EminEnt GuEsts for thE AnnivErsAry

Masterworks
in Dialogue
EminEnt GuEsts for thE AnnivErsAry
Edited by Max Hollein
With contributions by Jana Baumann, Bastian Eclercy, Martin Engler, Anna Helfer, Felicity Korn, Felix Krämer,
Kristina Lemke, Eva Mongi-Vollmer, Maureen Ogrocki, Susanne Pollack, Almut Pollmer-Schmidt, Annabel
Ruckdeschel, Jochen Sander, Jutta Schütt, Martin Sonnabend, Fabian Wolf, and Daniel Zamani
wiEnAnd
Contents
8 Prefaces
Max Hollein
10 Foreword
Eva Mongi-Vollmer
12 “… for it strives to be merely a house, and not a fortress of art.”
200 YEARS OF ARt in tHE StäDEL MUSEUM
20 Old Masters
Jochen Sander – The Städel Museum’s Old Masters Collection
Rhenish Master, ca. 1330 | Upper Rhenish Master, ca. 1410 / 20 | Jan van Eyck | Fra Angelico | Sandro Botticelli |
Pietro Perugino | Mathis Gothart nithart, called Grünewald | Quentin Massys | Guercino | Rembrandt Harmensz.
van Rijn | nicolas Poussin | Johannes Vermeer | Ferdinand van Kessel | Justus Juncker
84 Modern Art
Felix Krämer – The Modern Era in the Städel Museum
Johann Heinrich Wilhelm tischbein | Arnold Böcklin | Edgar Degas | Max Liebermann | Vilhelm Hammershøi |
Pablo Picasso | Franz Marc | Ernst Ludwig Kirchner | Max Beckmann | Otto Dix
152 Contemporary Art
Martin Engler – Contemporary Art in the Städel Museum
Georg Baselitz | thomas Struth | Dierk Schmidt | Daniel Richter | Corinne Wasmuht
210 Prints and Drawings
Jutta Schütt and Martin Sonnabend – The Städel Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings
Master E. S. | Paolo Caliari, called Veronese | Hendrick Goltzius | Adam Elsheimer | Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn |
Carl Philipp Fohr | François Bonvin | Edgar Degas | Ernst Ludwig Kirchner | Pablo Picasso | Richard Serra
262 Appendix
CORPORAtE SPOnSOR
MEDiA PARtnERS
FUnDinG FROM
Bibliography
Photo Credits
Colophon
Eva Mongi-Vollmer
“… for it strives to be merely a house,
and not a fortress of art.” 1
200 YEARS OF ART IN THE STÄDEL MUSEUM
T
he Frankfurt artist Johann Friedrich Hof could not yet identify with the “fortress
of art” quoted in the title, as can be discerned from his memoirs published in 1914:
“From a very early age, as a result of the traditions passed on to me by my father, the
Städelsches Kunstinstitut was always a sacred place.” 2 Hof was still obviously very much under the spell of the
nineteenth century, when art and museums had become a sacred hub of society. Only ten years after Hof’s
account, the tenor had shifted considerably. Museums should no longer be grand, majestic or overwhelming.
On the contrary, as the journalist Lilli Fischel noted on the opening of the new garden wing, “the” Städel – as the
museum was often called until the Second World War – should be “merely a house” and not a fortress. It is presumably no coincidence that, only a few years after the end of the First World War, she thought in categories of
defence architecture. When, approximately 100 years earlier, the patron Johann Friedrich Städel laid the foundations for the museum and educational institution with the inal version of his testament dated 15 March, 1815, he
did not envision the donation of his collection within the context of a solemn presentation in a temple or the capturing of a fortress. Far more important for him were the “embellishment” of the city of Frankfurt and the beneits
of art: “Since it is my intention that the Städelsches Kunstinstitut […] should provide the city with true adornment
and, at the same time, be of beneit to its citizens; I thus stipulate […] that my collection […] be made available […] to
aspiring artists and enthusiasts on certain days and hours under due supervision for the purpose of practical exercises and display.” 3 Städel’s thoughts were irmly anchored in the ideas of the Enlightenment, in which the involvement with art was propagated as an integral component of the general education and training of the people.4
These examples shed light on one and the same phenomenon: From the very beginning, art museums
have not been merely places to encounter selected works of art, but rather should always also serve as projec-
1
Fischel 1924, p. 18.
2 Hof 1914, p. 1.
3 Deed of Foundation, 1817, p. 5.
4 Mai 1993, p. 63; Sheehan 2002, p. 15
(with a view towards this era, he speaks
here of the social goals of the museums);
Gaehtgens 2015.
12
fig. 1: Johann Friedrich Städel’s house
(centre) on Rossmarkt in Frankfurt,
ca. 1870
200 Years of Art in the Städel Museum
13
Fra Angelico
Vicchio before 1399–1455 Rome
40
MADONNA AND CHILD ENTHRONED, SURROUNDED BY TWELVE ANGELS
ca. 1425/30
Mixed technique on poplar, 37.5 x 29.7 cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, inv. no. 838, acquired in 1831
Fra Angelico
Vicchio before 1399–1455 Rome
MADONNA AND CHILD WITH ANGELS AND SAINTS DOMINIC AND CATHERINE
ca. 1430/35
Mixed technique on poplar, 24.4 x 18.7 cm
Vatican Museums, Rome, inv. no. 40253, acquired in 1877
Old Masters
41
Quentin Massys
Leuven 1465/66 – 1530 Antwerp
56
PORtRAit OF A SCHOLAR
ca. 1525/30
Mixed technique on oak, 68.8 x 53.3 cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, inv. no. 766, acquired in 1829
Willem van Haecht
Antwerp 1593 – 1637 Antwerp (?)
APELLES PAintinG CAMPASPE
ca. 1630
Oil on wood, 104.9 x 148.7 cm
Mauritshuis, the Hague, inv. no. 266, acquired in 1822
Old Masters
57
Pablo Picasso
Fernande Olivier, Horta de Ebro,
and the triumph of Cubism
20
In 1967, the Städelscher Museums-Verein acquired
Pablo Picasso’s Portrait of Fernande Olivier, 1909.
In the context of the 150th anniversary of the institution, the holdings of the Städel Museum were thus enriched with a key work of
early Analytic Cubism. The purchase of this painting for a substantial amount was in
keeping with the acquisition policy of the then director Ernst Holzinger, which aimed
strategically at illing gaps in the collection with regard to the historic progression of
the Classical Modern period.1
Amélie Lang, who is better known under her artist’s name Fernande Olivier
(ig. 42), had met Picasso as early as 1904. Shortly after their chance encounter on rue
Ravignan in the Paris district of Montmartre, the exotic beauty moved into Picasso’s
studio in the so-called Bateau-Lavoir. Through 1912, the two remained in a stable
relationship, the often turbulent daily life of which Fernande recorded in her later
memoirs.2 Numerous portraits created by Picasso during this period bear witness to
Fernande’s key role as the irst muse of the Spanish artist. In the period between the
spring and fall of 1909 alone, Picasso had completed more than 60 portraits of his
122
lover and thus demonstrated a unique focus on one single model, hitherto unknown
within the art of the Modern Era.3
The Frankfurt portrait belongs to a group of over 20 oil paintings that were created during a four-month sojourn in Horta de Ebro in southern Spain. In the summer
of 1909, Picasso and Fernande withdrew together to the picturesque hilltop village,
located in the barren, rocky landscape of the Catalonian Terra Alta. Here, far away
from the stress and noise of the French metropolis, Picasso was able to concentrate
fully on his artistic production. At the same time, the view of the impressive Muntanya de Santa Bàrbara with its rough and angular limestone crags and barren rock
ledges provided an ideal source of inspiration for his experiments with the then new
artistic movement known as Cubism. On 10 July, the painter wrote enthusiastically
to his collectors, Leo Stein and his sister Gertrude: “The landscape is wonderful here.
I love it, and the route which leads here exactly resembles the overland route in the
Wild West.” 4
One of the landscape paintings executed by Picasso during this time is known
under the title The Reservoir (ig. 40) and is generally considered a stylistic and formal
precursor work of his Portrait of Fernande Olivier. In terms of both its colouration and
composition, the work is clearly inspired by Paul Cézanne’s numerous depictions of
Mont Sainte-Victoire, which greatly inluenced the typically Cubist breakdown of
pictorial space into largely autonomous surface shapes (ig. 41). Through the dissection of the mountain face into individual, highly abstracted, geometric facets and their
systematic interweaving, Picasso circumvents the traditional division of the composition into background, middle ground, and foreground. At the same time, the fragmentation of the subject depicted also allows an optical merging of the rough rocky
landscape with the architecture of the village integrated into the mountain.
Immediately after Picasso’s return to Paris, The Reservoir was acquired – together
with two additional landscapes also created in Horta de Ebro – by the author Gertrude Stein, who was among the artist’s most important early patrons, as well as a
close conidante. In her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, published in 1933, the American-born writer emphasised the optical nexus between landscape and architectural
forms and described the summer months in Horta de Ebro as the birth of Cubism,
which she preferred to understand as a thoroughly Spanish art movement: “That
summer they [Picasso und Fernande] went again to Spain and he came back with
some spanish landscapes and one may say that these […] were the beginning of cubism. […] There was very evidently a strong Cézanne inluence […]. But the essential
thing, the treatment of the houses was essentially spanish and therefore essentially
Picasso. In these pictures he irst emphasised the way of building in spanish villages,
the line of the houses not following the landscape but cutting across and into the
landscape, becoming indistinguishable in the landscape […].” 5
In Portrait of Fernande Olivier, Picasso links the angular structure of the mountain
with a highly abstracted visual rendering of his lover. Even more strongly than in
The Reservoir, the painter blurs the distinctions between the individual layers of the
image by means of a simultaneous perspective and the dissolution of the compact
form of the face into rectangular and diamond-shaped surface elements. Fernande’s
head emerges in a virtually sculptural manner out of the rock landscape; the stony
face seems as though it has been carved out of the mountain. As the art historian
Christopher Green has stated, this compositionally reined interlinking of landscape
and portrait is less a matter of a metaphorical “humanisation” of the Muntanya de
Sante Bàrbara than it is of a visual petrifaction of Fernande. Decidedly masklike and
deprived of any individuality, the portrayal becomes symbolically associated with the
“inorganic, inhuman strength and resilience of the mountain”.6
Considering the extremely haptic composition of space and surfaces in this
painterly analysis of Fernande’s portrait, it is hardly surprising that, shortly afterward,
Picasso would take this work as the formal starting point for his irst Cubist sculpture.
Immediately following his return from Horta de Ebro, he made a model of Fernande’s
head and created two plaster casts, which became the basis for numerous subsequent
versions in bronze. Here, elements such as the diamond-shaped, extremely deep-set
eyes, as well as the slight incline of the head and the fanning out of
the hair into scale-like forms, are maintained. The artistic transfer
between the lat painting support and three-dimensional modelling
is thus surprisingly direct and the dialogue between painting and
sculpture is noticeably close. The mask-like character already present
in the painting is emphasised even more, while the dark, shiny patina
further increases the sculpture’s aesthetic appeal.
This deformation of the human body so characteristic for Cubism is also relected in the thematically related composition Seated
Nude, 1910/11, in which Picasso continues and radicalises the formal
innovations of the portraits created in Horta. The still recognisable
formation of the background as a schematic mountain landscape in
his Portrait of Fernande Olivier now gives way to a completely abstract
background, while the mask-like face of Fernande is replaced by a
seemingly mechanical, crystalline body structure. The interweaving
of the pictorial layers is also more advanced: As a result of his use
of the so-called “passage technique”, body parts, such as the right
ig. 40: Pablo Picasso, The Reservoir, Horta de Ebro, 1909, the Museum of Modern Art,
new York
ig. 41 : Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, ca. 1885, the Barnes
Foundation, Philadelphia
shoulder area and the upper left arm, appear to merge almost seamlessly into the
background. Only barely legibly does the igure comprised of fragmented, angular
individual facets emerge out of the chromatically reduced space, which is dominated
by cold tones of brown, grey, blue, and black. The realistic depiction of the human
body, from which Picasso has already distanced himself in the Frankfurt painting,
gives way here completely to the triumph of an internal Cubist pictorial logic. From
an art historical perspective, Cubism is often seen as being the most important
avant-garde movement of the twentieth century. Like no other movement before,
it liberated the depiction of reality from the dictates of objectivity. Starting with an
initially reluctant schematisation of the object by means of geometric facets, Picasso’s
painterly approach became more and more radical: The artist not only consciously
emphasised the anatomy of the form itself, but, at the same time, also increasingly
propagated the inherent features of the work of art, in which natural objects should
be depicted from several perspectives simultaneously and presented to the viewer as
though they had been dissected analytically. In his groundbreaking treatise The Path to
Cubism (1920), Picasso’s dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler wrote: “This new language
has given painting an unprecedented freedom. It is no longer bound to the more or
less verisimilar optic image, which describes the object from one single viewpoint. It
can, in order to give a thorough representation of the object’s primary characteristics,
depict them as stereometric drawing on the plane, or, through several representa-
Modern Art 123
Max Pechstein
Zwickau 1881 – 1955 Berlin
138
FORESt SCEnE
ca. 1909
Oil on canvas, 68 x 79.5 cm
Private Collection
Erich Heckel
Döbeln 1883 – 1970 Radolfzell on Lake Constance
GROUP OUtDOORS
ca. 1909
Oil on canvas, 80 x 94 cm
Merzbacher Kunststiftung
Modern Art 139
Thomas Struth
Born 1954 in Geldern
176
ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO 1, CHICAGO 1990
1990
Colour photograph, 129 x 161.5 cm
Studio Thomas Struth
Thomas Struth
Born 1954 in Geldern
ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO 2, CHICAGO 1990
1990
Colour photograph, 138 x 175 cm
Studio Thomas Struth
Contemporary Art 177
Pablo Picasso
Málaga 1881 – 1973 Mougins
256
MinotAURE CARESSAnt UnE DoRMEUSE
MinotAUR CARESSing A SlEEPing WoMAn
1933
Drypoint on ribbed laid paper, 299 x 365 mm / 339 x 450 mm
Private Collection
Pablo Picasso
Málaga 1881 – 1973 Mougins
MinotAURE AVEUglE gUiDÉ PAR UnE FillEttE DAnS lA nUit
BlinD MinotAUR lED BY A YoUng giRl in tHE nigHt
1934
Aquatint, drypoint, etching needle on ribbed laid paper, 247 x 348 mm / 336 x 441 mm
Städel Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, Frankfurt am Main, inv. no. Sg 4175, acquired in 1980
Prints and Drawings 257
Alte Meister 279