2014

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Today Dagmar Westberg is celebrating her one-hundredth birthday at the Städel Museum. On this occasion, the founder of the Dagmar-Westberg-Stiftung and long-time Städel patron is donating an extremely precious and art-historically important work to the Frankfurt museum for its Old Masters collection: the painting Saint James the Greater of ca. 1615/16 by Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652). Ribera is among the most important painters of the seventeenth century, and one who unites the artistic achievements of two European schools in a single person. Born in the province of Valencia, he can be considered the most prominent Spanish painter after Diego Velázquez (1599–1660). He spent his entire life in Italy, however – first in Rome, then in the Spanish vice-kingdom of Naples – and was accordingly also one of the most influential painters of the Italian Baroque. In the Städel Museum, this masterwork will be presented in the large Italian gallery with immediate effect, and thus, after four centuries in private ownership, be placed on view in a public collection for the first time and permanently.

“For nearly two hundred years now, the dedication of individual citizens has been a cornerstone in the continuing existence of the Städel Museum. Within this tradition, Dagmar Westberg is a shining example, and in every respect an outstanding figure to whom we are deeply indebted. Her donation of the Saint James the Greater by Ribera can unquestionably be considered a milestone in our museum’s long collection history. We could not have dreamed of a more wonderful gift – and on the special occasion of her one-hundredth birthday, no less. We are delighted and proud that Ms Westberg is celebrating her day of honour in and with the Städel”, museum director Max Hollein commented.

Born in Hamburg in 1914 and a resident of Frankfurt, Dagmar Westberg is one of the most prominent patrons of the city’s Städel Museum. In the past years, she has already taken her birthdays as occasions for supporting the Städel with major donations of artworks and funds. In 2008, for example, Westberg presented the museum with, among other works, the altarpiece by the “Master of the von Groote Adoration”, a triptych dating from the first third of the sixteenth century and one of the most outstanding Netherlandish works of its time. In 2013, Dagmar Westberg enabled the museum to purchase a rare lithograph by Francisco Goya and a print by Edvard Munch. With funds from the Dagmar Westberg foundation she moreover regularly supports important purchases for the Städel’s Department of Prints and Drawings. Over the past years, drawings by Carl Spitzweg, Max Klinger, Henri Michaux and Almut Heise and works of printmaking by Max Beckmann, Candida Höfer, Tacita Dean and Paul Morrison – to name just a few important examples – have been acquired with her help. Ms Westberg also espouses the general interests and concern of the Städel and has assumed permanent patronage of a gallery in the museum’s Old Masters department.

Born to a Baltic-Hamburg family of entrepreneurs, Dagmar Westberg worked for many years for the American consulates general in Hamburg, Berlin and – from the end of World War II onward – Frankfurt am Main. Already her great-uncle Oskar Troplowitz, the inventor of such products as Leukoplast, Hansaplast, Tesa tape and Nivea and responsible for the success of the Beiersdorf company, was a great art patron. He bequeathed twenty-six paintings to the Hamburg Kunsthalle, including masterpieces by French and German artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such as Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Pablo Picasso or Max Liebermann. His great-niece Dagmar Westberg has continued the tradition. She supports not only the Städel Museum but also, with great personal commitment, numerous other social, cultural and educational endeavours. Among the institutions and foundations she has aided are the Frankfurt girls’ refuge FeM, the Cronstetten-Stiftung, the German Summer Work Program at Princeton University and the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. In 2008 she was awarded the Georg August Zinn Medal of the State of Hesse for her dedication.

Jusepe de Ribera (Játiva 1591 – 1652 Neapel)
Saint James the Greater, ca. 1615/16

Dates and facts
The painting acquired by the Städel Museum shows the apostle James the Greater in the impressive format of 133.1 by 99.1 centimetres, corresponding to the dimensions which, in Roman painting, were characteristic of the so-called tela d’imperatore (“imperial canvas”). In the work, the viewer encounters a monumental half-length figure of sheer sculptural presence. The apostle stands before a dark wall and is illuminated by a beam of light strikingly set off against that dark surface – a lighting situation of the kind typical of Caravaggio and his successors. In his right hand he firmly grips his attribute, the long pilgrim’s staff; in his left hand, which he holds before his body, he clutches a book. A further indication of his identity as a pilgrim is the insignia of the two small crossed pilgrim’s staffs pinned to the chest of his robe and gleaming in the light. James’s hands – toughened by weather and work and quite literally demonstrating his “hands-on” character – have been rendered with the almost provocative naturalism Caravaggio had introduced to art not long before. His garments, a light grey tunic with a vivid red cloak over it, is rich – not in decoration but in volume. The saint has the cloak draped over his left shoulder and gathered on his left arm in such a way that the thick fabric creates an elaborately formed topography of folds. Light and shade lend forceful plasticity to the virtually abstract pattern thus formed. The body performs a slight but perceptible twist; the left shoulder is turned towards the viewer. The contrary directions of the arms and hands lend the figure a certain dynamic. The monumentality of the pose, the arm held before the body in a protective gesture, and the three-dimensional pattern of the folds presenting itself so prominently to the viewer all serve to intensify the presence of the apostle in his virtually stage-like appearance in this painting.

The manner in which this inherent force is tempered by the figure itself is typical of Ribera’s style. It is his head, inclined gently to one side, that brings an entirely different facet of the saint into play. Ribera calls attention to the head by making it the only part of the figure placed directly in the beam of light, while also backing it with a light aureole. The apostle gazes at the viewer frontally from deeply dark shining eyes, his lips slightly parted. Everything about his countenance is fine, noble and elegant – the curve of the lips, the contours of the ears, the dynamic strands of wavy brown hair. The gentleness of the face contrasts subtly with the forceful expression of the body. The ambiguity between appearance and apparition, presence and rapture distinguishes the painting as a sensitively conceived masterwork by the early Ribera. He executed it in the years around 1615/16, towards the end of his stay in Rome and shortly before he departed for Naples, where he would reside for the rest of his life.

Art-historical classification
Art scholars initially attributed the painting to the so-called “Master of the Judgement of Solomon” who has meanwhile revealed himself to be a fiction of research. Since 1978 the work has been cited in art-historical literature convincingly and unanimously as an early work by Ribera, and included in all of the relevant œuvre catalogues. Not only is the quality of the conception and painterly execution of this painting superb, but also the condition in which it has come down to us. It is above all stylistic comparison with works known for certain to be from Ribera’s hand that testify to his authorship, for example the Saints Peter and Paul in Strasbourg, the Saint Sebastian in Osuna, and the Penitent Saint Peter in New York, all of which resemble the Apostle James extremely closely in the formation of the face and modelling of the folds, even down to the smallest detail. A depiction of the same saint in the Prado, executed around 1630, strikingly shows how, fifteen years later, in a different stylistic phase, Ribera drew on his early work. Yet the painting is highly important not only within the Spanish master’s œuvre, but also with regard to its reception by his contemporaries. Even Diego Velázquez, an artist eight years Ribera’s junior, presumably received fundamental impulses from the older master’s work for his Saint Thomas executed only a few years later and now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Orléans.

Provenance
In Rome, the sources tell us, the young painter led the life of a bohemian and quickly made a name for himself with his art. As a result, his paintings were verifiably in the inventories of some of the town’s wealthiest collectors. Vincenzo Giustiniani, for instance, known as a patron of Caravaggio, must have cultivated close contact with Ribera and admired him much as he did Caravaggio, whose works are the most numerously represented in his inventory. That listing also mentions a Saint James the Great by Ribera’s hand in the tela d’imperatore format – possibly the very work now in the Frankfurt collection. The twentieth-century collection history of the Städel Saint James was recorded thanks to a number of changes of ownership. It first appeared in a catalogue when it was offered at auction by Leo Schidlof in Vienna in 1924. In 1927 it was shown in Berlin in the framework of an exhibition of the Antiquitätenhaus Wertheim; the accompanying catalogue names a certain Ernst Lang as its owner. Two years later, the private collector Ernst Seifert purchased the painting from Ernst Adler, domiciled in Asch, at an auction in the Berlin establishment of Rudolph Lepke. Seifert kept it over the war years, for nearly three decades altogether, and in 1958 sold it to the Munich art dealer Julius Harry Böhler. The latter sold it in 1964 to a family from whose collection the Bernheimer-Colnaghi art dealership recently obtained possession of it. It was there that the Frankfurt patron Dagmar Westberg purchased it in 2014 so as to present it to the Städel Museum as a gift on 8 December on the occasion of her one-hundredth birthday.

The significance of the acquisition for the Städel collection
At the Städel, the donation fills a gap in the Old Masters holdings. Precisely the beginnings of European Baroque painting, dating back to the decades around 1600 in Italy, were inadequately represented in this public collection. The donation of a Madonna by Guercino (ca. 1621/22) from the Beaucamp collection in 2010 was a first important step in remedying this state of affairs. A wide range of links can also be drawn to Guido Reni’s Caravaggesque Christ at the Column (1604), Dirck van Baburen’s Young Man Singing (1622) and Massimo Stanzione’s Susanna and the Elders (ca 1630/35).

“In Ribera’s Saint James, an outstanding example of the early reception of Caravaggio has made its way into the collection, where it will introduce a striking accent in our large Italian hall. A painting that stops you in your tracks”, comments Bastian Eclercy, head of the collection of pre-1800 Italian, French and Spanish painting at the Städel Museum.

The major museums of the world – first and foremost the Prado in Madrid and the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples – have works by Ribera in their collections. At the Frankfurt Städel, the absence of a painting by this master has hitherto represented a painful gap. A particular desideratum was a work from the phase in which the young artist was strongly affected by his encounter with the art of Caravaggio. Still in his early twenties, Ribera lived in Rome for at least four years from about 1612 to 1616, and there fell under the spell of that master of chiaroscuro painting and the study of nature. Very few sources shed light on this phase of Ribera’s career, which has only recently gained the recognition it deserves from scholars and the public thanks above all to the major exhibition in Madrid and Naples in 2011/12. That show gave research on the subject a regular boost, as a result of which Ribera’s early work is presently one of the most intensively discussed topics in the literature on the Italian Baroque. Within this context, the acquisition of a large-scale Ribera canvas of the Penitent Saint Peter (ca. 1612/13) by the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 2012 attracted a lot of attention, as did the Paris Louvre’s purchase of the artist’s Saint John the Baptist the same year. With the new acquisition that has come about through Dagmar Westberg’s gift, the Städel is now in the fortunate position of being able to make a significant contribution to this highly topical discussion.

Jusepe de Ribera (Játiva 1591 – 1652 Naples)
Saint James the Greater, ca. 1615/16
Oil on canvas, 133.1 x 99.1 cm
Frankfurt am Main, Städel Museum
Donated by Dagmar Westberg, Frankfurt am Main, in 2014

Städel Museum
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
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

Frankfurt's Städel Museum, founded in 1815, has started its anniversary year with two exceptional new acquisitions ‒ The Assumption of the Virgin of 1596/97 by Guido Reni (1575‒1642), and the precious Study of a Nude (Étude de Nu) (1888–92), a drawing by Edgar Degas (1834–1917). Both works are entering the collection as special birthday presents from the Städelscher Museums-Verein. The purchasing funds for the Reni painting were raised entirely by means of a successful donation drive and the outstanding dedication of numerous members of the association founded in 1899. The acquisition of the Degas drawing was made possible by a single donation from a Frankfurt patron of the arts.