FRANKFURT.- For its two-hundredth birthday the Städel Museum welcomes eminent guests: from 7 October 2015 to 24 January 2016, selected Städel works host sixty-five masterpieces from the world’s most renowned museums for an anniversary exhibition entitled “Masterworks in Dialogue”. The outstanding Städel works represent a cross-section of the museum’s history while at the same time offering insights into a collection that has evolved over two-hundred years. Companions from far and wide joined them in temporary partnerships and long-awaited unions. Planned by all of the Städel’s curators, the show is the first ever to spread throughout the galleries of the museum’s collections. Loans from the Albertina in Vienna, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, the Mauritshuis in The Hague, the Tate in London, the Vatican Museums, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and elsewhere traveled to Frankfurt am Main for this special occasion. The superb “anniversary guests” allow us to draw surprising art-historical references and to illuminate and examine the Städel holdings – spanning seven-hundred years of art – anew.

“In the bicentennial year, Städel favourites are meeting with stars from all over the world! This major anniversary project is an ideal occasion both to rediscover our collection – which constitutes the Städel’s identity and core – and to experience yet another highlight in the museum’s exhibition history in the form of intriguing and arthistorically unique dialogues between the masterworks. Unparalleled in quality, number and heterogeneity, the exceptional loans are also a token of international esteem for the Städel. We are especially grateful for this phenomenal support from the world’s most famous collections on the occasion of our two-hundredth birthday”, comments Städel Museum director Max Hollein.

The anniversary exhibition spreads out on all four floors and in all areas of the Städel collection. The visitor embarking on a tour of the museum will encounter, for example, prominent “anniversary guests” by such artists as Jan van Eyck, Fra Angelico, Johannes Vermeer or Nicolas Poussin bearing close relationships to works from the Städel’s Old Masters collection. Masterworks by Edgar Degas, Max Liebermann, Pablo Picasso and Franz Marc sojourn in the Modern Art collection, and examples by Martin Kippenberger, Georg Baselitz, Thomas Struth, Daniel Richter and Corinne Wasmuht await discovery in the collection of Contemporary Art. The Department of Prints and Drawings presents opera magna by Adam Elsheimer, Edgar Degas, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann and Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn side by side with Städel treasures. The thematic pairs and groups thus formed – numbering forty in all – are being displayed on specially designed coloured pedestals serving not only to explain the ensuing dialogues but also to give them special prominence within the collection presentations.

Dialogues in the Old Masters Collection
In the Old Masters gallery, for instance, the Annunciation (ca. 1434/36) by Jan van Eyck (1390–1441) from the National Gallery of Art in Washington encounters the same artist’s Lucca Madonna (1437) from the Städel. The two paintings are among the most beautiful and, in terms of content, most complex Marian images by the most well-known Early Netherlandish artist. Works distinguished by their stunning realism of detail and elaborate spatial and temporal structures, they are still admired for their exquisite artistic rendering today, nearly six hundred years after their execution. Until 1850, both belonged to the splendid Old Masters collection of King William II of the Netherlands; now they are on view side by side for the first time again in 165 years. Two portraits of women, one of the fifteenth and one of the nineteenth century, come together in no less spectacular a meeting: Sandro Botticelli’s (1445–1510) Idealized Portrait of a Lady (Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci as a Nymph) of ca. 1480/85 from the Städel and Fazio’s Mistress (Aurelia) (1863) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) from the London Tate form companion pieces. Not only is one of the most famous works from each of these museums’ collections thus be united, but the direct comparison sheds light on astonishing similarities despite the temporal distance of nearly four centuries. The complex manner in which the painting by the Pre-Raphaelite Rossetti reflects on Botticelli’s Simonetta, compositionally speaking, has hitherto gone unrecognized and now becomes strikingly evident in the joint display. Both paintings bear a relation to a literary and artistic discourse on the ideal image of female beauty that was revived by the Pre-Raphaelites in the context of studying the works of their Italian idols.

Dialogues in the Modern Art Collection
Hardly any of the Städel Museum’s paintings is as well-known to the public as Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein’s (1751–1829) portrait of Goethe in the Roman Campagna of 1787. Surrounded by testimonies to antiquity, the “prince of poets”, wrapped in a travelling cloak, reposes contemplatively in an ideal Arcadian landscape. On the occasion of the show, this centrepiece of the Frankfurt collection is being presented along with several preliminary studies. What is more, works making reference to the painting once again bear witness to the popularity of the iconic, world-famous portrait of Goethe. Tischbein began the portrait in 1786, when Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was sharing living quarters with him and other artists in Rome during his travels in Italy. In later depictions the painting was quoted again and again – now reverently, now tongue-in-cheek – for example in a proposal by Adolf von Donndorf (1835–1916) for the Goethe monument in Berlin and in Andy Warhol’s (1928–1987) silkscreen of 1982, which has been in the Städel collection since 2000.

Three closely interrelated works by the Expressionist artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938), Max Pechstein (1881–1955) and Erich Heckel (1883–1970) also have been assembled in the Modern Art gallery. The three bathing scenes were presumably executed in 1910 during a joint excursion to the Moritzburg Ponds near Dresden. Painted in a synchronous working process, they represent a kind of contest among equals in which each of the painters had a chance to measure his own potential against that of his colleagues. Kirchner’s version, later reworked, is on a canvas painted on both sides and was only discovered in 2010. Within the framework of the exhibition, the works are being shown together for the first time, thus offering a unique opportunity for what promises to be a suspenseful comparison between the protagonists of the Brücke group.

Dialogues in the Collection of Contemporary Art
By assembling the works Sex with Dumplings (1963) and Big Night Down the Drain (1962/63) (loans from private collections) with the painting Field (1962) from the Städel Museum holdings, the exhibition presents the early work of the painter Georg Baselitz (b. 1938) as an important window on the history of West German painting of the twentieth century. The three works shown within the framework of the “Masterworks in Dialogue” were all featured in Baselitz’s first solo exhibition in 1963. Owing to their radical painterly qualities they sparked a scandal that would prove legendary. The debate even took on a political dimension: works such as Big Night Down the Drain (1962/63) were confiscated. The ideological controversy over abstract versus representational painting in the young Federal German Republic culminated in Baselitz’s provocative compositions in which carnality took centre stage – both formally and with regard to content – and the sensitivities of the German postwar period seemed mirrored. A striking encounter with Georg Baselitz’s epochmaking early phase will here be made possible.

Another group of works on view in the Contemporary Art collection in the Städel’s anniversary year address the topic of the museum as an institution. From the perspective of the photographer Thomas Struth (b. 1954), the museum is not just a place for the preservation of art but also one in which art is created. On the occasion of the bicentennial exhibition, the photo Louvre 3, Paris 1989 (1989) from the Städel holdings has been joined by five further works (loans from the Atelier Thomas Struth) from his Museum Photographs series photographed in the National Gallery in London, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the Art Institute of Chicago. The series focusses on the visitors’ behaviour and their relationship to the art on exhibit. The spectrum of scenes ranges from the indifferent attitudes of tourist groups to the meditative immersion of an individual art viewer seen, for example in Kunsthistorisches Museum 3, Vienna of 1989. The juxtaposition makes the works’ serial character particularly evident.

Dialogues in the Department of Prints and Drawings
In the gallery of the Department of Prints and Drawings, the exhibition brings together a number of outstanding drawings, paintings and prints. Among the encounters, for example, are two works by Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617), an engraver and draughtsman highly admired in the late sixteenth century – works that testify to the astounding development in Goltzius’s mastery of the drawing technique within just a few years. The virtuoso Portrait of Gillis van Breen drawn by Goltzius in coloured chalk in 1588 was already in the collection of the museum’s founder Johann Friedrich Städel. The Portrait of Giambologna from the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, executed three years later, provides evidence of the amazingly painterly effect Goltzius was capable of achieving with the sparsest of means.

Two graphic works by the exceptional artist Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) likewise enter into dialogue. The artist made reference to his eventful and productive life with depictions of his alter ego: the Minotaur, which he staged in drawings and prints. He was captivated not so much by the myth as by the figure’s masculine creatureliness, which he conveyed now as brutish, libidinous, and powerful, now as tender and needy. The two prints from the Suite Vollard on view at the Städel offer a superb illustration of the dichotomy between strength and weakness in Picasso’s Minotaur. In the Minotaur Caressing a Sleeping Woman of the year 1933, on loan from a private collection, the beast kneels before a peacefully slumbering female figure, bending his muscular body over her. The threatening look of the bull’s head contrasts with the disconcertingly gentle gesture with which he touches the woman’s hand. This work has been placed on display with the Blind Minotaur Being Led through the Night by a Young Girl (1934), a print from the Städel collection which, from the point of view of technique, is one of the artist’s most ambitious prints. Reminiscent of a theatre stage, the composition is borne by the contrast between light and dark.