Städel Museum
masterpieces debut in Melbourne
The Städel Museum boasts one of the world’s finest art collections – more than 2800 paintings, 600 sculptures and 100,000 prints and drawings – a must-see chronicle of European art on any Frankfurt visitor’s itinerary. Work is currently underway on the museum founded in 1815 for a modern art exhibition building, while the original building undergoes renovations.
If not for a travelling exhibit, the museum’s prized collections would have been absent from public view until the construction’s completion in 2011. “There was this idea to give somewhere else around the country or around the world the opportunity to get to know our collection better,” explains Städel Press Spokesman Axel Braun.
Thus an idea was borne for a masterpieces tour of three locations that would feature some of the museum’s greatest works.
After first travelling to Lausanne in February, European Masters: Städel Museum 19th-20th century opened in June at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, notably Australia’s oldest and largest public art gallery. After its conclusion on October 10, the exhibit is set to move once again, this time to nearby New Zealand.
European Masters reveals works rarely seen outside Europe, nearly 100 works by 70 artists chronicling the dynamic and transformative art scenes of the 19th and 20th centuries. According to National Gallery of Victoria Director Gerard Vaughan, the exhibit is “a superb survey of the key artistic movements of the time, including Realism, Impressionism and Post Impressionism, German Romanticism, Expressionism and Modernism, and French Symbolism.”
Opening with some of Germany’s most well-known paintings including Johann H.W. Tischbein’s iconic Goethe in the Roman Campagna (1787), European Masters also treats visitors to 19th century French art including Corot and Courbet’s Realist landscapes and the Impressionism of Monet, Renoir, Degas and Cézanne. The exhibit includes a tour of German Realists and Symbolists like Max Liebermann and Franz von Stuck, as well as Swiss, Belgian and Dutch pieces by such famed artists as Arnold Böcklin, Fernand Khnopff and Vincent Van Gogh. European Masters’ highlight, however, is the German Expressionist paintings and ten powerful works by Max Beckmann, some of which have left the Städel for the very first time.
European Masters is the 7th in the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series at the National Gallery of Victoria. According to Braun, who recently spoke with his colleagues in Australia, the exhibit has been a huge success with some 19,000 visitors by mid-August.
The Städel is set to tour another exposition starting in October 2010, this time of Dutch works from the 16th and 17th centuries, ensuring the museum’s famed collections are shown to international audiences while it undergoes construction. The Städel is set to reopen in a grand event in the fall of 2011, and the masterworks will again be on-view to all museum goers.
Angela Boskovitch/FRM
