Städel Exhibit

On Friday my friend Regina and I spontaneously planned a visit to the Städel. They had an exhibit on called Dialog der Meisterwerke (Masterworks in Dialogue) which closes next weekend. It was an interesting exhibit, unlike any I have been to. Instead of having the exhibit in its own space, it was spread throughout the entire museum. In most rooms, there was an extra painting or two brought in to connect with a piece from their permanent collection. They had sourced works that connected by artist, theme or subject. We had an audio guide that explained the connection and what can be learned from viewing them together.

Here are some of the paintings that they had in the exhibit:

van Eyck's Annunciation and the Lucca Madonna, the second belonging to the Städel.
Photos from the internet. 

We started in the Old Masters gallery. They had paintings from Rembrandt, Gentileschi, Botticelli, to name a few famous artists. One interesting piece was a winged altar. The wings both are part of the Städel's collection, but the centre had come from two different galleries to finally have it complete and on exhibit again.

The next level was modern art. Not to be confused with contemporary, this is from the impressionists to Picasso. Here they had a series of three Degas paintings. Here are two of them, the first from the Musee D'Orsay and the second from the Städel.

The one on the right is an earlier painting, and you can see that it focuses more on the musicians. In the second one, Degas originally made it the same, before adding more canvas to the top in order to finish the dancers.
Photos from the internet. 

Also on this floor were some Max Beckmann paintings of Frankfurt from the 1920s. I was really taken with this one below, as it is a scene that I am very familiar with. The church in the background is the Dreikönigskirche, and is less than a ten minute walk from my house. The bridge is the Eisernersteg, a pedestrian bridge across the Main which has become a popular place for people to leave locks.

Photo taken by me, before I realized we weren't suppose to take photos ...

The last floor was the contemporary art. While I have more appreciation for that than I used to, I still am not a big fan. Some of the exhibit paintings were a bit disturbing, so much that Regina and I just looked at each other and walked away. The one set I found interesting were actually photographs. They were photos of famous paintings, but of people in museums looking at them. One of them happened to be people looking at my favourite painting, The Coronation of Napoleon in the Louvre.