2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maniera. Pontormo, Bronzino and Medici Florence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SIGMAR POLKE. EARLY PRINTS

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

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

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

Wall texts "Sigmar Polke. Early Prints"

From 30 June to 23 October 2016, the Städel Museum is presenting Georg Baselitz’s famous “Heroes” in a comprehensive monographic special exhibition fifty years after the paintings’ making. Georg Baselitz (b. 1938) definitely ranks among the most influential painters and sculptors of our time. His powerful workgroup of “Heroes” and “New Types” is regarded as a key achievement of 1960s German art all over the world. In the exhibition curated by Max Hollein, it is being shown on a large scale for the first time. Some seventy paintings and works on paper are on view: their aggressively and defiantly painted monumental figures have lost nothing of their ambiguous, portentous and vulnerable quality to this day. Baselitz’s “Heroes” are raddled soldiers, resigned painters, marked by their latent failure as well as by their uncertain future. The fragility and contradictory nature of the “Heroes” in terms of contents find their formal equivalent. The consistently frontal depiction and central placement of the clearly outlined figures contrast with the wildness of the artist’s palette and the vehemence of his painting style. Loans from important international museums and private collections offer the public a wide-ranging view of these icons of German postwar art conceived by the only twenty-seven-year old artist in a spurt of explosive productivity in 1965 and 1966. After its début at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, the major exhibition will travel to the Moderna Museet Stockholm, the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

The exhibition “Georg Baselitz. The Heroes” is being sponsored by Goldman Sachs.

“The ‘Heroes’ are both a landmark and a fervent pivot in Georg Baselitz’s oeuvre. They have sprung from a deep, inner necessity in a deliberate confrontation with pressing, charged subjects and unfold a timeless reflection on the artist’s existence as such. Giving expression to strikingly visualized and self-felt isolation, uprooting, and lack of orientation, the works render the artist’s precarious state of experience in a broken world, establishing a paradigmatic image of his condition”, says Max Hollein, curator of the show.

In 1965, Georg Baselitz found himself faced with an order destroyed in multiple ways: twenty years after the end of World War II, ideologies and political systems, as well as artistic styles, were up for discussion. This lack of systems of order was very much in keeping with the artist’s own nature: appropriation through artistic categorization is something that has remained foreign to him throughout his life. Fundamentally skeptical, Baselitz emphasized the equivocal aspects of his time. Breathing failure and resignation, his monumental “Heroes” in their tattered battle dress evince an accordingly contradictory character. That the artist devoted himself to the subject of “Heroes” or “Types” at all at that time was a provocation in itself. (Male) heroism and its one-time exponents had been called into question by the war and the postwar period. Figures from a presumably buried past are brought back to life, picturing a reality which was anything but welcome in the German Federal Republic’s success story of the economic miracle – and this in the supposedly obsolete form of figurative painting. Yet the artist was concerned with far more than general issues of society. In numerous role depictions – the spectrum includes the “New Type”, the rebel/partisan with historical/political connotations, the spiritual shepherd and the painter adopting a position – Baselitz visualized his individual stance and his personal path as a painter. In a staggering act of self-assertion and identity definition that ran contrary to the prevailing currents of the time, he reflected on his own position vis-à-vis the society in which he lived. “I’ve carried out a lot of experiments in fifty years. But I don’t think the ‘Heroes’ require any further coaching”, comments Georg Baselitz on the “Heroes” and “New Types” workgroup.

“The Städel’s exhibition is presenting Baselitz’s ‘Heroes’ across two floors of its Exhibition Building in an interplay of empty spaces and zones of concentration,” says Eva Mongi-Vollmer, co-curator of the exhibition. Special emphasis has been placed on the impact of the individual paintings and drawings. Thanks to the varied wall colors and the strongly rhythmical – and frequently surprising – presentation, a visit to the exhibition heightens the perception of the works and sensitizes the viewer.

Baselitz’s “Heroes” and “New Types” with their colossal bodies and extremely small heads are always positioned in the very center of the picture. They stagger or, sometimes clumsily, sometimes in complete control, stalk through the pictorial space. In accordance with their maltreated bodies, their bleak surroundings suggest devastation: houses on fire, trees stripped of their leaves, thrown-up mounds of earth. The vagrant “Heroes” are furnished with a repertoire of recurring objects they carry with them: field packs, palettes and brushes or instruments of torture. Despite the repetitive format of 162 × 130 centimeters, each of the works strikes us with an expression all of its own, which strongly depends on the chosen method of painting and the colors employed. The loose chronological sequence of works in the presentation testifies to Baselitz’s gradual breaking away from his motif. It is only a short way from there to his later inversion of the subject.

Baselitz began the “Heroes” and “New Types” workgroup during the period he spent at the Villa Romana in Florence on a grant. After returning to West Berlin, he continued developing the theme. The much-discussed history of Baselitz scandals that had begun in 1963 with the show at the Galerie Werner & Katz was now drawing to a close. Within the œuvre of the artist’s early years, the “Hero” paintings represent a special turning point and can today be regarded as a historical document. These works did not fall into line with the artistic tendencies of their time – whether the ZERO group’s vision of the future, the French or American approaches to abstraction or the variations on German post-war Informel. Even twenty years after the end of the war, they did not content themselves with a superficial feeling of a new beginning. And even if the “Heroes” and “New Types” adhere to recurring elements in terms of motif, they are monstrous, damaged and forceful in their painterly formulation. They represent an important stance within post-1945 German art.

The exhibition is being accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue published by Hirmer, in which editor Max Hollein explores painting as a means of liberation in his introduction, while Alexander Kluge’s texts create an impressive, very special space of perception; Uwe Fleckner deals with the postheroic hero, the art historian Richard Shiff gives a lively impression of lost heroes, and Städel curator Eva Mongi-Vollmer focuses on the years Baselitz’s “Heroes” date from.

The audio guide to the exhibition (also available on the Städel app) is spoken by Georg Baselitz and Alexander Kluge. Starting on Wednesday, 15 June 2016, an elaborately designed “digitorial” – available at baselitz.staedelmuseum.de – will provide comprehensive insights into key premises and works of the exhibition.

Georg Baselitz
Born in Deutschbaselitz in eastern Saxony on 23 January 1938, Georg Baselitz began his studies at the College of Fine Arts in Berlin-Weissensee (East). After he had been expelled from the school because of “sociopolitical immaturity” after two semesters, he continued his studies in Berlin-Charlottenburg (West) in 1957. First travels abroad led him to Amsterdam and Paris. 1961 saw the beginning of his exhibition activities together with Eugen Schönebeck in an unoccupied house, on the occasion of which the first “Pandemonium Manifesto,” as it came to be called, was published. The following gallery shows were controversially received. In 1966 Baselitz left Berlin for a town in Rhine-Hesse near Worms. He painted his first picture showing its motif upside down in 1969 – a decision he remained true to throughout his further career. As he became more and more renowned, he increasingly presented his works in exhibitions abroad; in 1980 he and Anselm Kiefer were invited to represent the Federal Republic of Germany at the 39th Venice Biennale. Much-acclaimed exhibitions in various countries such as Great Britain and the United States followed. Baselitz continued his teaching activities, which he had begun in Karlsruhe in 1978, in Berlin from 1983 to 1988 and from 1992 on. Numerous retrospectives, honors, awards, and honorary professorships still pay tribute to the outstanding relevance of his work.

GEORG BASELITZ. THE HEROES
Curator: Max Hollein, director, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Co-curator: Dr. Eva Mongi-Vollmer, Städel Museum
Exhibition dates: 30 June to 23 October 2016
Press preview: Wednesday, 29 June 2016, 11 am
Location: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main

Information: www.staedelmuseum.de, info@staedelmuseum.de, phone +49(0)69-605098-200, fax +49(0)69-605098-112
Visitor service: phone +49(0)69-605098-232, besucherdienst@staedelmuseum.de
Opening hours: Tue, Wed, Sat, Sun + holidays 10 am – 6 pm, Thur + Fri 10 am – 9 pm
Special hours: Mon, 3 October, 10 am – 6 pm
Admission: 14 euros, reduced tickets 12 euros, family ticket 24 euros; free admission for children up to twelve years of age. Groups of at least ten persons: reduced admission per person. Groups are required to book in advance: please call +49(0)69-605098-200 or contact info@staedelmuseum.de
Advance ticket sales online at: tickets.staedelmuseum.de

Catalogue: A catalogue accompanying the exhibition will be published by Hirmer. Edited by Max Hollein and Eva Mongi-Vollmer, it comprises a foreword by Max Hollein and contributions by Uwe Fleckner, Max Hollein, Alexander Kluge, Richard Shiff, and Eva Mongi-Vollmer. German and English edition, 172 pages, 29.90 euros (museum edition).

Digitorial: The digitorial has been made possible by the Aventis Foundation. It is available now at baselitz.staedelmuseum.de.
Städel App: Optimized for Android and iOS smartphones, the app offers the audio tour for download to the smartphone with the beginning of the exhibition.
Audio tour: The audio tour includes excerpts from an interview with Georg Baselitz and essays on individual works of the “Heroes” cycle written and read by Alexander Kluge. German and English, 4 euros; two audio guides 7 euros.
Social media: The Städel Museum communicates the exhibition in the social media with the hashtags #Baselitz and #Staedel.

General guided tours of the exhibition: Tue 3 pm, Thur 7 pm, Sat 4 pm, and Mon 3 October, 4 pm; admission includes tour.

Sponsored by: Goldman Sachs

Media partners: Frankfurter Rundschau, Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine, Verkehrsgesellschaft Frankfurt am Main

From 22 June to 25 September 2016, the Städel Museum is devoting a concentrated presentation of choice objects to the art of the Middle Ages. The exhibition “Heaven on Display” will feature one of the most striking church choir ensembles that have come down to us from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the Early Gothic Altenberg Altar, and its rich imagery. Apart from presenting the high altar retable – complete with a shrine cabinet, a statue of the Madonna and wings with painted depictions of the Passion and the Life of the Virgin – the show will also reunite the ensemble of extremely precious objects once surrounding the altar of the former convent of the Premonstratensian Sisters in Altenberg an der Lahn. Works of panel painting and sculpture as well as textile art and goldsmithery will bring a complex inter-referential system of imagery to life and impressively re-enact the interplay of various media in a specific choir ensemble of the early fourteenth century. The thirty-seven objects will be on view together for the first time since the convent’s secularization at the beginning of the nineteenth century. At its centre, the exhibition will feature the folding altarpiece that graced the high altar from around 1330 onward. Acquired for the Städel Museum in 1925, the wings of the altarpiece are among the earliest as well as the most outstanding works of German panel painting. Within the framework of the special exhibition, these key works of the Städel’s Old Masters collection will now be presented comprehensively in their historical, artistic and functional context. The show is based on the results of research carried out over several years as well as recent technological examinations of the retable conducted to gain insight into how the imagery of the high altar was viewed within, but also outside, the framework of worship services.

The exhibition is supported by the Kulturstiftung der Länder.

The spectrum of objects belonging to the Altenberg Altar and on display in the show is quite broad, encompassing reliquaries originally presented in the interior of the shrine cabinet, altar cloths of around 1330 embroidered with figural depictions and bearing patrons’ inscriptions, gold work and altar crosses of the thirteenth century, figural glass paintings from the early fourteenth-century choir window, etc. The survival of altar cloths belonging to an altar ensemble of the Early Gothic period is in itself unparalleled. Concurrently with the panel paintings, they were produced as embroidered pictorial compositions of imposing size and quality to decorate the altar table in front of the altarpiece. The exhibition will include two of these embroidered linen cloths and – in several original sections sent to Frankfurt from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and elsewhere especially for the show – also present the central apse window formerly displaying a pictorial cycle of its own behind the high altar retable.

The various objects of the convent church ensemble are interrelated both functionally and with regard to content. A depiction of an enthroned Madonna and Child being worshiped by the three Magi is not only found prominently placed in the central choir window’s glass paintings dating as far back as ca. 1300, but is also present in the richly polychrome sculpture at the centre of the retable of 1330 and in the pictorial programmes of the embroidered altar cloths.

“The deliberate repetition of one and the same motif in various media and in different locations reinforced the key importance attributed to the figure depicted here – the Mother of God as the main patroness of the Altenberg convent”, explains Jochen Sander, the exhibition’s curator. “Within that context, the high altar, with its embroidered, painted and sculpted images – but above all its salvation-bringing relics of saints – literally served the medieval viewer as a ‘display window’ of heaven.”

The wings of the altarpiece were hinged in such a way that the shrine could be completely opened or closed, but also partially opened, and thus permitted various ways of staging the central figure of the Virgin Mary and the reliquaries accompanying her. The presentation could be further varied through the choice of altar cloth – there were originally three – and its respective embroidered pictorial programme.

A 3D visualization and a control panel will enable the exhibition visitor to experience the synergy of the various objects of the choir from different simulated vantage points. An audio station will moreover explain how the altarpiece wings and the high altar were displayed on the various feast days of the Christian year.

The altar and other objects in the show remained in the Altenberg convent until its secularization, and in 1803 became the property of the princes of Solms-Braunfels. Many of them are therefore still in the holdings of the Braunfels castle museum today. In the nineteenth century, however, owing to the outstanding quality of the Altenberg church ensemble, there was a great amount of interest in the items, and many of them made their way into prominent collections worldwide – from pre-eminent private collections and those of the city of Frankfurt, the Wartburg-Stiftung in Eisenach and the Bayerische Nationalmuseum in Munich to the Hermitage in St Petersburg and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The presentation at the Städel Museum will now reunite these objects, giving visitors an opportunity to experience them as a synthesis of the arts in their original context.

With the aid of the objects it showcases, the show will moreover offer a very personal impression of a saint who has undoubtedly been one of the most popular since the Middle Ages: Elizabeth of Hungary. Her youngest daughter Gertrude, entrusted to the care of the Altenberg sisters as a small child, became the convent’s superior at the age of twenty-one and played a decisive role in determining the church furnishings now on view in the exhibition. A tapestry executed around 1270 illustrates the life of Elizabeth and her husband, Landgrave Louis IV. This work may have been presented behind the altar mensa on high feast days before the installation of the altarpiece, and thus have been its textile predecessor. A second large tapestry with embroidered figures, likewise produced under Gertrude, was shown on days commemorating the family. The two hangings join with other objects from the convent – for example the arm reliquary of St Elizabeth, her silver jug and a ring allegedly once belonging to her husband – to provide insights into the story of Elizabeth of Hungary and her family. At the same time, the works bear witness to the far-reaching contacts cultivated by the landgrave’s daughter and thus to political history on the regional and international levels.

The special exhibition will moreover present the results of recent technical examinations of the retable paintings. These results and the textile works to be placed on view in the show will together provide entirely new insights and perspectives regarding the accessibility of the high altar imagery to medieval churchgoers and their reception at close range. The latest findings lead to the conclusion that the outsides of the altarpiece originally exhibited a decoration system comprising further depictions of saints and inscriptions that fit in seamlessly with the paintings on the wings. The sides and back, that is to say, were integral elements of the retable design and meant to be viewed at close quarters. The back of the altarpiece thus supplements the display side with an additional level of meaning and was apparently also conceived for extra-liturgical use, for example private devotions. These discoveries will create an entirely new foundation for the extremely suspenseful art-historical and cultural-historical discussion on the function of high altar imagery in the Middle Ages. The exhibition catalogue documents the recent findings. In addition, a publication to be released concurrently with the show – Aus der Nähe betrachtet. Bilder am Hochaltar und ihre Funktionen im Mittelalter (German edition), with the proceedings of the 2015 Passavant-Kolloquium at the Städel Museum, edited and introduced by Jochen Sander, Stefanie Seeberg and Fabian Wolf and with texts by numerous scholars of many countries – will present further detailed results and research contributions on these themes. The findings of the X-ray fluorescence examination will also be published digitally in detail at www.staedelmuseum.de/ausstellungen/altenberger-altar, where they will be permanently accessible.

HEAVEN ON DISPLAY. THE ALTENBERG ALTAR AND ITS IMAGERY

Curator: Prof Dr Jochen Sander, deputy director and head of the collection of Dutch, Flemish and German painting before 1800, Städel Museum
Exhibition dates: 22 June to 25 September 2016
Press preview: Tuesday, 21 June 2016, 11 am

Information: www.staedelmuseum.de, info@staedelmuseum.de, Telephone +49(0)69-605098-200, Fax +49(0)69-605098-112
Visitor services: telephone +49(0)69-605098-232, besucherdienst@staedelmuseum.de
Location: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main
Opening hours: Tue, Wed, Sat, Sun + holidays 10 am ‒ 6 pm, Thu, Fri 10 am ‒ 9 pm
Admission: 14 EUR, reduced 12 EUR, family ticket 24 EUR; admission free for children under 12; groups (minimum 10 persons): reduced admission fee per person. Groups are required to book in advance by contacting us at +49(0)69-605098-200 or info@staedelmuseum.de.
Advance ticket sales online at: tickets.staedelmuseum.de

General guided tours of the exhibition: Fri 7 pm, Sun 11 am. The price of the guided tour is included in the admission fee. The number of participants is limited; previous booking is not required.

Catalogue: The exhibition catalogue is being published by the Deutscher Kunstverlag and edited by Jochen Sander, with a foreword by Max Hollein and texts by Jochen Sander, Julia Schultz, Stefanie Seeberg, Christoph Krekel, Christiane Weber and Fabian Wolf. Bilingual edition in German and English language, 186 pages, 24.90 EUR (museum edition).
Accompanying publication: The exhibition will also be accompanied by the conference proceedings of the Passavant-Kolloquium of 13 and 14 November 2015, entitled Aus der Nähe betrachtet. Bilder am Hochaltar und ihre Funktionen im Mittelalter, edited by Jochen Sander, Stefanie Seeberg and Fabian Wolf, with contributions by Angela Kappeler, Stephan Kemperdick, Peter Knüvener, Christian N. Opitz, Victor M. Schmidt, Johannes Tripps, Gerhard Weilandt, Matthias Weniger, Jörg Widmaier and Susanne Wittekind; colour illustrations throughout, 192 pages, 19.90 EUR (German edition).

Social Media: The Städel Museum is communicating the exhibition on the social media with the hashtags #AltenbergerAltar and #Staedel.

Supported by: Kulturstiftung der Länder

Media Partner: Weltkunst

The search for a director for the Städel Museum and the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung is over. The graduated art historian Dr. Philipp Demandt (45) will take charge of the two museums on 1 October 2016. Demandt has been the director of the Alte Nationalgalerie, a museum of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preussischer Kulturbesitz, since January 2012 and is one of Germany’s most renowned art historians and exhibition curators. He has comprehensive experience with modern culture management.

This decision was preceded by an intensive national and international search carried out by the Städel Museum administration under the chairmanship of Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Schweickart. Peter Feldmann, the mayor of Frankfurt and chairman of the supervisory board of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Prof. Dr. Felix Semmelroth, the outgoing deputy mayor in charge of culture, and Dr. Ina Hartwig, the designated deputy mayor in charge of culture, welcome the decision.

"We are very happy about the fact that, so soon after Max Hollein’s departure, we have succeeded in recruiting one of the most creative minds in the German museum world to direct the two institutions. As the director of one of Germany’s most prominent museums and a key player in the Berlin museum scene, he has demonstrated his abilities many times over – and is therefore exactly the right person for this major responsibility in Frankfurt", commented Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Schweickart, the chairman of the Städel Museum administration.

Frankfurt’s Mayor Peter Feldmann, the chairman of the supervisory board of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, pointed out: "Frankfurt and Philipp Demandt: a perfect fit. I am delighted that Philipp Demandt has decided to direct the Städel Museum and the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung. He is an outstanding scholar and art mediator – a museum man of distinction. I am certain that Demandt will make a sustainable and future-oriented contribution to shaping and expanding culture in Frankfurt."

The director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt will be decided on by the relevant political bodies after Dr. Ina Hartwig has taken office as Frankfurt’s deputy mayor in charge of culture. Both the mayor and Dr. Hartwig regard the joint direction of the three institutions as a sensible and forward-looking constellation that has hitherto proven highly advantageous for Frankfurt as a city of culture.

"The successful work at the Städel Museum and the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in cooperation with all colleagues is a challenge I anticipate with suspense. At the same time, I look back on five fulfilling years at the Nationalgalerie with deep gratitude. I am greatly looking forward to Frankfurt – professionally because it has developed to become one of the most exciting art centres in Germany and beyond, and personally because I have long been well acquainted with the city and the surrounding region", commented Dr. Philipp Demandt on his call to Frankfurt.

Born in Constance in 1971, Demandt studied art history, classical archaeology and media science and gained his doctorate in 2001 at the Institute of History and Cultural Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin with a thesis on the execution and reception of the portraits of Queen Louise by Johann Gottfried Schadow and Christian Daniel Rauch and the historical mythology of the Prussian state as mirrored in the "Queen Louise cult". After serving as exhibition assistant at the Bröhan Museum in 2002, Demandt became a department head with the Kulturstiftung der Länder. There his responsibilities included advising and supporting German culture institutions on the purchase and financing of artworks from pre- and early history to the nineteenth century as well as on exhibition projects. From 2007 to 2010 he also co-curated the Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg Prussian exhibition "Louise: Life and Myth of the Queen". He planned and directed the magazine "Arsprototo" published by the Kulturstiftung der Länder, as well as the foundation’s scholarly publication series "Patrimonia", and published numerous articles on the history of art and culture, for example in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Welt.

In January 2012, Demandt was appointed director of the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. There he drew attention to himself with a comprehensive new concept for the display collection and a number of exhibitions that were as innovative as they were successful. Among the highlights of the shows staged under his direction were "Rembrandt Bugatti", "Impressionism – Expressionism: Art at a Turning Point" and, most recently, "The Monk Has Returned", a special presentation on the restoration of Caspar David Friedrich’s masterworks Monk by the Sea and The Abbey in the Oakwood. The Alte Nationalgalerie holds paintings and sculptures dating from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Its collection is part of the Nationalgalerie, which also encompasses the Neue Nationalgalerie, the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, the Museum Berggruen and the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg.

In Frankfurt Dr. Philipp Demandt will succeed Max Hollein, who assumed his post as director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) on 1 June 2016.

Press contact:
Axel Braun (Head of Press and Public Relations)
Städel Museum, Dürerstrasse 2, D-60596 Frankfurt, e-mail: braun@staedelmuseum.de;
telephone: +49 (0)69 60 50 98-170, mobile +49 (0)171 5644061, fax: +49 (0)69 60 50 98-188

In the framework of the “In the Städel Garden” series and as part of the programme offered by Flanders & the Netherlands Guest of Honour at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, the Städel Museum will present a work produced by the Belgian artist David Claerbout (b. 1969) especially for this occasion. The film Die reine Notwendigkeit (2016) is a surprising adaptation of the animated movie classic The Jungle Book of 1967. Claerbout’s one-hour loop turns the sentimental and comical story about dancing, singing, and trumpet-playing jungle animals into a film that has dispensed all ‘humanization’ of the animals – but also its young protagonist Mowgli – and portrays them instead in a manner befitting their species. Baloo, Bagheera and Kaa, whose songs and slapstick acts have been delighting children and adults alike for decades, are now back to being pure bear, panther and python. For Die reine Notwendigkeit, the artist painstakingly redrew the frames of Wolfgang Reitherman’s prototype by hand, one by one, and then assembled them to create an entirely new film. Now no more than shadowy outlines, the animals move around before a jungle backdrop. Claerbout alludes to the original only in the work’s title, Die reine Notwendigkeit, a reference to Baloo the Bear’s song about the “bare necessities of life”.

The exhibition “David Claerbout. Die reine Notwendigkeit” is being carried out with support from Flanders & the Netherlands Guest of Honour at the Frankfurter Buchmesse 2016, the Government of Flanders and the Städel Gartengesellschaft.

“In the œuvre he has produced over the past twenty years, David Claerbout has developed fascinating mastery in transforming even the most reductive photographic or filmic postulations – however decelerated, void, or free of all narration they might seem at first sight – into artworks highly complex from the point of view of aesthetics and content alike. Over the years, his time-based works have developed a wholly independent and distinctive aesthetic”, observes Martin Engler, head of the Städel’s collection of contemporary art and curator of the show.

Despite the fact that David Claerbout’s Die reine Notwendigkeit completely eliminates the narrative of the original, it holds a fascination all its own. It is the viewer’s associations that account for this quality, but also the oddly stiff and jerky movements of animals as strange to us as they are familiar. The ambiguity and incongruity of the protagonists, on whom a human ego was first imposed, only to be deprived of it again in Claerbout’s adaptation, serve to charge the completely eventless film narrative with a suggestive tension virtually impossible to put a finger on.

Rather than telling the story of a little boy abandoned, far from civilization, in the middle of a jungle and in the midst of its fauna, Claerbout’s film loop culminates anew every hour on the hour – somewhat like a clock – in the final scene of the original animated film. It is the moment in which a young girl comes to the edge of the jungle to fetch water. Mowgli is so beguiled by her singing that he leaves his animal wonderworld and is lured back to the order of civilization. “An ending that already didn’t make sense to us back when we were kids”, as Engler comments.

The film, coproduced by the Städel Museum, will be shown throughout the exhibition on a six-by-four-metre LED screen. Generous support from Dr. Mathias Boehringer has made it possible to purchase the work for the Städel collection.

A public conversation between David Claerbout and Martin Engler will take place on the occasion of the show’s opening at 7 pm on Tuesday, 27 September 2016.

David Claerbout
Born in Kortrijk, Belgium in 1969, David Claerbout studied at the Artesis University College in Antwerp and the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam from 1992 to 1995. He has been honoured with the Will-Grohmann-Preis of the Berlin Akademie der Künste and the Peill-Preis of the Günther-Peill-Stiftung, and is one of the world’s most important contemporary artists. Solo exhibitions of his work have been staged at the Wiener Secession, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Pinakothek der Moderne and the Lenbachhaus in Munich, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique and the WIELS in Brussels, the De Pont Museum in Tilburg and elsewhere.

The point of departure for Claerbout’s photographic and filmic installations is visual material ranging from historical photographs and reconstructed images to film recordings shot according to his instructions. In elaborate digital processes he transforms this material into works that blur the boundaries between photography and film. He deconstructs linear temporal progressions, for example, and questions the manner in which stories are told with the aid of pictures.

“In the Städel Garden”
“In the Städel Garden” is an initiative carried out with the support of the Städel Gartengesellschaft. With this series, the Städel Museum pursues the aim of offering its freely accessible garden grounds as a venue for changing installations, performances and events in the area of contemporary art. Since the new presentation of the sculpture collection in the Städel Garden in 2013, the museum’s outdoor facilities have frequently served as a setting for performance and installation works by such artists as Adrian Williams (“Watering Hole”, 2013), Adolf Luther (“Architecture as Light and Reflection”, 2013), Erwin Wurm (“One-Minute Sculptures”, 2014) and Franz Erhard Walther (“Walking Pedestals and Places to Stand”, 2014).


David Claerbout. Die reine Notwendigkeit
From the “In the Städel Garden” series

Curator: Dr. Martin Engler, Head of the Contemporary Art Collection
Exhibition dates: 28 September to 23 October 2016
Press talk: Tuesday, 27 September 2016, 11 am
Location: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main

Information: www.staedelmuseum.de, info@staedelmuseum.de, telephone +49(0)69-605098-200, fax +49(0)69-605098-112
Visitor services: telephone +49(0)69-605098-232, besucherdienst@staedelmuseum.de
Opening hours: Tue, Wed, Sat, Sun + holidays 10 am – 6 pm, Thu + Fri 10 am – 9 pm
Special opening hours: Mon, 3 October, 10 am – 6 pm

The Städel Garden may be visited free of charge.

Social Media: The Städel Museum communicates the exhibition in the social media with the hashtags #Claerbout and #Staedel.

Supported by: Flanders & the Netherlands Guest of Honour at the Frankfurter Buchmesse 2016, the Government of Flanders and the Städel Gartengesellschaft

David Claerbout’s Die reine Notwendigkeit was made in coproduction with the Städel Museum and with generous support from Dr. Mathias Boehringer.

From 19 October 2016 to 15 January 2017, the Städel Museum will present a comprehensive exhibition on one of the most outstanding draughtsmen in the history of French art – Antoine Watteau (1684–1721). The show in the Exhibition Gallery of the Department of Prints and Drawings will bring together fifty drawings by Watteau, enhanced by six of his paintings and a small selection of drawings by contemporaries and successors. Organized in cooperation with Teylers Museum in Haarlem, Holland, the exhibition “Watteau. The Draughtsman” will be the first monographic presentation of the artist’s work in Germany for more than thirty years. It will moreover be the first in this country devoted specifically to the phenomenon of Watteau in all his many facets as a draughtsman. Drawings served him as a basis for his painterly work. He drew continually and habitually, and in the most varied situations. The Städel has in its holdings altogether seven works from different phases of his career – and thus one of the most prominent Watteau collections in Germany. The precious sheets from the two institutions will form the exhibition’s core, and be supplemented by loans of high quality from collections in Germany, Holland, France and other European countries. Following its presentation at the Städel, the exhibition will be on view at Teylers Museum in Haarlem from 2 February to 14 May 2017.

“Already the spectacular purchase of the painting The Embarkation for Cythera (ca. 1709–1712) in 1982 prepared the ground for the scholarly investigation of the works of Antoine Watteau at the Städel Museum. Our present comprehensive special exhibition on Watteau as an eminent draughtsman provides us with an opportunity to address ourselves to a further central aspect of his œuvre”, comments Dr Martin Sonnabend, curator of the exhibition and head of the Städel’s department of prints and drawings to 1750.

The French artist Antoine Watteau is one of the great masters of draughtsmanship. He was born in 1684 in the Flemish city of Valenciennes, which had been conquered by the troops of Louis XIV only shortly beforehand. Nothing is known about his early artistic training. In about 1702 he went to Paris, where he eked out a living for several years as an assistant to various artists, interior decorators and art dealers. It was around 1709 that he began to call attention to himself as a painter of works of his own. In 1712 the Paris academy admitted him to its ranks. From that time onward, he was highly successful above all with bourgeois connoisseurs and collectors, for whom he carried out paintings – for the most part small in format – of a novel subject, the fête galante (courtship party). The compositions show gatherings of young, elegantly dressed women and men in park-like landscapes, conversing, making music or contemplating nature. With their mix of reality and ideality, they catered to the taste of a generation that no longer found artistic appeal in the ponderous history paintings of the age of Louis XIV, works designed to represent the interests of the state. In Watteau’s courtship scenes, arcadian themes and traditions of Dutch genre painting join with motifs taken from the theatre of the artist’s time to create a reality considered free, indebted to sensory perception, and as immediately real as it was permeated with artistry. It took the generation following Watteau – who died of tuberculosis at the young age of thirty-six – to develop his approach further into the art that later came to be called “Rococo”.

Drawings were the prerequisite for Watteau’s artistic production. His ability to capture his observations rapidly and confidently in red chalk enabled him to amass an extensive repertoire of motifs – primarily figural studies, but also landscape drawings and copies of works by other artists –; he then drew from this rich stock to devise the compositions of his paintings. Over time, by employing white and black chalk in addition to the red, he developed a virtuoso technique of stunning painterly effect. The immediacy of drawing provided him with an essential means of recording the fine nuances of reality that found their way into his scenes of courtship gatherings. Already his contemporaries recognized this special quality and collected Watteau’s drawings. His innovative style, characterized by a combination of precise observation, spontaneity, facility and intimacy, contrasts distinctly with the rigorous tradition to which the academically oriented artists of his time adhered. With its psychological sensitivity, the new, virtuoso art reflected the spirit of the incipient Enlightenment. The French Romanticists and the Impressionists considered Antoine Watteau one of their forerunners, and to this day we are amazed by the modernity of his works – especially his drawings.

The Städel Museum has in its painting collection the earliest version of the famous The Embarkation for Cythera (ca. 1709–1712) which – also thanks to the other two versions in the Louvre and Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin – is presumably the artist’s single most famous composition.

“Watteau. The Draughtsman” will enhance this work with five further paintings and fifty selected drawings. The presentation will begin with early drawings by Watteau showing figures from the realm of theatre as well as fairs and folk festivals. His early theatre studies of ca. 1709 to 1712 bear a direct thematic connection to the The Embarkation for (or Pilgrimage to) Cythera. In addition to the Städel Museum painting, this section will also feature preliminary studies of male and female models in pilgrims’ costumes. Watteau also devoted himself to other popular themes of his time, as seen in his soldier and hunting scenes. His drawings of members of a Persian delegation that visited Paris in 1715 testify to the draughtsman Watteau’s sublime mastery of the “three-chalk” technique. It was also around this time that he made his studies of the “Savoyards”, destitute street performers and merchants of the French capital. Following a section presenting Watteau’s drawings after works by other artists, the show will return to the most important theme in his œuvre. After first appearing in the The Embarkation for Cythera, the subject of the fête galante continued to play a decisive role, characterizing Watteau’s work to such an extent that it came to be closely associated with his name. In his paintings he also turned his attention again and again to theatre as a medium that can present the world of feelings without the constraints imposed by societal or natural reality, and as an element combining the artificial and the real. The reflection on emotional events that already played a role in the artist’s investigation of theatre is also the theme of a further section of the exhibition. Here the focus is on drawings in which Watteau captured the gazes, thoughts and feelings of his models. The show “Watteau. The Draughtsman” will conclude with thirteen drawings by successors to the artist – among them Antoine Coypel (1661–1722), Nicolas Lancret (1690–1743), François Boucher (1703–1770) and Jean Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) – from the Städel Museum holdings. A publication of the years 1726–1728 containing 350 etchings after Watteau drawings (by, among others, François Boucher) will also be on display.

A catalogue accompanying the exhibition will be published by the Hirmer Verlag with a foreword by Philipp Demandt and Marjan Scharloo. The publication will offer an introduction to the art of Watteau by Martin Sonnabend. Michiel Plomp (Teylers Museum, Haarlem) will investigate the artist’s exploration of the works of those “Old Masters” he chose – in the context of the drawing medium – as examples to emulate, and the Watteau expert Christoph Martin Vogtherr (Wallace Collection, London and designated director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle) will analyse various aspects of the specific strategies Watteau pursued as a draughtsman, which differed distinctly from the practices otherwise common in his day.

WATTEAU. THE DRAUGHTSMAN

Curators: Dr Martin Sonnabend (Head of the Department of Prints and Drawings to 1750, Städel Museum), Dr Michiel Plomp (Chief Conservator of the Art Collections, Teylers Museum)
Exhibition dates: 19 October 2016 to 15 January 2017
Press preview: Monday, 17 October 2016, 11 am

Information: www.staedelmuseum.de, info@staedelmuseum.de, phone +49(0)69-605098-200, fax +49(0)69-605098-112
Visitor services: phone +49(0)69-605098-232, besucherdienst@staedelmuseum.de
Location: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main
Opening hours: Tue, Wed, Sat, Sun + holidays 10 am – 6 pm, Thu + Fri 10 am – 9 pm, mondays closed
Special opening hours: Sat 24 Dec. 2016, closed, Sun 25 Dec., 10 am ‒ 6 pm, Mon 26 Dec., 10 am ‒ 6 pm, Sat 31 Dec. 2016, closed, Sun 1 Jan. 2017, 11 am ‒ 6 pm; Mon 2 Jan. 2017, 10 am ‒ 6 pm
Admission: 14 euros, reduced tickets 12 euros, family ticket 24 euros; free admission for children under twelve years of age. Groups of at least ten persons: reduced admission per person. Groups are required to book in advance: please call +49(0)69-605098-200 or contact info@staedelmuseum.de
Advance ticket sales online at: tickets.staedelmuseum.de.

General guided tours of the exhibition: Thu 6 pm, Sun 2 pm and Mon 26 Dec. 2 pm. The number of participants is limited; previous booking is not required.

Catalogue: A catalogue accompanying the exhibition will be published by the Hirmer Verlag, with approx. 260 pages and approx. 185 illustrations, with texts by Martin Sonnabend, Michiel Plomp and Christoph Martin Vogtherr and a foreword by Philipp Demandt and Marjan Scharloo. German edition, 34.90 Euro (museum edition).

Social Media: The Städel Museum is communicating the exhibition in the social media with the hashtags #Watteau and #Staedel.

An exhibition of the Städel Museum, Frankfurt and the Teylers Museum, Haarlem.

The Städel Museum, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung have a new director. On 1 October 2016, Dr Philipp Demandt will begin his work at the head of the three cultural institutions of Frankfurt. The art historian was chosen within the framework of an intensive national and international search for a successor to Max Hollein. He was previously the director of the Alte Nationalgalerie, a museum of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preussischer Kulturbesitz. At the press conference held today on the occasion of his assumption of office, Demandt (b. 1971) was introduced by Prof Dr Nikolaus Schweickart, chairman of the Städel Museum administration, and Dr Ina Hartwig, deputy mayor in charge of culture of the city of Frankfurt am Main.

The chairman of the Städel Museum administration Prof Dr Nikolaus Schweickart, who presided over the search, commented: “Philipp Demandt was the candidate we most favoured for this position. It was his comprehensive experience with modern culture management and his qualified expertise as an art historian and curator with a keen instinct for special themes and discoveries that made him the candidate of choice for the job. We look forward to working with him.”

“I am delighted we were able to win the renowned art historian Philipp Demandt for the post of director of the three institutions. The Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is one of the leading exhibition halls, and its clear and distinctive profile is appreciated far beyond the boundaries of Frankfurt and Germany. It represents an outstanding complement to the collection focuses of the richly traditional Städel Museum and Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung. The continuation of the effective interaction between these three large art institutions is sensible and important for the cultural development of the city and the region. I wish Philipp Demandt all the best and much success for his new work”, added Dr Ina Hartwig, Frankfurt’s mayor in charge of culture.

Dr Philipp Demandt himself took advantage of the opportunity offered by the press conference to introduce himself to the gathering of media representatives as the new director of the three Frankfurt art institutions: “To head the Städel, Schirn and Liebieghaus as director and develop their successful work further in all its diversity is a challenge I accept with great pleasure. I thank the magistrate of the city of Frankfurt and the administration of the Städel Museum for the confidence they are placing in me. The Städel Museum, the Schirn and the Liebieghaus are three prominent art institutions that delight the public with their progressive exhibitions and projects and demonstrate again and again how we can – and must – conceive of vibrant engagement with art in today’s times. The preservation of the three institutions’ strong and distinct profiles and the continued exploitation of the synergies between them are matters beyond debate. All three have broadly qualified teams whose outstanding work you are familiar with and will encounter once again in the coming weeks in our large autumn exhibitions. I am greatly looking forward to this cooperation.”

Born in Constance in 1971, Demandt studied art history, classical archaeology and media science and gained his doctorate in 2001 at the Institute of History and Cultural Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin with a thesis on the execution and reception of the portraits of Queen Louise by Johann Gottfried Schadow and Christian Daniel Rauch and the historical mythology of the Prussian state as mirrored in the “Queen Louise cult”. After serving as exhibition assistant at the Bröhan Museum in 2002, Demandt became a department head with the Kulturstiftung der Länder. There his responsibilities included advising and supporting German culture institutions on the purchase and financing of artworks from pre- and early history to the nineteenth century as well as on exhibition projects. From 2007 to 2010 he also co-curated the Stiftung Preussische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg Prussian exhibition “Louise: Life and Myth of the Queen”. He planned and directed the magazine “Arsprototo” published by the Kulturstiftung der Länder, as well as the foundation’s scholarly publication series “Patrimonia”, and published numerous articles on the history of art and culture, for example in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Welt.

In January 2012, Demandt was appointed director of the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. There he drew attention to himself with a comprehensive new concept for the display collection and a number of exhibitions that were as innovative as they were successful. Among the highlights of the shows staged under his direction were “Rembrandt Bugatti”, “Impressionism – Expressionism: Art at a Turning Point” and, most recently, “The Monk Has Returned”, a special presentation on the restoration of Caspar David Friedrich’s masterworks Monk by the Sea and The Abbey in the Oakwood. The Alte Nationalgalerie holds paintings and sculptures dating from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Its collection is part of the Nationalgalerie, which also encompasses the Neue Nationalgalerie, the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, the Museum Berggruen and the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg.

In Frankfurt Dr Philipp Demandt is succeeding Max Hollein, who assumed his post as director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) on 1 June 2016.

From 24 November 2016 to 19 March 2017, visitors to the Städel Museum in Frankfurt will have the opportunity to see a major exhibition that explores a timeless theme: the emotionally charged relationship between man and woman and its representation in art. “Battle of the Sexes. Franz von Stuck to Frida Kahlo” illuminates the artistic exploration of gender roles and gender relations from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War. Featuring over 150 works, the exhibition reveals just how controversial both male and female modern artists were in their reaction towards the construction of gender identities and bears witness to the ways they used painting, sculpture, graphic art, photography and film to tackle stereotypes and role models. Some used their work to confront their audiences with exaggerated gender traits or else sought to undermine stereotypical role models. Others attacked common clichés and aimed to deconstruct them via strategies such as irony, exaggeration, masquerade and hybridization. Gender distinctions – based upon traditional associations of male and female with categories such as active/passive, rational/emotional, culture/nature, state/family – became increasingly defined over the course of the nineteenth century, not only influencing economic, social and political structures, but also art. The exhibition builds upon the Städel’s own collection of artworks with direct relevance to the show’s theme, including paintings by Max Liebermann, Edvard Munch, and Franz von Stuck, sculptures by Auguste Rodin, and photographs by Frank Eugene and Claude Cahun. Significant loans mean that famous names such as Hannah Höch, Édouard Manet, Gustav Klimt, Otto Dix and Frida Kahlo can be featured in meaningful juxtaposition with lesser-known artists, including works by Leonor Fini, John Collier, and Gustav Adolf Mossa. Works from the canon of modern art are thus complemented by similarly apposite, though somewhat neglected exhibits. The exhibition takes up the intense debates that have come to surround the respective roles played by women and men, offering nuanced insights into the complexity of this often problematic cultural issue, while highlighting the art-historical dimension of a socio-political theme that remains just as relevant in our own contemporary context.

The exhibition is funded by the Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain and has received additional support from the Georg und Franziska Speyer’schen Hochschulstiftung.

In a statement, Dr. Philipp Demandt, director of the Städel Museum, announced: “Our exhibition highlight at the turn of the year explores a subject that loomed particularly large in the art of the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth century: the debate surrounding gender roles and gender relations. The avowed aim of this large-scale project is to select outstanding and keenly observed artworks and put them in dialogue with one another. As the various works displayed in the show illustrate, the scrutiny brought to bear upon the construction of male and female identities has lost none of its power to captivate contemporary audiences.”

In twelve chapters overall, the exhibition contains an unprecedented range of artistic subjects, which highlight some of the key aspects characterizing art in its exploration of the interrelationship of women and men. From the mythological representations of Gustave Moreau through to the fantastical images that emerged out of Surrealism, the displays aim to bring into focus modern art’s ever-changing visions of male and female role models, observing the developments they underwent within the context of comprehensive historical and social transformations: from the beginnings of the Women’s Movement in the second half of the nineteenth century, via the debates on gender and sexual controversies that characterized the Weimar Republic, through to the end of the Second World War. The works are arranged chronologically in a display that encompasses both floors of the exhibition house. However, this thematic sequence is interrupted by five monographic chapters, each of which is dedicated to a particular male or female artist whose oeuvre gives special prominence to the theme of the battle of the sexes: Franz von Stuck, Jeanne Mammen, Félicien Rops, Edvard Munch and Lee Miller.

The exhibition is curated by Felicity Korn and Dr. Felix Krämer. In a curatorial statement, Felicity Korn said: “It is especially important for us that the exhibition should include works by both male and female artists, so as to shed as much light as possible on the often highly charged relationship between men and women. It bears mentioning that considerably fewer female artists broached the subject – particularly in the nineteenth century – which is of course also due to the disparities in their educational and professional opportunities. This makes the works by women featured in the exhibition all the more tantalizing: remarkably, female artists often engaged with the theme through irony and humour – even though they were themselves more directly affected by the battle of the sexes.”

“The aim of our exhibition is to encourage people to reflect upon the theme of gender conflict while offering historical insights into this complex topic. The exhibition follows on from the success of the Städel Museum’s 2012 show “Dark Romanticism”, with which we established a precedent for taking on a contemporary theme that resonated with the social attitudes of modern audiences and examined it from an art-historical perspective. While the post-war history of the battle of the sexes is well documented and well-known to many contemporaries, this is less the case with earlier historical periods. Yet for many modern artists, the battle of the sexes was a recurrent theme throughout their life’s work,” said Felix Krämer.

The exhibition “Battle of the Sexes” takes as its historical starting point the emergence of a growing groundswell of voices (led by the Women’s Liberation Movement) demanding social equality between man and woman, which in the nineteenth century made itself heard throughout Europe. For the first time, prevailing models of male and female identity were discussed by the wider public – a debate which from the 1860s onwards also left its mark on the visual arts.

The exhibition begins with an introductory section on Adam and Eve, the biblical story to which the battle of the sexes traditionally traces its origins. There emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century a large number of depictions of the first human couple, anticipating the range and diversity of artistic responses that gender-related themes would subsequently elicit. Visitors can see evocative works by Franz von Stuck, Julius Paulsen, and Suzanne Valadon – whose partner, André Utter (20 years her junior), sat as the model for her Adam.

As women’s position in society began to strengthen, fin de siècle art gave rise to a parallel development whereby representations emphasized the guilt of original sin and female powers of seduction. This produced an increasingly important strand of art, predicated upon a particularly destructive and ruinous form of femininity, with the femme fatale (French: the fateful woman) coming to denote men’s humiliation and thus serving simultaneously as a projection of male anxieties and sexual desire. In the eyes of many (primarily) male artists, the figure of a woman with aspirations to social equality represented an existential threat. Their work stylized members of the female sex as figures of evil who deliberately courted their powers of sexual attraction to emasculate men. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, strong biblical characters such as Salome, Judith, and Delilah attained cult status, providing subjects for works by numerous artists, including Gustave Moreau, Jean Benner, Lovis Corinth, and Aubrey Beardsley.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the emerging academic discipline of sexual research upturned bourgeois conceptions of clearly delineated gender roles, and opened up topics such as the libido and sexual preferences for public discussion – albeit one that was almost exclusively conducted by men. Artists such as Alfred Kubin, Thomas Theodor Heine, and Félicien Rops no longer had to refer back in their work to mythological and biblical figures, but instead translated stereotypical notions of gender into exaggerated visual ideas. The period gave rise to a large number of artistic representations in which the woman appears as helpless victim, entirely at the mercy of a man who exerts over her the full force of his sexual and social prowess. The exhibition includes a prime example of this sort of imagery in the shape of Emmanuel Frémiet’s sculpture Gorilla Abducting a Woman (1887), which nearly half a century later inspired Merian C. Cooper’s famous film King Kong (1936).

A quite different perspective is offered by Jeanne Mammen, whose early work is exhibited for the first time at the Städel Museum, and provides the subject for one of the shows’s monographic chapters. The artist’s work engages extensively with the fantastical world of ideas and dreams that grew out of literary Symbolism. Mammen thus created a series of works themed upon Gustave Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874), as well as various depictions of strong female figures, including Medusa and Salome. Another artist whose oeuvre accords particular prominence to themes relating to the battle of the sexes is Edvard Munch (who also features in one of the monographic displays). In his pictures, the Norwegian artist depicted the ambivalence haunting the relationship between men and woman, frequently associating eroticism and love with pain and death. In so doing, he typically put the observer in the position of a male voyeur-lover, doomed to fall victim to the seductive power of the woman’s physical beauty.

The liberal climate of the Weimar Republic gave rise to a swathe of new nightclubs, strip joints and drag clubs, to which city dwellers flocked in the hope of suppressing the trauma of the First World War by indulging in different kinds of sensual pleasure. Accompanying this new mood was an abiding fascination in art for such subjects as sexually motivated murders, sexual violence, and prostitution. Male proponents of the New Objectivity, including Otto Dix, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen and Karl Hubbuch, depicted ravaged female bodies in the most gruesomely explicit ways and presented them as fetishized objects. Artists used this new and shocking sensibility to shift their focus towards depictions of human depravity and social marginalization, which were duly understood as references to the encroaching brutalization of the social climate and as metaphors for the moribund political system. The period’s fascination for sexual crimes transcended genres. Franz Wedekind’s drama Lulu: Earth Spirit/Pandora’s Box, for example, served as the template for Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s film Pandora’s Box (1928/29). In both versions, Lulu falls victim to the murderer Jack the Ripper. Both female and male artists working in Berlin’s dadaist circles, such as Hannah Höch and Hans Bellmer, created pictures of distorted, mechanical, and monstrous figures that risked scandalizing audiences, but whose primary purpose was nevertheless to operate as a critique of bourgeois sexual mores.

In addition to these deliberately subversive acts of radical excess, the period was also notable for its preoccupation with the theme of the “New Woman”. Amidst the social upheavals precipitated by the First World War, women working on the “home front” found that they had gained in self-confidence as new social and professional freedoms opened up to them. As men returned from the war, often traumatized by their experiences, they were confronted by a generation of women whose understanding of gender roles had been completely transformed. With women having won the right to vote in 1919, the German Women’s Movement had reached an important milestone on the road towards achieving political, social and civil rights as citizens. This led to the development of a self-confident and active model of femininity. Portraits by Otto Dix, Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, Jeanne Mammen and Christian Schad reflect the transformations undergone by society in its understanding of gender roles.

A different emphasis was evident in the surrealist circles of André Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, whose art was characterized by a liberal attitude towards sexuality and at the same time a playfully subversive approach to bourgeois society’s gender stereotypes. Inspired by Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical studies, many surrealists sought to break down gender boundaries. They demonstrated a particular fascination for the figure of the androgyne, a mythological hermaphrodite with both male and female sexual characteristics. For the surrealists, the androgyne symbolized both the transgression of conventional modes of behaviour and the synthesis of the male and female sex. Surrealism’s influence was also felt in the realm of cinema. Artists such as Maya Deren and Alexander Hamid, who were close to the Paris Surrealists, strove to construct a sexual identity, as for example in the 1943 film Meshes of the Afternoon.

Female artists working among the surrealists made ongoing efforts to forge an alternative model of womanhood vis-à-vis their male counterparts. These attempts to reconstruct gender had a precedent in cinema: male and female roles were swapped to comic effect in Alice Guy’s 1906 film Les Résultats du féminisme (The Consequences of Feminism). Meret Oppenheim later employed similarly humorous methods, playing upon the preconception that the woman’s role was that of a passive object of sexual desire by presenting viewers with a pair of high-heeled shoes, trussed up like a roast goose on a tray. Meanwhile Frida Kahlo created a highly personal and symbol-laden representation in her self-portrait The Little Deer.

BATTLE OF THE SEXES. FRANZ VON STUCK BIS FRIDA KAHLO

Curators: Felicity Korn (Assistant Curator of Modern Art, Städel Museum), Dr. Felix Krämer (Head of Modern Art, Städel Museum)
Exhibition period: 24 November 2016 to 19 March 2017
Press preview: Wednesday, 23 November 2016, 11 a.m.

Information: www.staedelmuseum.de, info@staedelmuseum.de, telephone +49(0)69-605098-200, fax +49(0)69-605098-112
Visitor service: telephone +49(0)69-605098-232, besucherdienst@staedelmuseum.de
Address: Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main
Opening times: Tue, Wed, Sat, Sun & public holidays: 10 a.m. – 6 p.m., Thu & Fri: 10 a.m. – 9 p.m., Mon: closed
Special opening times: Sat 24 Dec: closed; Sun 25 Dec: 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.; Mon 26 Dec: 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.; Sat 31 Dec: closed; Sun 1 Jan 2017: 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.; Mon 2 Jan: 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Entrance: 14 euros; concessions: 12 euros, family ticket: 24 euros; free entry for children under 12; groups of more than 10 people: reduced per person rate. Groups must register in advance by calling +49 (0)69-605098-200 or emailing info@staedelmuseum.de
Advance ticket sales online at: tickets.staedelmuseum.de (until 10 November 2016, Early Bird Tickets will be available from the online shop at a price of 10 euros).

Digitorial: The Digitorial is a project developed by the Aventis Foundation. It can be visited at geschlechterkampf.staedelmuseum.de.
Audio tour and the Städel app: The audio tour is supported by the Georg und Franziska Speyer’schen Hochschulstiftung. It offers tours of the exhibition in German and English. The German audio tour is read by Constanze Becker and Felix Rech (both of the Schauspiel Theatre, Frankfurt). The price for an audio guide is 4 euros, or 7 euros for two. In addition to being available for loan at the museum, the audio tour can also be downloaded via the Städel app from the comfort of your own home. The Städel app is free of charge from the Android and Apple Store, and costs 1 euro for the current IOS and Android smartphones: http://www.staedelmuseum.de/de/angebote/staedel-app

Social media: The Städel Museum communicates the exhibition in the social media with the hashtags #Geschlechterkampf and #Staedel.

**General guided tours of the exhibition: Tue 3 p.m., Wed 1 p.m., Thu 7 p.m., Fri 7 p.m., Sat 4 p.m., and Sun 12 p.m.; additionally on 26 Dec at 4 p.m. Please note there is limited space on the tours. Tickets for tours are available from two hours before the start of the tour at the ticket office, or can be ordered online in advance at a special rate of 16 euro (including entrance and tour) at tickets.staedelmuseum.de

Catalogue: A catalogue is being published by Prestel Verlag to accompany the exhibition, containing 336 pages and approximately 400 illustrations. It features an introductory discussion between Felicity Korn, Felix Krämer, and Rose-Maria Gropp, essays by Andreas Beyer and Ute Frevert, and articles by Ingo Borges, Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Katharina Ferus, Miriam Halwani, Kristina Lemke, Nele Putz, Elena Schroll, Svetlana Svyatskaya, Melanie Ulz, Anne Vieth, and Daniel Zamani, and a foreword by Philipp Demandt.
German edition/English edition: 39.90 euros (museum edition).
Visitor’s guide: A German-language booklet to accompany the exhibition is available for 7.50 euro.

Sponsored by: Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain
With additional support from: Georg und Franziska Speyer’schen Hochschulstiftung
Media partners: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Verkehrsgesellschaft Frankfurt am Main, Cicero – Magazin für politische Kultur
Mobility partner: Deutsche Bahn
Culture partner: hr2-kultur

Watteau. The Draughtsman
to 15 January 2017
Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings
The Städel Museum’s comprehensive exhibition of the work of Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) – one of the most outstanding draughtsmen in the history of French art – runs until 15 January 2017. The exhibition, held in the Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings, brings together fifty of Watteau’s drawings, complemented by six of his paintings, and a small selection of drawings by contemporaries and followers. “Watteau –The Draughtsman” was developed in collaboration with the Teylers Museum in Haarlem in the Netherlands. It is the first monographic exhibition on the artist to be held in Germany for more than thirty years, and it will be the first in this country ever devoted to the phenomenon of Watteau the draughtsman, in all his many facets. The drawings, which the artist completed in large numbers and in a wide variety of contexts, were the basis for his work as a painter.
Curators: Dr. Martin Sonnabend (Städel Museum), Dr. Michiel Plomp (Teylers Museum)


Battle of the Sexes. Franz von Stuck to Frida Kahlo
to 19 March 2017
Exhibition House
The exhibition deals with the artistic investigation of gender roles from the mid-19th century to the end of the Second World War. The traditional definition of male and female as active/passive, rational/emotional, culture/nature was a crucial theme in modern art: many artists presented audiences with exaggerated gender characteristics, reinforcing stereotypical models of behaviour. But others attacked commonplace clichés, attempting to subvert them with strategies including irony, exaggeration, masquerade, and hybridisation. This major exhibition uses 140 works of painting, sculpture, graphic art, photography, and films to present particularly incisive artistic statements, putting them in dialogue with one other. Important artworks on the topic were selected from the Städel Museum’s permanent collection, including paintings by Max Liebermann, Edvard Munch, and Franz von Stuck, sculptures by Auguste Rodin, and photographs by Frank Eugene and Man Ray. In addition, carefully-chosen loans of important works mean canonical names – like Gustave Moreau, Édouard Manet, Gustav Klimt, Otto Dix, Meret Oppenheim, and Frida Kahlo – can be juxtaposed with discoveries that extend the canon with bold but lesser-known artists, including Leonor Fini, Jeanne Mammen, Rudolf Jettmar, and Gustav Adolf Mossa. Against a background of intensive discussion of gender questions and the constant evolution of men’s and women’s roles, the project offers insights into the complexity of the problem, while exploring art-historical aspects of this highly relevant social and political theme.
Curators: Felicity Korn (Städel Museum), Dr. Felix Krämer (Städel Museum)


Into the Third Dimension. Spatial Concepts on Paper from the Bauhaus to the Present
15 February to– 14 May 2017
Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings
Apparently familiar characteristics – including form, volume, delineation, emptiness, and structure – produce depth and space and thus allow the viewer to orient his gaze through the image. But how do drawings and prints – in other words, flat, two-dimensional representations – depict these elements of the third dimension? These questions are addressed by the exhibition “Into the Third Dimension. Spatial Concepts on Paper from the Bauhaus to Contemporary Conceptual Art” at the Städel Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings. Selected works by thirteen artists are on display, including Lucio Fontana, Eduardo Chillida, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Giò Pomodoro, Blinky Palermo, James Turrell, and Michael Riedel. The show begins with geometrical compositions from 1923 by El Lissitzky and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, continuing through the century to prints made by contemporary conceptual artists. In this way, lithographs with Constructivist perspectival representations are juxtaposed with embossed prints emerging out of two-dimensional flatness. Lacerated surfaces which open onto imaginative spaces encounter sketches made for wall pieces. Sculptural and object-like prints by artists working in the tradition of Minimal Art, installation art, and light art are juxtaposed with chalk drawings, foldings, and collages by 20th century sculptors. To enable a greater range of spatial experiences, the display combines prints and drawings with sculpture in the round. The exhibition brings together significant works from the Department of Prints and Drawings with selected pieces from the Deutsche Bank Collection in the Städel Museum.
Curator: Jenny Graser (Städel Museum)


Photographs Become Pictures. The Becher Class
27 April to– 13 August 2017
Exhibition House
One of the most radical changes in art’s relation to its aesthetic, media, and economic contexts is closely associated with the names Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff, Jörg Sasse, and Thomas Struth – but even more so with the names of their teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher. This group of artists – to which names like Volker Döhne, Tata Ronkholz and Petra Wunderlich should be added – formed the first of a long line of ‘Becher Classes’ at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. “Photographs Become Pictures. The Becher Class” brings together over 180 major works, some in large format, by these important artists, as well as a selection of their early works. This generation not only shaped the international photography scene of the 1990s, they went one further, and helped to transform the way artistic photography is perceived. Their visual creations make arguments in both formal and conceptual terms, interrogating human beings in their natural and cultural habitat, investigating their immediate surroundings and their private and global dimensions, examining their principles of social and aesthetic organisation. For all the heterogeneity of these artists’ work, their oeuvres are always characterised by an ambivalent relation to painting, shifting between appropriation and differentiation. Their works are an expression of a self-conscious emancipation of photography as an artistic medium, while also reflecting the (not merely digital) moment, when the boundaries between these two previously competing media dissolve.
Curator: Dr. Martin Engler (Städel Museum)
Co-curator: Dr. Jana Baumann (Städel Museum)


Géricault to Toulouse-Lautrec. French Lithographs of the Nineteenth Century
22 June to 10 September 2017
Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings
This summer, the Städel Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings is devoting an exhibition to French lithography in all its abundant diversity. The invention of this ‘stone printing’ technique at the end of the eighteenth century ushered in an entirely new epoch in printmaking: as compared to other methods in use until then, it offered more variety in the means of artistic expression, made the printing process faster, and allowed larger editions. In France, prominent artists began experimenting with lithography around 1820, and over the course of the century substantially broadened its range of artistic possibilities.
The spectrum of works on display will include expressive compositions by Théodore Géricault, one of the rare lithographs executed by Goya when he was in exile in Bordeaux in the 1820s, Eugène Delacroix’s masterful Goethe and Shakespeare illustrations, and Honoré Daumier’s political and social commentaries in the form of newspaper caricatures. Works of the later nineteenth century such as Edouard Manet’s virtuoso inventions, Symbolist works by Rodolphe Bresdin and Odilon Redon, and masterworks of colour lithography by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the “Nabis” Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard will also be on view. The prints, about eighty in all, represent highlights of lithography of the period in question, but also the superb quality and wide diversity of the Städel’s holdings in this area.
Curator: Dr. Martin Sonnabend (Städel Museum)


Matisse – Bonnard. ‘Long live Painting!’
13 September 2017 to– 14 January 2018
Exhibition House
‘Long live Painting!’ – this was the rallying cry with which Henri Matisse (1869–1954) greeted his friend Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) on 13 August 1925. The postcard from Amsterdam bearing these words marked the beginning of an important correspondence between the two painters. The exchange of letters, which lasted until 1946, makes their mutual appreciation very clear. The Städel’s large-scale special exhibition sheds light on a friendship lasting more than forty years, presenting the relationship in the context of their contribution to modern art and revealing its broader significance for their work. With over 100 paintings, sculptures, and drawings, the show opens a dialogue between the two artists, offering new perspectives on the development of the European avant-garde from the beginning of the 20th century to the end of the Second World War. The closeness of the relationship is underlined by the two painters’ intense engagement with very similar subjects. A number of chapters addressing these central themes – including Interiors, Still Life, Landscape, and Nude – illustrate the sheer variety of the artistic results. The exhibits on display include masterpieces from leading international collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art, Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. This extensive selection of works is enhanced by a series of photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, who visited both Bonnard and Matisse in the south of France in 1944.
Curator: Dr. Felix Krämer (Städel Museum)
Co-curator: Dr. Daniel Zamani (Städel Museum)


Maria Sibylla Merian and the Tradition of Flower Depiction
11 October 2017 to– 14 January 2018
Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings
Born and raised in Frankfurt, Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) is one of Frankfurt’s most famous daughters. 2017 marks the 300th anniversary of her death. To mark the occasion, the Städel Museum, in cooperation with the Kupferstichkabinett of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, will present an exhibition devoted to flower illustration in drawings and prints from the 15th to the 18th century. At its centre is the extraordinary figure of Maria Sibylla Merian: a copperplate engraver, a painter of flowers and insects, a naturalist, and an explorer. Educated in the tradition of ‘florilegia’ (flower books) and tulip books, Merian became a naturalist, first investigating the metamorphosis of caterpillars and butterflies, later the symbiosis of insects and plants. She published the results of her research in illustrated books containing copperplates and etchings, as well as body-colour drawings of the highest artistic quality. The central works of this exceptional artist will be shown in the context of flower representations by her predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. In the 18th century, gardens and valuable plants, above all tulips, were valuable goods. ‘Florilegia’ from the time communicate their particular importance: the images were produced as splendidly colourful drawings on vellum, or as large-scale hand-coloured copperplate engravings, produced in exclusive small editions, such as the famous Hortus Eystettensis by Basilius Besler. The exhibition also includes ornamental engravings with floral motifs, for example by Martin Schongauer, apothecary books from the 15th and 16th century, plant studies from the circle of Albrecht Dürer, and nature studies by Georg Flegel and Georg Hoefnagel from around 1600. Also included are a group of flower drawings by Bartholomäus Braun, who – like Maria Sibylla Merian – worked in Nuremburg, as well as 18th century flower portraits by Barbara Regina Dietzsch and her circle.
Curators: Dr. Martin Sonnabend (Städel Museum), Dr. Michael Roth (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett)

Titles and exhibition dates subject to alteration.

(Frankfurt am Main, 23 March 2016) After more than fifteen years in Frankfurt am Main, Max Hollein is resigning as head of the Städel Museum, Liebieghaus Sculpture Collection and Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. As of 1 June 2016, Hollein will serve as director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), the largest public art institution in Northern California and, with 1.6 million visitors in 2014, the fourth most frequently visited museum in the U.S.

Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Schweickart, the chairman of the Städel Museum foundation, commented on Hollein’s decision as follows: “We hugely regret Max Hollein’s imminent departure. The Städel and Liebieghaus are thus losing one of their most successful and most visionary directors, who took both museums to entirely new dimensions – not least of all by way of expansions in terms of content and spatial facilities alike – while also substantially developing their educational mission. The Städel has rarely reached the degree of success it boasts today. That is a circumstance we owe especially to Max Hollein. We are infinitely grateful to him and wish him all the best and continued great success for his personal future. For us, a challenging search now begins for a suitable successor whose responsibility will once again comprise the directorship of all three institutions.”

Frankfurt’s mayor Peter Feldmann, the chairman of the supervisory board of the Schirn Kunsthalle, observed: “Max Hollein’s decision deserves our respect, even if we deeply regret it and his departure means a great loss to the German cultural world. With his untiring work, Max Hollein has made the institutions under his leadership – above all the Schirn – the most distinguished, most well-known and most exciting art institutions in Europe, and granted all the citizens of the region unforgettable encounters with art and culture. For this we are highly indebted to him.”

“For fifteen years, Max Hollein has played a decisive role in cultural life in Frankfurt, and contributed more than anyone else to carving out a firm place for Frankfurt as an important centre of culture on the international museum map. We thank Max Hollein for his exceedingly successful work. The Städel Museum, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and the Liebieghaus Sculpture Collection are all thriving; at all three institutions, the course has been set for a positive future. We would naturally have loved to keep such an accomplished museum director with us longer, but now we wish him and his family all the best for the new challenge in San Francisco”, stated Prof. Dr. Felix Semmelroth, the Deputy Mayor in Charge of Culture of the City of Frankfurt.

Born in Vienna in 1969, Hollein has been the director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt since 2001, and of the Städel Museum and the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung since January 2006. All three cultural institutions have developed substantially under his direction and are today among Europe’s most successful art institutions.

“To leave Frankfurt after more than fifteen years is a difficult decision for myself and my family. This city and its people have grown very dear to our hearts. Essentially, things could have just kept going on this way indefinitely at the Städel, the Schirn and the Liebieghaus: all three institutions are in the very best of shape and can look ahead to a very positive future. For me, it has been a huge pleasure to have the opportunity to develop and promote countless projects for these institutions and with their outstanding employees, being borne along in the process by a sheer unending wave of support from so many sides, as well as an outstanding cultural policy programme. Even if I’m afraid it can’t possibly as wonderful as this anywhere else, the time really was ripe for me to take new step and face a new challenge. The American west coast in general and San Francisco in particular represent one of the most interesting focal points of cultural diversity and economic dynamics, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco constitute a large encyclopaedic museum institution at the heart of this unparalleled development, in which I would like to take active part”, Max Hollein explained.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

With their two branches, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) constitute the largest public art institution in the city of San Francisco and among the most prominent museums in California. The encyclopaedic collection of more than 128,000 works is divided up into seven departments and collection areas with emphases on American and European art. The FAMSF employ a staff of altogether 520, along with some 600 volunteers, and have one of the largest societies of friends in the U.S. with more than 100,000 members.

PRESS CONTACT
Axel Braun
Städel Museum, Dürerstrasse 2, D-60596 Frankfurt, e-mail: braun@staedelmuseum.de; telephone: +49 (0)69 60 50 98-170, mobile +49 (0)171 5644061, fax: +49 (0)69 60 50 98-188

Pamela Rohde
Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Römerberg, D-60311 Frankfurt, e-mail: pamela.rohde@schirn.de;
telephone: +49.69.29 98 82-148, fax: +49.69.29 98 82-240