Starting in March, the Städel Museum is devoting the major exhibition EN PASSANT.  Impressionism in Sculpture to the question of what it means in concrete terms to translate the qualities of Impressionist painting such as light, colour, mood, movement – even transience – into solid materials. The presentation focuses on five artists: Edgar Degas, Auguste Rodin, Medardo Rosso, Paolo Troubetzkoy and Rembrandt Bugatti. With more than 160 works, the exhibition provides a comprehensive overview of the possibilities and challenges of Impressionism in sculpture.

As of 2 April 2020, almost a decade after the opening of the Garden Halls, the Collection of Contemporary Art in the Städel Museum is being presented in a new way for the first time. Starting from the central space of the Garden Halls and beginning with major works by the younger and youngest generation of contemporary artists, a history of art after 1945 will be unfolded. Works from various schools, styles and groups facilitate surprising comparisons, perspectives and visual axes between the immediate present and its roots in past decades – an experience of the collection based not on chronology but rather on specific themes. In total, the new presentation comprises roughly 250 works by 170 artists on nearly 3,000 square metres of exhibition space. The presentation includes recent acquisitions and donations, such as works by Victor Vasarely and Miriam Cahn. Most of them were acquired for the Collection of Contemporary Art by the Städelkomitee 21. Jahrhundert in 2007.


The vast collection and newest scholarly research of the Städel Museum’s department for prints and drawings will be showcased in two exhibitions in 2020. In the exhibition Städel’s Legacy, a selection of ninety-five master drawings by Raphael, Correggio and Primaticcio, Watteau, Boucher and Fragonard, Dürer, Roos and Reinhart, as well as Goltzius, Rembrandt and De Wit are put together. This will give an exemplary impression of the character, order and artistic significance of the former drawing collection of Johann Friedrich Städel.
In autumn, Dutch Drawings of the Eighteenth Century (working title) will take over and will accentuate a flourishing production of art in the century of the Enlightenment, particularly in centres such as Amsterdam, Haarlem, The Hague and Dordrecht. There, in addition to paintings and prints, drawings were produced on a large scale and at a high level. Johann Friedrich Städel was also a collector of those drawings. With these, he acquired works of his present or recent past and thus at the same time an art that corresponded particularly to the bourgeois taste of the time.

At the end of the year, the Städel Museum, together with the National Gallery of Canada, will for the first time address Rembrandt’s rise to international fame in Amsterdam in the comprehensive exhibition Becoming Rembrandt: Creativity and Competition in Amsterdam, ca. 1630-1655. The presentation combines the Städel’s collection of works by Rembrandt, including “The Blinding of Samson” (1636), with outstanding loans from international collections, including the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden, the National Gallery in London, the Museo del Prado in Madrid and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

The full list of exhibitions runs as follows:

EN PASSANT. Impressionism in Sculpture
19 March to 28 June 2020

Back to the Present: New Perspectives, New Works – The Collection from 1945 to Today
New presentation of the Collection of Contemporary Art as of 2 April 2020

Städel’s Legacy: Master Drawings from the Founder’s Collection
13 May to 16 August 2020 (dates may vary)

Dutch Drawings of the Eighteenth Century (working title)
1 October 2020 to 10 January 2021

Becoming Rembrandt: Creativity and Competition in Amsterdam, ca. 1630 – 1655
9 December 2020 to 5 April 2021

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