Images & Texts

THE STÄDEL CELEBRATES ITS BICENTENNIAL WITH A SPECIAL EXHIBITION PROGRAM

MONET AND THE BIRTH OF IMPRESSIONISM – FIGURATIVE PAINTING OF THE EIGHTIES IN GERMANY – MASTERWORKS IN DIALOGUE. EMINENT GUESTS FOR THE ANNIVERSARY – AND MUCH MORE

In writing down his last will and testament, Johann Friedrich Städel laid the cornerstone for Germany’s oldest civic museum foundation in 1815. 2015 will see the bicentennial of this historic day on March 15. The Städel will celebrate its anniversary with a variety of high-carat exhibition and research projects, numerous substantial acquisitions and additions to its collections, a major public celebration, as well as a considerable extension of its educational offer, particularly in the digital sphere.

JEAN-JACQUES DE BOISSIEU. A Contemporary of Städel’s
February 11 – May 10, 2015
Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings
Jean-Jacques de Boissieu (1736–1810) was already a highly acclaimed artist beyond France in his lifetime. Not only princes but also private collectors like Johann Friedrich Städel were fascinated with the landscapes, genre scenes, and portraits depicted in the artist’s drawings and prints. The founder of the Städelsches Kunstinstitut acquired over twenty drawings and far more than two hundred etchings by de Boissieu, which still rank among the central holdings of the Städel’s Department of Prints and Drawings. Created in a period of historically revolutionary events, de Boissieu’s oeuvre mirrors the landscape and life of the province around the artist’s native city of Lyon with an almost irritatingly unexcited and serious steadiness. His etched landscapes and portraits as well as his subtly nuanced brush and chalk drawings reveal a progressive realism that hints at a bourgeois understanding of art independent of any academic norms.
Curator: Dr. Jutta Schütt

MONET AND THE BIRTH OF IMPRESSIONISM
March 11 – June 28, 2015
Exhibition annex
With Claude Monet’s painting The Luncheon (Le déjeuner) from 1868/69, the Städel Museum possesses one of the key works of early Impressionism. Starting from this work – and the institution’s outstanding holdings of early Impressionist works by Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, and Paul Cézanne – the show on display at the Städel will highlight the beginnings of the Impressionist movement from spring 2015 on. The comprehensive anniversary exhibition, with which the Städel celebrates its bicentennial, draws on the history of the institution’s own collection: it was already in the first years of the twentieth century when Georg Swarzenski, then Director of the museum, passionately championed French art, which today constitutes an important focal point of the Städel’s collection. The special exhibition sheds light on how a contemporary experience of looking at things becomes manifest in the Impressionist artists’ paintings and how the representation of this “modern gaze” in their pictures changed in the course of time. Based on a selection of more than ninety paintings including numerous world-renowned loans from museums abroad – such as Claude Monet’s La Grenouillère (1869) from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, L’Étang à Montgeron (The Pond at Montgeron) (1877) from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, or the monumental Luncheon (1874) from the collection of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris – the individual lines of development within Impressionism and the change in the relationship between content and form can be illustrated. The presentation of Impressionist painting is rounded off by photographs and cartoons dealing with the art movement.
Curator: Dr. Felix Krämer
Sponsored by: Commerzbank-Stiftung

Vices of Life: The Prints of William Hogarth
June 10 – September 6, 2015
Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings
Presenting works by the English painter, copperplate engraver, and etcher William Hogarth (1697–1764), the Städel Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings focuses on artworks from the days of its founder Johann Friedrich Städel. It was Hogarth who established the new genre of the “modern moral subject” with his series A Harlot’s Progress (1732), A Rake’s Progress (1735), and Marriage à-la-mode (1745). An attentive observer, the artist made the vices and seamy sides of modern life in the metropolis of London his subject. Hogarth regarded his works as a printed theater of his day and laid the foundations for sociocritical caricature in England. The Städel’s Department of Prints and Drawings comprises a significant array of works by Hogarth, including all the series in their entirety that gained the artist his international renown. The special quality of these works, which came to inform a whole era, lies in Hogarth’s great interest in individual physiognomies, his keen powers of observation, and his mordant wit.
Curator: Annett Gerlach

THE 80S.
FIGURATIVE PAINTING IN WEST-GERMANY
July 22 – October 18, 2015 Exhibition annex From 22 July to 18 October 2015, the Städel Museum will be presenting “The 80s. Figurative Painting in West Germany” in a major special exhibition. With some one hundred works by altogether twenty-seven artists, the show will illuminate the novel, disconcerting and enormously dynamic approach to figurative painting that developed in the 1980s almost simultaneously in Berlin, Hamburg and the Rhineland. Works by Ina Barfuss, Werner Büttner, Walter Dahn, Jiří Georg Dokoupil, Rainer Fetting, Georg Herold, Martin Kippenberger, Helmut Middendorf, Christa Näher, Albert Oehlen, Salomé, Andreas Schulze and many others will be on view. The exhibition will shed light on the West German art centres – for example Moritzplatz in Berlin or Mülheimer Freiheit in Cologne – while at the same time providing insights into the figurative painting of those years in all its complexity and diversity. The artists who turned the art world topsy-turvy with unbridled intensity and a fast painterly tempo in the years around 1980 produced figurative paintings that ventured a critical examination of the tradition of painting, the post-war avant-gardes and their own immediate present. They drew their themes primarily from their surroundings. As a result, the established art scene became as much a subject of their works as homosexual emancipation and the intoxicating pace of the international club and music world conveyed by New Wave and Punk from the mid seventies onward. The protagonists of the time were nevertheless anything but a homogeneous painterly movement. On the contrary, the painting of a decade demarcated by student revolts on one end and a reunified Germany on the other is distinguished by a multi-faceted and often contradictory coexistence of various currents, influences and sensitivities. With its specific focus on post-1945 painting, the Städel Museum’s collection of contemporary art offers an ideal framework for the presentation of this eventful decade.
List of artists: Hans Peter Adamski, Peter Angermann, Elvira Bach, Ina Barfuss, Peter Bömmels, Werner Büttner, Luciano Castelli, Walter Dahn, Jiří Georg Dokoupil, Rainer Fetting, G. L. Gabriel, Georg Herold, Gerard Kever, Jan Knap, Milan Kunc, Martin Kippenberger, Helmut Middendorf, Christa Näher, Gerhard Naschberger, Albert Oehlen, Markus Oehlen, Salomé, Andreas Schulze, Bettina Semmer, Volker Tannert, Thomas Wachweger and Bernd Zimmer.
Curators: Dr. Martin Engler, Franziska Leuthäußer
Sponsored by: Deutsche Bank AG

MASTERWORKS IN DIALOGUE. EMINENT GUESTS FOR THE ANNIVERSARY
October 7, 2015 – January 24, 2016
Presentations of the Old Masters, Modern Art and Contemporary Art,
Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings
The Städel collection looks forward to welcoming a number of international visitors on the occasion of its bicentennial. A show that has been conceived by all the Städel’s curators together will confront key works of the institution’s own holdings with masterpieces from the most renowned museums over the world. The fascinating and inspiring comparisons will – both in terms of contents and space – encompass all collections of the Städel Museum: visitors will come upon temporary “partnerships” in about eighty selected places throughout the house to be explored for three and a half months. Jan van Eyck’s Annunciation (c. 1434/36) will fly in from Washington, for example, and meet with the master’s Lucca Madonna (1437) that resides in the Städel. The two paintings, which rank among the most beautiful and, as regards their contents, most complex Madonnas of the most famous Early Netherlandish artist, were part of the splendid old masters collection of William II, King of the Netherlands, until 1850. The confrontation of Edgar Degas’s Musicians in the Orchestra (1872–1876) with his Ballet Scene from Meyerbeer’s Opera “Robert Le Diable” (1876) reveals a common ground in terms of both contents and motifs, in particular in regards to the depicted relationship between orchestra and dancers. Bringing together loans such as Geschlecht mit Klößen (Sex with Dumplings, 1963) with paintings from the collection of the Städel Museum like Acker (Field, 1962) elucidates the painter Georg Baselitz’s early work as a crucial position in the history of German twentieth-century painting. The Department of Prints and Drawings will also be visited by works of Elsheimer, Goltzius, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and others. The approximately eighty encounters of important anniversary guests with works from the Städel’s collection will not only yield insights into exciting and sometimes surprising art-historical and historical connections but also unfold a background for reassessing the Städel’s own holdings.
Curators: Dr. Bastian Eclercy, Dr. Martin Engler, Dr. Felix Krämer, Dr. Eva Mongi-Vollmer, Prof. Dr. Jochen Sander, Dr. Jutta Schütt, Dr. Martin Sonnabend
Sponsored by: DZ Bank

JOHN BALDESSARI
November 5, 2015 – January 24, 2016
Exhibition annex
On the occasion of the Städel Museum’s bicentennial, the American artist John Baldessari (b. in National City, California, in 1931) has, based on holdings from the Städel’s collection, created a new series of works, which will be presented there in winter 2015/16. Masterpieces by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Agnolo Bronzino, Dirck van Baburen, or Maria Lassnig provided the artist with the visual material for his large-format collages. Baldessari has ranked among the most influential figures of the international art scene since the late 1960s. An outstanding representative of Conceptual Art and Media Art, he developed an original and unmistakable understanding of the pictorial between painting and photography, text and image. In his work, he uses and explores pictorial strategies of Modernism, such as montage or the incorporation of everyday elements, and confronts these with approaches of the postwar avant-gardes like their discourses on consumerism and the media. Following in the tradition of his exploration of the complex relationship between painting and photography, Baldessari’s new group of works reflects on a number of quite different exhibits from the Städel’s collection, setting them off against text and monochromy, photography and concept. The result is an against- and with-each-other that questions old and more recent works alike, shedding new light on them.
Curator: Dr. Martin Engler

Titles and exhibition dates subject to change

The bicentennial program and anniversary activities will be presented in detail in the context of the Städel Museum’s annual press conference scheduled for January 21, 2015 at 11 a.m. Please register for this conference in the Metzler Hall by contacting presse@staedelmuseum.de.

In the exhibition “Realms of Imagination. Albrecht Altdorfer and the Expressivity of Art around 1500”, taking place from 5 November 2014 to 8 February 2015, the Städel Museum is shedding light on far-reaching innovations that came about in the early sixteenth century in the art of Europe, which took on a surprisingly modern appearance as a result. With the aid of 120 objects, the show vividly conveys how, around 1500, an entire generation of artists formulated the genres of landscape and history painting as well as the portrait anew. Far removed from naturalistic representation, an innovative, expressive interplay of light effects, exuberant colouration and grotesque forms and poses evolved throughout the spectrum of artistic media: painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing and book illumination. Taking the artists Albrecht Altdorfer (ca. 1480–1538), Wolf Huber (ca. 1485–1553), the Master IP of Passau (active until after 1520) and Hans Leinberger (documented in Landshut, 1510–1530) as a point of departure, the phenomenon of “expressivity” – a chief pursuit of the artists of the so-called Danube School – will here be placed in a pan-European context for the first time. To this end, the works by Altdorfer, Huber, Leinberger and the Master IP are juxtaposed with examples by contemporaries such as Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553), Hans Leu (ca. 1490–1531) or Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). The exhibition emphasizes the importance of examining their œuvres within a broader European reference framework, because not only the artists in the Danube valley but also their colleagues in the Netherlands, on the Lower and Upper Rhine, in Switzerland and Upper Italy, Bohemia, Poland and Northern Germany availed themselves of a directly comparable pictorial and formal language. The Frankfurt show demonstrates this phenomenon to its visitors in a range of media and themes whose breadth is unprecedented in the history of exhibitions on this subject.

The exhibition is being supported by the Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain and the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe. It is receiving additional support from the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne.

“Realms of Imagination” is the outcome of a joint exhibition project of the Städel Museum and the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in Frankfurt am Main and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in cooperation with the Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum Geschichte und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas e.V. of the Universität Leipzig.

After its presentation at the Städel, the show will be on view at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna from 17 March to 14 June 2015.

It has been nearly fifty years since the last comprehensive presentation of the art of the “Danube School”, and thirty years since the last major thematic show on Altdorfer. Now, with a selection of striking masterworks, the special exhibition at the Städel Museum is illuminating the phenomenon of expressivity in the art around 1500 in all its thematic and artistic facets and media in a panoramic survey of this stylistic development, which was not confined solely to the Danube region. Particularly in the area of religious depictions, the approaching Reformation granted artists of the time entirely new expressive liberties. They would not enjoy this freedom for long, however, because once the process of confessionalization was over the Protestant faith renounced certain images entirely, while the Catholic Church returned to a policy of insisting on iconographic conventions. As a result, in the art around 1500 we encounter narrative strains that were no longer conceivable in the same form in the further course of the sixteenth century.

The exhibition assembles and deliberately juxtaposes all of the artistic genres prevalent and displaying expressive tendencies in the period around 1500. Within this context, paintings and prints from the Städel collection as well as sculptures from the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung form the show’s core, which is enhanced with prominent loans from other museums. Key works from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Alte Pinakothek and the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich, the Národni Galerie in Prague, the Skulpturensammlung and Gemäldegalerie of the Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin, the Graphische Sammlung of the Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Szépművészeti Múzeum in Budapest and other collections will be on view. We moreover succeeded in obtaining a substantial number of loans belonging to churches, for example the Retable of St John from the Church of Our Lady before Týn in Prague (1520s) and paintings from St Florian’s Priory in Linz. With this presentation, the Städel is continuing its series of major exhibitions on art of the Early Modern era, of which the most recent example was the show on Albrecht Dürer.

The exhibition is divided thematically into six parts. The introductory section, entitled Weight of the World, Forces of Nature: Depictions of St Christopher, is devoted to one of the most frequently portrayed saints in the Late Middle Ages. Images of St Christopher, who carries the Christ Child across a river on his shoulders, not only decorated church walls and altarpieces in the form of paintings or sculptures, but were also very popular as prints used in domestic settings. Albrecht Altdorfer, Wolf Huber and Georg Lemberger depicted the saint in a previously unheard-of manner, employing bizarrely exaggerated forms to lend expression to the tremendous burden Christopher took upon himself when he carried the Child.

In the first gallery of the exhibition annex, the four leading artists of the Danube region are introduced with a selection of key works: Albrecht Altdorfer, Wolf Huber and the sculptors Meister IP and Hans Leinberger. Here the focus is on Images of Man. On the one hand, the objects on display shed light on how these masters differed from the preceding generation of artists in the depiction of the human being; on the other hand attention is called to stylistic devices they employed in the realization of this pictorial motif. Albrecht Dürer, as the protagonist and originator of a mathematically and scientifically constructed image of the human being, is moreover juxtaposed here with his contemporaries Altdorfer, Huber, Master IP and Leinberger. In contrast to Dürer’s precisely proportioned bodies, the figures in the works of the other artists are extremely dynamic, and their anatomy is often depicted in a manner that is anything but realistic. The art of the Danube masters is distinguished by the employment of expressive colour and form. With works by Wolf Huber such as his painting The Arrest of Christ (after 1522) or his Altarpiece of St Anne (1521), the second leading artist of the Danube region after Altdorfer is presented. What is more, in addition to Hans Leinberger, the monogrammist IP is featured here – with the central panel of his Retable of St John (1520s) – as one of the most prominent representatives of sixteenth-century sculpture.

In the section Oblique Views in Crucifixions and Other Passion Scenes, the expressivity of the art of this epoch is examined with the aid of various religious motifs. Within the œuvres of Altdorfer, Huber, the Master IP and Leinberger, expressive means such as ornamentalization, dramatization and distortion are encountered in particularly striking form in depictions of the Crucifixion and the Deposition. A Crucifixion scene known as the so-called Schottenkreuzigung (ca. 1500) serves to introduce a further artist active in the Danube region in the early sixteenth century: Lucas Cranach the Elder; it is his first painting. The depiction of the theme by Cranach contrasts with other interpretations of the motif particularly by virtue of its drastic character. The positioning of the crosses at oblique angles would later be adopted frequently by other artists. Leinberger unites all these various phenomena in his low reliefs of the Crucifixion, the Deposition and the Lamentation of Christ (ca. 1515/16). The Master IP is represented in this section with a Crucifixion group in the round, part of the Retable of St John from the Church of Our Lady before Týn (1520s). Huber, in his Large landscape with a city (ca. 1525) relegates the actual pictorial theme of the Crucifixion to the background, giving the landscape centre stage instead.

The section with the heading Landscape as a Vehicle of Expression features striking examples of how, in art around 1500, landscape and its components no longer serve as mere backdrops for the actual event, but – for the first time – become a pictorial subject and a theme in their own right. Skies threatening to erupt in storm or lyrical sunsets underscore the expressivity and moods of scenes usually devoid of people, and in many artworks the vegetation develops a mysterious life of its own. Pen-and-ink drawings by Albrecht Altdorfer and his younger brother Erhard, for example, show willows and spruces not as static trees but as eerily animated beings.

The following section, Means of Expressivity, is devoted to examining the various expressive devices employed in the art of the period in question. With the aid of deliberate contortion, deformation, ornamentalization and dramatization, as well as with draughtsmanship, the treatment of light, colouration and pathos, the artists undermined traditional visual expectations and presented the depicted figures in a new, astonishing, and often downright modern manner. In his painting The Birth of Christ (ca. 1511), for example, Altdorfer achieves an extreme intensification of the scene’s impact with his use of colour and his handling of the light. The figure of an Abbot Saint (ca. 1520/30) by a Lower Bavarian artist is distinguished by tremendous distortion and deformation. The new generation of artists conceived of the human body virtually as a malleable material which could be modelled at will, regardless of established ideals.

The exhibition comes to a close with the topic Artists and Their Clients. Here we take a look at the role played in the development of the new style by the persons who commissioned the artworks. The Prayer Book of Emperor Maximilian I (1514/15) from the Bibliothèque Municipale in Besançon once again shifts the focus to the importance of Dürer and his function as an authority to be resisted, but also as a source of inspiration and point of departure for the exponents of the new approach. Recent findings in connection with the financers and clients of large sculptural ensembles of the altarpieces and epitaphs executed above all for Bohemian churches moreover shed light on the special production conditions and mechanisms of what in many cases were monumental commissions.

The themes explored and the insights gained within the framework of the show offer a fresh and comprehensive look at the unique phenomenon of expressivity in art around 1500.

REALMS OF IMAGINATION.
ALBRECHT ALTDORFER AND THE EXPRESSIVITY OF ART AROUND 1500

Curators: Dr Stefan Roller (Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung), Prof Dr Jochen Sander (Städel Museum)
Exhibition dates: 5 November 2014 to 8 February 2015
Press preview: Tuesday, 4 November 2014, 11 am

Information: www.staedelmuseum.de, info@staedelmuseum.de, Telephone +49(0)69-605098-0, Fax +49(0)69-605098-111
Visitor service: +49(0)69-605098-232, besucherdienst@staedelmuseum.de
Location: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main
Opening hours: Tue, Wed, Sat and Sun 10 am – 6 pm, Thu and Fri 10 am – 9 pm
Special opening hours: 24 Dec 2014 closed, 25 Dec and 26 Dec 2014 10 am – 6 pm, 31 Dec 2014 closed, 1 Jan 2015 11 am – 6 pm
Admission: 12 euros, reduced 10 euros, family ticket 20 euros; Saturdays, Sundays and holidays 14 euros, reduced 12 euros, family ticket 24 euros, admission free for children to the age of 12;
groups (min. 10 persons) reduced admission fee per person Groups are required to make advance reservations.
Advance ticket sales at: tickets.staedelmuseum.de

Catalogue: An extensive catalogue edited by Stefan Roller and Jochen Sander will accompany the exhibition. With a foreword by Max Hollein and essays by Daniela Bohde, Katrin Dyballa, Markus Hörsch, Susanne Jaeger, Guido Messling, Jochen Sander and Matthias Weniger. German edition, approx. 290 pages, Hirmer Verlag, 34.90 euros (museum edition)
Visitors’ guide: A 36-page guide to the exhibition (for visitors age 12 and over) will be available, 7.50 euros, in sets for school classes 1 euro per guide.
Social Media: The Städel Museum will communicate the show in the social media with the hash tags #FantastischeWelten and #staedel.
General guided tours of the exhibition: Thursdays 7 pm /Saturdays 11 am / Sundays 3 pm
The number of participants is limited. Tickets: 4 euros plus admission fee, available starting two hours before the tour begins, on Saturdays from 10 am, at the Städel cashier’s desk
Special guided tours on request, please call: +49(0)69-605098-200 or write to info@staedelmuseum.de

With support from: Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain, Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe
With additional support from: Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne
Media partners: Verkehrsgesellschaft Frankfurt am Main, Weltkunst