tablets and is optimized for modern browsers.

A production of the Städel Museum in collaboration with the Art History Chair and the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University of Lüneburg

Overall concept: Dr. Chantal Eschenfelder (Director of Education, Städel Museum), Prof. Beate Söntgen (Professor of Art History, Leuphana University of Lüneburg), Herbert Schwarze (dramatic advisor, Berlin)
Technical concept, design and realization: agenturfuerkrankemedien GmbH, Berlin
Sponsor: Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V.
Additional support from: maze pictures GmbH, Munich & Berlin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SIGMAR POLKE. EARLY PRINTS

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

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

Admission: 14 euros, reduced 12 euros, family ticket 24 euros; free admission for children under twelve years of age; groups of more than ten persons: reduced admission per person (groups are required to book in advance: please call +49(0)69-605098-200 or contact info@staedelmuseum.de)
Advance ticket sales online at: tickets.staedelmuseum.de
Opening hours of the Study Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings: Wed, Fri 2–5 pm; Thu 2–7 pm

Wall texts "Sigmar Polke. Early Prints"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maniera. Pontormo, Bronzino and Medici Florence

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

Information: www.staedelmuseum.de, info@staedelmuseum.de, telephone +49(0)69-605098-0, fax +49(0)69-605098-111.
Visitor services: telephone +49(0)69-605098-232, besucherdienst@staedelmuseum.de.
Location: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main.
Opening hours: Tue, Wed, Sat, Sun + holidays 10 am ‒ 6 pm, Thu, Fri 10 am ‒ 9 pm.
Special opening hours: 25, 27 and 28 Mar. 10 am ‒ 6 pm; 1, 5, 15, 16 and 17 May 10 am ‒ 6 pm, 26 May 10 am ‒ 6 pm.

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

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

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

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

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

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