Frankfurt am Main: Dark Romanticism. From Goya to Max Ernst

PRESS RELEASE

The Exhibition Annex of Frankfurt's Städel Museum is presently bustling with preparations and conversion measures for the major autumn show Dark Romanticism. From Goya to Max Ernst scheduled for display from September 26, 2012 to January 20, 2013. This will be the first exhibition in Germany to investigate the dark side of the Romanticist movement and its persistence in Symbolism and Surrealism. Featuring more than two hundred paintings, sculptures, graphic works, photographs, and films by more than seventy artists, the thematic presentation will explore the fascination of numerous artists with the realm of the unfathomable, mysterious, and evil.

Frequently closely relating to literature, this "dark side" has found its expression in art in manifold ways. The range of selected works spans from artists like Francisco de Goya, Henry Fuseli, and William Blake to Caspar David Friedrich and Carl Blechen as well as Théodore Géricault, Eugène Delacroix, and Victor Hugo. The exhibition equally encompasses works by Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Arnold Böcklin, Franz von Stuck, and Max Klinger, but also by Edvard Munch, René Magritte, Hans Bellmer, Salvador Dalí, and Max Ernst.

The complex loan negotiations have been concluded in the meantime; seven paintings by Goya and Fuseli each could be secured for the show. Essential loans come from internationally renowned collections like the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Musée du Louvre, London's Royal Academy, the Museo del Prado in Madrid, and the Art Institute of Chicago. The works to be presented tell of loneliness and melancholy, passion and death, the sublime of nature and the irrational of dreams. The socially excluded - criminals and lunatics, beggars and prostitutes - are elevated to new heroes who offer insights into abysses of the human condition.

Based on the holdings of the Städel Museum, which - with works by Goya, Delacroix, Franz von Stuck, or Max Ernst - comprise key contributions to the subject, Dark Romanticism. From Goya to Max Ernst continues in the Städel's tradition of major thematic exhibitions. By taking a geographically and temporally comprehensive approach that sheds light on the relationship between various Romanticist centers and retraces complex iconographic developments, the show is aimed at stimulating interest in the dark aspects of Romanticism and at fostering an extended understanding of the movement.

Accompanied by a substantial catalog, the exhibition project presents the Romantic as a recurring attitude which seized all of Europe and continued far beyond the nineteenth century. In collaboration with the Deutsches Filmmuseum, the Städel will also integrate excerpts from such film classics as Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's Nosferatu or James Whale's Frankenstein into the exhibition.

The exhibition is a cornerstone of the major cooperative project Impuls Romantik initiated and funded by the Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain. From 2012 to 2014, the Kulturfonds focuses on Romanticism as its special subject, drawing on the many extraordinary artists living and working in the region. With Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the Brothers Grimm as well as artists like Moritz von Schwind or Victor Müller, the cultural region Frankfurt Rhein-Main has made an essential contribution to the movement.

Curator: Dr. Felix Krämer, Head of the Städel Museum's Department of Modern Art.

Catalog: A comprehensive catalog edited by Felix Krämer will be published by Hatje Cantz to accompany the exhibition. With contributions by Roland Borgards, Ingo Borges, Claudia Dillmann, Dorothee Gerkens, Johannes Grave, Mareike Hennig, Hubertus Kohle, Felix Krämer, Franziska Lentzsch, Manuela B. Mena Marqués, and Nerina Santorius. German, ca. 305 pages, 34,90 €.

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