Being Human: From Pollock to Bourgeois
After more than twenty-five years, the Städel Museum is once again dedicating an exhibition to American art on paper from 1945 to the present. Some fifty outstanding prints, drawings, and multiples by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Chuck Close, Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Bruce Nauman, Jackson Pollock, Larry Rivers, Kiki Smith, or Kara Walker will be presented, all of which deal with the theme of being human.
Welcome!
The Städel Museum is open. The official burden of proof and mask requirements are no longer necessary for your visit.
Tickets are available in our online shop and at the ticket counter.
American art of the past eighty years is full of boundary crossings and contradictions. It is as unconventional as it is multifaceted: Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Concept Art, Minimal and Performance Art. In a relatively short period of time after 1945, various and at times contradictory aesthetic concepts developed in New York and (later) on the West Coast. Artists chose their media and materials freely and strategically – depending on the message they wanted to convey. Printmaking played a key role in this context. As a laboratory for experimentation in form and content alike, it offered artists new possibilities. From the 1960s onward, this went hand in hand with the founding of new printing and paper workshops. Artists collaborated closely with these workshops to produce technically sophisticated prints and objects (multiples), often in self-confidently large formats. This printmaking revolution went down in art history as the ‘Graphic Boom’.
Under the influence of ever-new political, economic, and societal upheavals and crises, many of the works revolve around human existence itself. Naturalistic depictions of the human figure now give way to the sign-like and abstract, the incomplete, the imprint, the blank space. Artists reflect on human perception and experience as fragmentary and question language as an instrument for describing the world.
Curator: Dr. Regina Freyberger (Head of Prints and Drawings after 1750, Städel Museum)
Picture: Kiki Smith, Untitled (Hair), 1990, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, © Kiki Smith & Universal Limited Art Editions, courtesy Pace Gallery
“From the late 1940s onwards, American art provided important impulses for the Western art world. Printmaking, with its great experimental potential, was particularly decisive here. The exhibition traces this creative impulse.”
Curator Regina Freyberger, Head of the Department of Prints and Drawings from 1750, Städel Museum
Figure, 1948
Enamel paint on handmade paper, 785 × 575 mm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, property of Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V.
© Pollock-Krasner Foundation / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021, Photo: U. Edelmann
Letter, 1953
Etching, aquatint, roulette, and some drypoint on wove paper, 242 × 312 mm (sheet), 125 × 176 mm (plate), Ex. 1/20
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
© 2022 Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts
Self-Portrait, 1999
Relief print on laser-cut acrylic plate on Japanese paper, 999 × 754 mm (sheet), 975 × 750 mm (plate), No. 7/99
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
© Chuck Close, courtesy Pace Gallery
Eliza, 1968
Pencil and neon foil on wove paper, partially mounted on wood or metal foil, on cardboard, on wood, beneath transparent plastic, 390 × 501 × 60 mm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Property of the Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V.
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022
Silhouette Black Boots on Brown Paper, 1972
Lithograph on packing paper, 761 × 558 mm (sheet), No. 93/100
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022
no world, from "An Unpeopled Land in Uncharted Waters", 2010
Etching with aquatint, sugar-lift technique, spit bite, and drypoint on wove paper, 768 × 1007 mm (sheet), 606 × 905 mm (plate), Ex. 28/30
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Property of the Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V.
© Kara Walker
“The Städel Museum has been collecting contemporary American art on paper since the 1960s. After more than twenty-five years, we are once again taking a look at this outstanding collection and also presenting recent acquisitions.”
Philipp Demandt, Director, Städel Museum
Thursday, 14 July, 7.00 pm
English is your native tongue and you’d like to talk to others about art in that language? Or you’re a non-native speaker and would be interested in building on your knowledge of English outside your professional environment? With Art Talks, we are offering a program of guided tours providing a relaxed atmosphere in which the fine arts will inspire you to perfect your English. The prerequisite is good command of English; specialized knowledge is not required.
Costs: 16 Euro (includes entrance fee)
Tickets: Available from June at our online shop
Tours are available in English, German, French, Italian, Russian, Dutch and Japanese. Please contact us to arrange your group visit even if you do not wish to book a guided tour.
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+49(0)69-605098-200
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The expansion of the collection of American prints at the Städel Museum is supported by the Heinz and Gisela Friederichs Foundation.
The exhibition catalogue is supported by the Georg und Franziska Speyer’sche Hochschulstiftung.