Images & Texts

The Städel Museum’s treasures comprise a comprehensive collection of Italian Renaissance drawings. This collection includes prized sheets by such outstanding artists as Michelangelo, Raphael, Correggio, or Titian, as well as drawings by anonymous masters of the fifteenth century and less known artists of the sixteenth century like Giulio Romano, Sebastiano del Piombo, or Taddeo Zuccari. “Raphael to Titian. Italian Drawings from the Städel Museum”, on show in the exhibition gallery of the Department of Prints and Drawings from 8 October 2014 to 11 January 2015, offers an exemplary selection of these valuable holdings, most of which were part of Johann Friedrich Städel’s foundation donation; in the mid-nineteenth century, these holdings were extended by Johann David Passavant to form a collection of the first order. The array of about ninety drawings visualizes the variety of an era which – with the discovery of America, conflicting confessions, and a new beginning in the natural sciences – was such a decisive period for Europe. The presentation centers around High-Renaissance works of the early sixteenth century as its art-historical pivot and not only ensures an experience of the utmost perfection in drawing. It also illustrates the various artistic movements of that epoch, the draftsmen’s working methods, and the functions of drawings and sheds light on the history of collecting in the Städel.

The Städel Museum continues the series “In the Städel Garden” with an extraordinary presentation dedicated to Franz Erhard Walther (b. 1939). The artist’s Walking Pedestals and Places to Stand will be on display on the museum’s freely accessible greens from 17 September to 23 November 2014. The internationally much-noticed artist began developing this group of works for outdoors, which made him a key figure of Minimal and Performance Art, in the early 1970s. With their reduced forms, the minimalist ground elements formed of steel invite the viewer to a walk-on tour of his work. Pacing off the plinths, the visitor turns into the material of the sculptural process. Franz Erhard Walther’s Walking Pedestals and Places to Stand in the front and back garden areas offer surprising lines of sight and new perspectives of the museum and its environs. The exhibition will be opened with a talk between Franz Erhard Walther and Dr. Martin Engler, Head of the Contemporary Art Collection of the Städel, in the Metzler Hall on Tuesday, 16 September at 7:00 pm; visitors are welcome to a tour of the grounds with the artist after the talk. A further tour through the exhibition with Franz Erhard Walther on Sunday, 21 September at 3:00 pm and a lecture held by the artist in the Städel Museum on Thursday, 16 October at 7:00 pm will provide the interested public with additional insights into the artist’s oeuvre.

In 1845, the Frankfurt Städel was the first art museum in the world to exhibit photographic works. The invention of the new medium had been announced in Paris just six years earlier, making 2014 the 175th anniversary of that momentous event. In keeping with the tradition it thus established, the Städel is now devoting a comprehensive special exhibition to European photo art – “Lichtbilder. Photography at the Städel Museum from the Beginnings to 1960” – presenting the photographic holdings of the museum’s Modern Art Department, which have recently undergone significant expansion. From 9 July to 5 October 2014, in addition to such pioneers as Nadar, Gustave Le Gray, Roger Fenton and Julia Margaret Cameron, the show will feature photography heroes of the twentieth century such as August Sander, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Man Ray, Dora Maar or Otto Steinert, while moreover highlighting virtually forgotten members of the profession. While giving an overview of the Städel’s early photographic holdings and the acquisitions of the past years, the exhibition will also shed light on the history of the medium from its beginnings to 1960.

“Even if we think of the presentation of artistic photography in an art museum as something still relatively new, the Städel already began staging photo exhibitions in the mid 1840s. We take special pleasure in drawing attention to this pioneering feat and – with the ‘Lichtbilder’ exhibition – now, for the first time, providing insight into our collection of early photography, which has been decisively expanded over the past years through new purchases and generous gifts”, comments Städel director Max Hollein.

Felix Krämer, one of the show’s curators, explains: “With ‘Lichtbilder’ we would like to stimulate a more intensive exploration of the multifaceted history of a medium which, even today, is often still underestimated.”

The first mention of a photo exhibition at the Städel Museum dates from all the way back to 1845, when the Frankfurt Intelligenz Blatt – the official city bulletin – ran an ad. This is the earliest known announcement of a photography show in an art museum worldwide. The 1845 exhibition featured portraits by the photographer Sigismund Gerothwohl of Frankfurt, the proprietor of one of the city’s first photo studios who has meanwhile all but fallen into oblivion. Like many other institutions at the time, the Städel Museum had a study collection which also included photographs: then Städel director Johann David Passavant began collecting photos for the museum in the 1850s. In addition to reproductions of artworks, the photographic holdings comprised genre scenes, landscapes and cityscapes by such well-known pioneers in the medium as Maxime Du Camp, Wilhelm Hammerschmidt, Carl Friedrich Mylius or Giorgio Sommer. An 1852 exhibition showcasing views of Venice launched a tradition of presentations of photographic works from the Städel’s own collection.

Whereas the photos exhibited in the Städel in the nineteenth century were contemporary works, the show “Lichtbilder” will focus on the development of artistic photography. The point of departure will be the museum’s own photographic holdings, which were significantly expanded through major acquisitions from the collections of Uta and Wilfried Wiegand in 2011 and Annette and Rudolf Kicken in 2013, and which continue to grow today through new purchases. The exhibition’s nine chronologically ordered sections will span the history of the medium from the beginnings of paper photography in the 1840s to the photographic experiments of the fotoform Group in the 1950s.

In the entrance area to the show, the visitor will be greeted by a selection of Raphael reproductions presented by the Städel in exhibitions in 1859 and 1860. They feature full views and details of the cartoons executed by Raphael to serve as reference images for the Sistine Chapel tapestries. The art admirer was no longer compelled to travel to London to marvel at the Raphael cartoons at Hampton Court, but could now examine these masterworks in large-scale photographs right at the Städel.

The following exhibition room is devoted to the pioneers of photography of the 1840s to ’60s. No sooner had the invention of the new medium been announced in 1839 than enthusiasts set about conquering the world with the photographic image. The aspiration of the bourgeoisie for self-representation in accordance with aristocratic conventions soon rendered photographic portraiture a lucrative business; to keep up with the growing demand, the number of photo studios in the European metropolises steadily increased. Works of architecture and historical monuments, art treasures and celebrities were all recorded on film and made available to the public. Quite a few photographers – for example Édouard Baldus, the Bisson brothers, Frances Frith, Wilhelm Hammerschmidt and Charles Marville – set out on travels to take pictures of the cultural-historical sites of Europe and the Near East, and thus to capture these testimonies to the past on film.

Among the most successful exponents of this genre was Georg Sommer, a native of Frankfurt who emigrated to Italy in 1856 and made a name for himself there as Giorgio Sommer. The second section of the show will revolve around the image of Italy as a kind of paradise on Earth characterized by the Mediterranean landscape and the legacy of antiquity. That image, however, would not be complete without views of the simple life of the Italian population. These genre scenes – often posed – were popular as souvenirs because they fulfilled the travellers' expectations of encountering a preindustrial, and thus unspoiled, way of life south of the Alps. Faced with the challenges presented by the climate, the long exposure times and the complex photographic development process, photographers were constantly in search of technical improvements – as illustrated in the third section of the presentation. Léon Vidal and Carlo Naya, for example, experimented with colour photography, Eadweard Muybridge with capturing sequences of movement, and the Royal Prussian Photogrammetric Institute with large-scale “mammoth photographs”.

While the pictorial language of professional photography hardly advanced, increasing emphasis was placed over the years on its technical aspects. The section of the show on artistic photography demonstrates how, at the end of the nineteenth century, enthusiastic amateur photographs worked to develop the medium with regard to aesthetics as well. Whereas until that time, professional photographers had given priority to genre scenes and other motifs popular in painting, the so-called Pictorialists set out to strengthen photography’s value as an artistic medium in its own right. Atmospheric landscapes, fairy-tale scenes and stylized still lifes were captured as subjective impressions. While Julia Margaret Cameron very effectively staged dialogues between sharp and soft focus, Heinrich Kühn employed the gum bichromate and bromoil techniques to create painterly effects.

After World War I, a new generation of photographers emerged who questioned the standards established by the Pictorialists. Their works are highlighted in the following room. Rather than intervening in the photographic development process, the adherents to this new current – who pursued interests analogous to those of the New Objectivity painters – devoted themselves to austere pictorial design and sought to establish a “new way of seeing”. The gaze was no longer to wander yearningly into the distance, but be confronted directly and immediately with the realities of society. The prosaic and rigorous images of August Sander and Hugo Erfurth satisfy the demands of this artistic creed. The exhibition moreover directs its attention to early photojournalism and the development of the mass media. Apart from documentary photographs by the autodidact Erich Salomon, Heinrich Hoffmann’s portraits of Adolf Hitler – purchased for the Städel collection in 2013 – will also be on view. Although it was Hitler himself who had commissioned them, he later prohibited the portraits’ reproduction. For in actuality, Hoffmann’s images expose the hollowness of the dictator’s demeanour. The show devotes a separate room to the work of Albert Renger-Patzsch, whose formally rigorous scenes are distinguished by uncompromising objectiveness in the depiction of nature and technology.

The photographers inspired by Surrealism pursued interests of a wholly different nature, as did the representatives of the Czech photo avant-garde – the focusses of the following two exhibition rooms. In the section on Surrealist photography, the works oscillate between fiction and reality, and photographic experiments unveil the world’s bizarre sides. Employing strange effects or unexpected motif combinations, artists such Brassaï, André Kertész, Dora Maar, Paul Outerbridge and Man Ray sought the unusual in the familiar. The Czech photographers of the interwar period, for their part, explored the possibilities of abstract and constructivist photography. Their works, many of which exhibit a symbolist tendency, are concerned with the aestheticization of the world.

The final section of the show is dedicated to Otto Steinert and the fotoform Group. It sheds light on how Steinert and the members of the artists’ group took their cues from the experiments of the photographic vanguard of the 1920s, while at the same time dissociating themselves from the propagandistic and heroizing use of photography during the National Socialist era. The six photographers who joined to found the fotoform Group in 1949 – Peter Keetman, Siegfried Lauterwasser, Wolfgang Reisewitz, Toni Schneiders, Otto Steinert and Ludwig Windstosser – coined the term “subjective photography” and emphasized the photographer’s individual perspective.

The show augments the joint presentation of photography, painting and sculpture practised at the Städel Museum since its reopening in 2011 and also to be continued during and after “Lichtbilder”. The aim of this exhibition mode is to convey the decisive role played by photography in art-historical pictorial tradition since the medium’s very beginnings. The presentation is being accompanied by a catalogue which – like the exhibition architecture – foregrounds the specific “palette” of photography as a medium conducted in black and white. The subtle tones of grey are mirrored not only in the works’ reproductions, but also in the colour design of the individual catalogue sections. When the visitor enters the exhibition space, he is surrounded by an architecture that is grey to the core, while at the same time making clear that no one shade of grey is like another. In the words of curator Felicity Grobien: “The exhibition reveals how multi-coloured the prints are, for in them – contrary to what we expect from black-and-white photography – we discover a vast range of subtle colour nuances that emphasize the prints’ distinctiveness.”

The Städel Museum in Frankfurt presents a high-carat selection of Netherlandish prints from the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century from 4 June to 14 September 2014. The special exhibition focuses on about sixty-five works by the artist Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617), one of the most brilliant draftsmen and printmakers active around 1600. His oeuvre is characterized by highly erudite and deliberately complex contents as well as extremely stylized solutions and, thanks to his engravings’ international dissemination, became famous throughout Europe. The exhibition “Style and Perfection. Hendrick Goltzius and Dutch Mannerist Printmaking” presents a total of about one hundred prints and four complementary drawings from the holdings of the Städel Museum in the Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings. Alongside major works by Goltzius, the show comprises works by Jan Harmensz. Muller (1571–1628), Jan Saenredam (1565–1607), Jacques de Gheyn II (1565–1629), and Jacob Matham (1571–1631) as important artist of his circle.

Born near today’s Venlo in the Netherlands in 1558, Hendrick Goltzius was one of the last great masters of copperplate engraving before this printing method took second place to the more flexible and personal etching technique in the seventeenth century. Goltzius came from a rather modest family of artists on the Lower Rhine and, after being trained as a copperplate engraver, worked for renowned publishers of prints in Antwerp before he founded his own publishing house in Haarlem in 1582. Though far from the realistic Baroque style of the seventeenth century as a late mannerist artist, Goltzius also ranks among the masters ushering in the Dutch Golden Age.

Beyond his technical perfection, another special quality of Hendrick Goltzius’s art lies in its high degree of reflection. He was not only a printmaker but also a draftsman creating his own compositions for his publishing house from its very beginnings. Goltzius was in close contact with the most important Dutch artists and particularly with the chief art theorist of his day, Karel van Mander (1548–1606). Owing to these connections, which were linked with endeavors to professionalize art in the Netherlands on an academic level, he got in touch with Bartholomeus Spranger (1546–1611), the influential court painter of the Holy Roman Emperor in Prague. Goltzius developed a copperplate technique suited to translate Spranger’s elegant, affected, and figure-oriented mannerism into the medium of printing. His graphic means consist in virtuoso, elaborately swelling and subsiding lines and flexible hatchings that emphasize the plasticity of forms and unfold a calligraphic quality of their own. Spranger’s art focuses on figures – elegant women and muscular heroic men; thematically, they oscillate between religious and often erotically tainted mythological subjects. Goltzius’s own compositions in this style, such as his sheets from the series The Roman Heroes (1586) or The Great Hercules (1589), mainly highlight the figures’ heroic aspect.

His works after Spranger ensured Hendrick Goltzius’s international renown; his publishing house produced the best prints of his time both in terms of contents and technique. Though Goltzius gave up Spranger’s style after only a few years, his pupil Jan Harmensz. Muller continued to work in this overelegant mannerist mode, even enhancing its sophisticated graphic language with shimmering moiré effects in the hatchings. Goltzius, who always experimented with new techniques and forms like with the colored or chiaroscuro woodcut, came to prefer a calmer, clearer language of forms informed by Antiquity and the Italian Renaissance under the influence of a tour through Italy in 1590 and 1591. Large copperplate engravings after ancient sculptures such as his The Farnesian Hercules from 1592 exemplify this turn. In the 1590s, Goltzius also began to dedicate himself to an intense study of the old masters, especially to Albrecht Dürer’s and Lucas van Leyden’s prints. With his so-called “master prints”, the Netherlandish artist strove to demonstrate his position as an artist on a par with – or even superior to – the old masters in the sense of “aemulatio”, the endeavor to equal or surpass one’s models. Besides the frequently programmatic prints he engraved himself in those years, his imaginative compositions were mainly executed by artists of his workshop like Jacob Matham and Jan Saenredam in particular. Around 1600, Goltzius entrusted his stepson Jacob Matham with the management of his publishing house, gave up his work as a printmaker, and committed himself to painting until his death in 1617.

The Städel Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings is in the fortunate position of being able to present the work of Goltzius and his circle as printmakers in a comprehensive way based on its own, very good holdings. Part of the works preserved in the museum come from the collections assembled by the institute’s founders Johann Friedrich Städel (1728–1816) and Johann Georg Grambs (1756–1817), the first chairman of the foundation’s administrative board. These holdings were prudently complemented by Johann David Passavant (1787–1861), the director of the Städel collections, in the nineteenth century. Another part of the prints comes from the estate of Senator Johann Karl Brönner (1738–1812), a contemporary of J. F. Städel. The museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings not only comprises extraordinary examples of Hendrick Goltzius’s major copperplate engravings and woodcuts but also rare artist’s proofs by Jan Muller, which provide enlightening insights into the engravers’ working techniques. The presentation is rounded off by some of Goltzius’s drawings, also from the Städel’s own holdings.

“Style and Perfection. Hendrick Goltzius and Dutch Mannerist Printmaking” picks up the thread of former exhibitions on old prints shown in the Städel Museum. Art-historically speaking, Goltzius’s works close a gap between early sixteenth-century prints like those of Lucas van Leyden, who was very influential in the Netherlands (exhibited in 2006), or of Albrecht Dürer (exhibited in 2007) on the one hand and seventeenth-century prints by such artists as Jacques Callot (exhibited in 2002), Rembrandt (exhibited in 2003 and 2013), or Claude (exhibited in 2012) on the other. As is the present presentation, these exhibitions were concerned with familiarizing visitors to the Städel Museum with the technical specifics, the particular compositional circumstances and possibilities, the individual and social function, the marks of quality, in short: with the significance and beauty of the visual medium of prints.

An alternative offer in parallel to the real, physical museum visit is made accessible through the digital extension of the Städel Museum with new technologies and communication paths. This extension’s objective is to fulfil the institution’s educational mandate also in the digital era, further expand the range of this mandate, and utilize innovative technological developments for the museum’s core responsibilities.

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