Städel Museum
13 May to 16 August 2020
With the bequest of his private art collection, the
businessman and banker Johann Friedrich Städel (1728–1816) founded a public art
museum of international stature, accessible to all – the Städel Museum. The collector
left behind an art treasure encompassing not only paintings and prints but also more
than 4,600 drawings. For a long time, it was not possible to determine which of the
drawings in the museum’s present-day holdings were originally in his collection. At
the time of the bequest, no complete inventory was compiled. Furthermore, in the
course the collection’s reorganization in the 1860s, many drawings were sorted out
and sold. For the first time, the Städel Museum has now succeeded in reconstructing
the founder’s drawing collection to a large extent, and identifying the roughly 3,000
works still in the collection today. From 13 May to 16 August 2020, the Städel
Museum is presenting a selection of 95 master drawings providing a representative
impression of the character, organization and artistic significance of the former
drawing collection of Johann Friedrich Städel. Following the founder’s tradition, the
outstanding works by Raphael, Correggio and Primaticcio, Watteau, Boucher and
Fragonard, Dürer, Roos and Reinhart, Goltzius, Rembrandt, De Wit and many others
are here arranged according to “European schools”. They are moreover discussed in
detail in an accompanying catalogue. A portion of these drawings are already known
among scholars; others are here being published for the first time.
Master Drawings from the Collection
The exhibition showcases Städel’s drawing collection with a representative selection
of 95 master drawings that have remained in the Städel Museum holdings to this day.
The founding collection was distinguished by an uncommonly broad spectrum: it
mirrored both regional idiosyncrasies and influential artistic figures, shed light on
stylistic differences in historical succession and moreover encompassed an
abundance of different drawing mediums, each with its own particular purpose.
The Italian drawings, originally numbering 1,300, ranged from the Florentine masters
of the late fifteenth century and exponents of the High Renaissance to those of the
founder’s own lifetime. Among the great Italian Renaissance artists in Städel’s
collection was Raphael (1483–1520), originally represented by 24 works attributed to
him. One of those works is the Caryatid of 1519/20 – the last years of the artist’s life –
in which he gently ‘modelled’ a marble sculpture in black chalk. An example of an
Italian work by a contemporary of Städel’s is Design for stage set with Indian temple,
executed by Giorgio Fuentes (1756–1821) around 1796/1800. In those years,
Fuentes exerted a formative and lasting influence on the theatre of the city of
Frankfurt with his overwhelmingly large and richly detailed stage sceneries. It is not
known what play this design was for, but the fancifully exotic details of the
architecture suggest a sacred structure in India.
The collection of French drawings comprised some 450 works. The earliest, dating
from the beginning of the seventeenth century, were by such influential artists as
Claude Lorrain (1600–1682) and Sébastien Bourdon (1616–1671). Examples by chief
exponents of the eighteenth century, among them Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659–1743),
Antoine Watteau (1683–1721) and François Boucher (1703–1770) provided an
overview of the stylistic upheavals of that period. Here playful Rococo creations by
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) contrasted with drawings distinguished byclassicist clarity. The scene Travelers Find Two Bodies in an Egyptian Burial
Chamber by Augustin Félix Fortin (1763–1832) testifies to the fact that rigorous form
does not have to go hand in hand with lack of drama. It was a contemporary of
Städel’s who rounded out the French school as well: thanks to the substantial number
of drawings by Jean-Jacques de Boissieu (1736–1810), landscape depiction took on
especial prominence among the holdings in this medium – possibly owing to a
personal preference on the part of the collector.
German art in the drawing collection spans the period from 1500 to the
Enlightenment. Two eighteenth-century artists were particularly well represented. The
holdings comprised 950 drawings by Franz Kobell (1749–1822) and Friedrich
Wilhelm Hirt (1721–1772) alone – not only small-scale sketches but also composition
designs and drawings so fully developed as to rank as artworks in their own right.
The share accounted for by other German artists did not even number 300. Among
them, however, were masters such as Hans Baldung Grien (1484–1545) and
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). The unconventional Man with lion, carried out by Dürerin 1517, shows a seated nude man with a lion approaching him from the right. Both
protagonists are clearly sizing each other up; the scene’s meaning, however, remains
a mystery. The view that Dürer was among the most ‘collection-worthy’ German
artists was uncontested by Städel’s contemporaries. Even if Städel himself did not
have a painting by Dürer to call his own, by means of print and drawing purchases he
succeeded in bringing together various phases of the artist’s oeuvre in his collection.
With 1,500 drawings, the Dutch/Flemish school accounted for about one third of the
collection; approximately half of that number were verifiably sold in the 1860s. This
section covered the period from the sixteenth century to Städel’s own time, while also
encompassing all genres, with landscapes making up the largest share.
Accomplished studies such as Four Studies of a Right Hand, by Hendrick Goltzius
(1558–1617) are an impressive demonstration of the special qualities of drawing, not
least of all because they reveal the processual character of artistic creation. Once
again, recognized masters and their workshops are represented, first and foremost
Rembrandt (1606–1669) – for example with Seated Old Man (The Drunken Lot) of
1633 – and his successors as well as Jacob de Wit (1695–1754) and the van de
Velde family.
