exhibition file

100 masterpieces from the Städel Museum in Frankfurt impressionism • expressionism • avant-garde

The appeal of the Städel Institute lies in the tremendous energy filling that confined space. Virtually all of the great emotions that have lived in the souls of the peoples of Europe are there, and all in superb works. Alfred Lichtwark

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, After the Luncheon, 1879, Städel Museum, Frankfurt

• how to use this file

• the Städel Museum in Frankfurt

• work modules impressionism expressionism cubism abstract art surrealism

• suggestions for further reading from the Art Bookshelf

• websites how to use the file instructions for using this file This file is designed for anyone interested in finding things out a resource for teachers, parents and professionals and in experimenting with things. The exhibition of “100 masterpieces from the Städel Museum in Frankfurt Impressionism, It offers suggestions for discussion Expressionism, Avant-Garde” is the first opportunity the Italian public will ever have had to topics and activities. The work admire the famous collection of one of Germany’s oldest museums, the Städel Museum. modules explore key themes with It offers the public a broad overview of painting and sculpture from the major artistic images, information, quotes and tips trends of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries ranging from Romanticism to for encouraging creative activity. It’s a useful tool for further Realism and from Impressionism to Symbolism via the Avant-Gardes. It focuses principally developing the issues addressed on French and German art, to allow visitors to track and comprehend the evolution at the exhibition, either at school of expression in the course of several decades that were crucial in the history of art. or at home, in an attempt to foster This file, like the exhibition, is arranged by theme rather than in chronological order. ongoing dialogue with schools Subdivided into movements and groups of artists, it mixes different disciplines, touching and families going well beyond the on all the various points in the astonishing artistic vicissitudes of the period. The works mere visit to the exhibition itself. in the file have been specially selected on the basis either because they belong to one or other major trend or because of the importance of the artists who produced them. Please don’t hesitate to let us know what you think of this file and its proposals, for further information by writing to: [email protected] on our working methods, we suggest you consult: C. Francucci and P.Vassalli (edited educational aims by), Educare all’arte. Immagini • stimulating the emergence of skills already naturally present in every child esperienze percorsi, Electa, Milan • encouraging group work based on interaction with others, involving story telling, 2009 C. Francucci and P.Vassalli descriptions and dialogue, asking each other questions, information, impressions, (edited by), Educare all’arte, Electa, opinions and feelings Milan 2005 • stimulating children to use all their senses to perceive the art and reality around them • learning to recognize color and its potential for expression • exploring the links and synergies existing among the various different forms of art • developing and boosting children’s ability to listen and understand sounds and music • experimenting with new technologies using digital video-cameras, projectors and computers • approaching history through comparison with children’s own daily lives to stimulate curiosity and to explore its relevance to the present day • offering learning methods based on theoretical criteria and practical workshop solutions

Hans Thoma, In the Hammock, 1876, Städel Museum, Frankfurt

2 collection A collection is a group of works of art and precious objects held in a single place. The first major European collections date back to the 16th century. Collectors were wealthy and influential men, particularly popes, aristocrats and men of culture. Collections today are many and varied. They can be public or private, in other words accessible to My collection of paintings, bronzes, manuscripts and objets d’art must serve the general public - when they’re as the basis for an art institute which by this act I wish to found for the greater hosted in museums either honour and dignity of my city, and which will bear by name. temporarily or on a permanent Johann Friedrich Städel basis - or open only to the collector and his friends. The collecting bug is triggered by a deep desire to know, organize The Städel Museum in Frankfurt and catalogue what one collects. The most consistent collections Frankfurt had been one of the most highly developed and cosmopolitan cities are based on specific criteria in Germany since the Middle Ages, because it was a crossroads of the many trade routes that determine the selection that crisscrossed Europe. Johann Friedrich Städel (1728-1816) was born to a wealthy of each piece. Collecting criteria merchant family. He rapidly built up a large fortune thanks to his work as a banker may change as a collection grows, and spice merchant. That was the start of a collection of works of art, which he placed and the collection itself may be at the disposal of the local population. subdivided and reorganized on the basis of new criteria. The museum’s story began in 1816, the year Städel died, in his city center home near Some pieces are sold or traded the river Main. Städel donated the institute he had founded and his art collection with others to impart greater to increase the amount of publicly available art and to promote the development uniformity to the collection. of modern art. No collection in Germany had been founded by private initiative until that moment. The founder’s financial independence was matched by his freedom of choice in the art he purchased, from old masters to contemporary German and French work. The collection grew constantly over time, to the point where it became necessary to move it to the opposite bank of the Main, to a building with the requisites of a modern museum, with well-lit rooms and room for an art library.The years went by and additional works of art began to join the collection through donations and bequests, pointing up the close tie between the citizens of Frankfurt and the Städel Museum. Today the collection includes masterpieces ranging from the early 14th century to the present day. It covers an area of 4,000 square meters and also hosts an academy for young artists, which is still one of the most influential art schools in Germany today.

Photo Städel Museum

3 work module en plein air this is a french expression meaning “in the open air”, used to define a painting technique that seeks to capture the variations and subtle nuance effects that light has on nature.

With time, my eyes began to open and I really started to understand nature. I also leaned to love it. Claude Monet impressionism

In Paris in or around 1860, a number of young artists got together to change the rules of traditional painting. Sick of having their work rejected at official exhibitions, they began to frequent private ateliers where they could move away from the stiff precepts of the Academy of Fine Arts. The group’s best-known members included Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne and Berthe Morisot. Monet urged his colleagues to get out of the studio to paint en plein air. With the invention of the portable easel, of paint in tubes and of the railroad which made travel so much faster, artists began to paint out in the open. Apart from landscapes, a genre which the Academy classified as minor, their most frequent theme was modern life: cities, stations, factories with soot-belching chimneys and the passtimes of the nascent bourgeois society. Manet painted waiters and patrons in bars and restaurants, Renoir painted luncheons and open-air dances and Degas painted evenings at the Opera with musicians and ballerinas on stage. The group’s work wasn’t very popular at first, which is why author Emile Zola offered it his support by publishing a series of articles in defense of its quality. In 1874 the group decided to hold its first independent exhibition in the studio of a photographer called Nadar. Taking his cue from the title of Monet’s painting Impression Sunrise, art critic Louis Leroy ironically christened the group’s style Impressionism because he felt it was capable of only transmitting an impression, in other words an unfinished idea of a vision. The Impressionists held eight collective exhibitions of their work before 1886, after which they broke up and each artist went on to pursue his own career independently.

Claude Monet, Houses on the Bank of the River Zaan, 1871, Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Edgar Degas, Musicians in the Orchestra, 1872, Städel Museum, Frankfurt

4 Alfred Sisley, Banks of the Seine in Autumn, 1876, Städel Museum, Frankfurt

topics for discussion painting one’s own time The Impressionists painted the essence of modernity: from the urban renewal of Paris lit by oil lamps, to the crowds in the streets, bars and restaurants and the new methods of transportation. Their work depicts the middle classes at work and play, as well as people performing humbler tasks: waiters, ironing ladies, stevedores, and floorboard scrapers, and a whole host of show biz personalities, beggars, ladies of the street and artists. What people or jobs could we portray today to depict our own time?

technique The greatest innovation that the Impressionists introduced was painting outdoors. They replaced the cold and artificial light of enclosed space with the spectacle of nature and its changing colors. This innovation required a certain rapidity of execution to fix the sudden changes of light and weather on the canvas. In Impressionist painting nature comes alive and responds to everything that moves: the rustle of leaves, trees swaying in the wind, scudding clouds and fleeting reflections on water. They spent a lot of time observing and painting water because it never stood still, always reflecting different lights and colors with every tiny movement. The Impressionists’ palette was clear and rich in pure colors, which they applied straight onto the canvas without mixing them first.They used short, separate brush- strokes without any preparatory drawing, dabbing small patches of color onto the canvas in rapid succession. That was how the Impressionists interpreted the instantaneous effect of light on the landscape. In Monet’s painting Houses on the Bank of the River Zaan, he manages to retain the full freshness and immediacy of his first observation. He renders the movement of the water with rapid and compact touches, while he uses think and lumpy brushstrokes to depict scudding clouds.

activity repreSENSATIONS Impressionist paintings express an idea of nature that is more evocative than descriptive, based on a sketchy vision reminiscent of a quick first look. If we look closely at an Impressionist painting, we can see how the image is broken down into so many small pieces of color matter. From a distance, however, the picture comes together again before our very eyes. To experience this visual sensation, take a digital camera and use a fixed frame to photograph a landscape in the open air with trees swaying in the wind and running water in the foreground. Get hold of a computer, a projector and a large sheet of paper to put on the wall. Now project the video straight onto the paper, watching how movement constantly changes the way things look. Trace the moving shapes on the paper using short brushstrokes and tempera paints. The ones in the foreground will be larger and spaced wider apart, those in the background will be smaller and closer together. When you’ve finished, take a few steps back and find the right distance to put the view of the landscape back together before your eyes. Have you managed to capture the vibrant effect of light on the landscape?

5 work module

When I put a green, it is not grass when I put a blue, it is not the sky Henri Matisse

expressionism

Emile Nolde, Eve, 1910, Städel Museum, Frankfurt The term “Expressionism”, which was coined by art dealer Paul Cassirer in 1910, does © Nolde Stiffung Seebüll not refer to a single movement so much as to a huge vessel containing the malaise and communicative urgency of its adepts. Expressionism was a widespread phenomenon with two distinct geographic focal points: in France, with the Fauves, the wild beasts, and in Germany with die Brücke, the bridge. The two groups of artists which formed at almost the same time, in 1903 and 1905, were moved by the wish to freely express their ideas without the rules imposed by the Academy.The move- ment affected the figurative arts, literature, music, the theater and architecture. It took its cue from Impressionism, but at the same time it contradicted it. For the Expressionists, a work of art wasn’t meant to represent what an artist saw but what he felt inside, transfiguring reality on the basis of his own feelings. In the Expressionists’ view, color is so self-contained as to transcend the imitation of nature. Vision communicates a state of mind spontaneously and immediately, depicting red fields, yellow water and green figures. The German Expressionists produced pictures that were sharper and more dramatic than those of their French counterparts. They painted street life, ports and people in cafés, but also nudes in the open air, isolated in the silence of their existence. They often saw the city as a place of confusion and desolation. Leading German Expressionists included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Emile Nolde and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. In his painting West Port in Frankfurt am Main, Kirchner turns his vacant gaze on the port area, which contrasts in its pinkish hues with the yellowy-green of the river and the sky. Kirchner creates an animated composition with oblique lines counter- balanced by horizontal and vertical elements. In the foreground there’s a blue signal box whose arms are waving threateningly over a ship and over the heads of two people who look as if they’re about to leave the port area.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Red Tower in the Park, 1910, Städel Museum, Frankfurt © Karl Schmidt-Rottluff by SIAE 2011

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, West Port in Frankfurt am Main, 1916, Städel Museum, Frankfurt

6 woodcut this is a printing technique technique dating back to the 16th The Expressionists’ revolution was mostly about technique and the use of color. century. It uses a carved block of Its main feature was the violence in the way colors were matched. Bright colors clash on wood as a matrix: the subject is the canvas in a primeval and brutal manner. Feelings and emotions are expressed through drawn on the smooth block then the choice of discordant colors. Painter Johannes Itten argued that colors express their full chiseled out using knives and significance only when they’re set in relation to one another, in the same way as a word gouges. The carved matrix is acquires its full meaning only in relation to other words in a sentence. They obtained covered with ink and the design is clashes by setting pure colors next to each other to achieve a brilliant and striking effect, then printed on a sheet of paper setting warm and cold colors alongside one another, and ultimately matching using a press. The carved areas “complementary colors”, in other words colors from opposite sides of the color wheel. The show up white on the print, while contrasting use of color demolishes any last link with realism and turns the the full areas show up black. “Impressionist” vision with its shapes and volumes on its head. The Expressionists painted with broad, vigorous and rapid brushstrokes. This means that their images were only sketched, with little regard for proportion, for light and shade (“chiaroscuro”) or for perspective. Their outlines are hard and spiky, underscored to further highlight the color. Their pictures often end up resembling grotesque caricatures. The distortion of their images was also due to the artists’ new interest in primitive sculpture from Africa and Oceania. They set great store by such manual skills as graphic art and woodcut, an ancient technique deeply rooted in the German tradition.

color wheel

topics for discussion say it with color! We’re surrounded by a world of colors. We often associate colors with feelings, especially with negative feelings, in our everyday speech: to be green with envy, yellow-bellied or in black mood. How about positive feelings? What’s the color of happiness? What people, places, words and sounds evoke that feeling? Your answers will show you that associations are very subjective, the result of personal experience and knowledge, just like in Expressionist art.

activity emotions in full color A color can be associated with a feeling, but a pair of colors can translate that feeling and make it even more intense. Every color can be brighter or less bright according to whether you set it alongiside another clolor that matches it or clashes with it. To achieve the greatest expressive contrast possible, set pure colors — warm and cold, light and dark, and matching (red/green, orange/blue, yellow/purple), next to each other. Take quite a few square colored cards to use as a base. Cut or tear oval shapes out of some of them to create lots of faces to place on top of the square cards. Now match a feeling to each pair. Take a black felt-tip pen and draw an expression on each face, remembering that the shape you draw it in is another a useful factor for communicating feeling. You can use the cards you’ve created to set up your own “colored feeling” gallery, discussing the order they should be presented in.

7 work module

The Fauvist bonfire had just died down when another movement came along to start a new scandal: cubism; and besides, certain artists such as Braque, had ensured the transition from one to the other. Georges Roque

cubism The word «Cubism», like «Impressionism» before it, wasn’t invented or chosen by the artists themselves but arose almost by chance. It was used for the first time in 1908 by art critic Louis Vauxcelles to describe simplified images broken down and reduced to the state of geometrical solids. Once again it was a convenient term, veined with irony, which the painters accepted in order to take up the critics’ challenge. Cubism soon became a full- fledged fashion that influenced numerous painters both in Europe and throughout the rest of the world. Its guiding beacon was Pablo Picasso, together with George Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger,Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger and Lyonel Feininger.The painters’ favorite subjects were portraiture, still-lifes and landscapes. In the Portrait of Fernande Olivier, Picasso does away with outlines and breaks the lines of the face down into small cubic shapes. The head of his lover, together with the melancholy gesture with which she brings her left arm up to her face, merges with the rocky background. Picasso highlights the slant of her eyes with a strong light-and-shade effect that molds the volumes while breaking the shape apart at the same time. The artist seems to be decomposing the image into its various different parts in his mind’s eye, before putting them back together again on the canvas. The resulting picture is a juxtaposition of several views seen from different angles. The Cubists thought that it was necessary to multiply one’s gaze because a single viewpoint is never enough to capture the full complexity of reality. No one ever stands still before an object; they move about in space, condensing the multitude of images that the eye captures.

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Fernande Olivier, 1909, Städel Museum, Frankfurt © Succession Picasso by SIAE 2011

8 linear perspective technique defines the illusory depiction With Cubism, shapes are broken down into so many geometric fragments, which are of a three-dimensional figure then rebuilt into images of immense expressive strength reminiscent of primitive art, on a flat surface. which the French and German Expressionists had already taken an interest in. The Cubists broke their subject matter down along sharp, cutting lines so that the surface papiers collés or “glued sheets of the canvas takes on a consistency and a volume of its own. The background moves of paper” are works of art made forward and merges with the figure, finally breaking up into many different hard and from paper cutouts – newspapers, pointed surfaces. The result looks rather like a puzzle in which some of the pieces aren’t wallpaper or musical scores – glued in the right place; this is because the subject is portrayed at once from above, below, onto canvas to convey the idea inside, outside and from the sides, in an effort to break linear perspective and to fuse of the materials represented, set the figure with the space around it. The Cubist palette consisted mainly of green, gray, into a charcoal or pastel drawing. ochre and brown. Their brushstrokes were slow and meticulous, keeping all emotion and spontaneity under control. The invention of the technique of collage and of papiers collés further underscored the the idea that the artist’s hand is hidden.

topics for discussion cubist music There’s a very close connection between visual art and music, because both give an idea of rhythm, time and space. One of the greatest masters of musical Cubism was Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, who rejected the pleasing melodies of the 19th century to experiment with unusual sound forms and distorting effects using out-of-tune instruments. His musical ideas are typified by the repetition of short and seemingly easy tunes, creating a collage-style composition with pieces of music from the past mixed with popular sounds and fragments from his other compositions. Try listening to an excerpt from his Histoire du Soldat and compare it with Picasso’s painting. Why do you think Stravinsky’s music is called Cubist?

activity look at things from several different perspectives at once! Cubism depicts reality reduced to geometric shapes and broken down so that it can be seen from several different perspectives, or viewpoints, at once. Perspective is the angle from which we observe an object: from above, below, the right, the left, in front or behind. Photography easily captures all the angles, showing the image from the exact point from which the photographer is observing it. Take a digital camera and choose a simple subject. Walk around it, taking shots of it from different angles. Now print the photos out, take a pair of scissors and some glue, and assemble small snippets from different shots to rebuild the subject. Your composition is going to look a bit odd, as though you were looking at it from lots of different viewpoints all at once but without having to walk around it in order to do so.

9 work module abstract art the word comes from the Latin “abtrahere” and is usually used to indicate a simplification of reality. In art it’s used to define painting that expresses itself through a composition of lines, shapes and colors, shunning all imitation of reality.

Art does not reproduce the visible, rather it makes it visible. Paul Klee

abstract art

Abstract art’s aim was to simplify and stylize shapes, relegating depiction to the background, or often doing away with it altogether. It first saw the light of day in Munich in 1910, when Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky painted his “First Abstract Watercolor”. On entering his studio one day, he saw a work that he didn’t recognize, until he realized it was simply upside down. This was a revelation to him, because the work looked even more interesting to him upside down than it had the right way up. The following year he founded a movement which he called the Blue Knights, using the name of a paint which in his view, suggested infinity.The artists who joined the Blue Knights were Alexey Jawlensky, Auguste Macke, Franz Marc and Paul Klee. Klee was the first artist to explore the boundless regions of the subconscious. His work is like a diary of his inner life. From that moment on, Abstract Art freed up the imagination of numerous artists who, until that time, had felt bound by the rules of traditional convention. Abstract Art did away with the relationship between the artist’s eye and the outside world, giving priority to his feelings instead. Art lost its job of depicting reality, a task that was now performed by photography, the cinema and the printed page. The process that led to this new kind of representation is called abstraction. Having eliminated the subject and its depiction, paintings could now display what the artist felt deep inside. In his painting entitled View into the Fertile Country, Klee calls up the memory of a trip he made to Egypt. The three-dimensional shapes painted toward the bottom of the picture conjure up images of pyramids and temples, while the long curved line makes us think of a city wall or of the Nile, which fertilizes the land with its flooding. Above, the horizontal stripes look like fields with a different type of crop. With his wavy shapes and his geometry, Klee uses the elements of figurative language: lines, curves, flat surfaces, volumes, colors, light and space.

Paul Klee, View into the Fertile Country, 1932, Städel Museum, Frankfurt

10 topics for discussion let’s abstract the concept What does the verb “to abstract” mean? Well, literally it means to “take away”, to extract, to pare down in order to know something by reducing it to its bare essentials. In art, to abstract means to simplify, to get rid of detail. It entails a choice involving isolating the most interesting elements and shedding all the rest. Abstracting allows the artist to modify his own vision and to create new worlds. Discuss what you think abstraction has to do with imagination, interpretation and knowledge. technique The need to express deeper content without regard for the way things look on the outside led artists to search for new modes of expression. In Abstract Art, painting is no longer based on resembling reality, while color, which is less and less subordinate to shape or drawing, becomes an interior expression capable of acting at a deeper level. We’ve already seen that the Expressionists saw color as a free and independent element, and this gradually pushed art in the direction of the breakdown of the figure. Abstract artists knew that all colors trigger different sensations in those looking at them, just as sounds do, so they began to use colors as though they were sounds: yellow was a sudden burst of the trumpet, while blue was the sweet sound of the flute. Kandinsky and Klee colored their canvases the way a conductor composes music. They often painted geometric shapes such as circles, squares and triangles. Both were interested in children’s drawings because they are the first steps in the thought process that communicates through images. Klee, in particular, experimented and practised with numerous different techniques: pen, watercolor, oil painting and collage. activity geometric or biomorphic? There are two kinds of abstract art: geometric and biomorphic. The former gradually eliminates reality and condenses shapes, summarizing them in geometic figures and in curving and straight lines. The latter tends to reduce figures to mysterious organic animal and vegetable shapes. Try experimenting with both. Collect lots of objects of different shapes and sizes and take them to your room. Place them on a large sheet of paper and draw around their outlines with a pencil. Then cut the shapes out and examine them closely.What’s left of your objects? Create a biomorphic abstract composition with the curving and irregular shapes, and a geometric one with the regular shapes.

11 work module avant-garde this term comes from the French for “before the guard”, referring to the military platoon that precedes the troops; thus, by extension, it also refers to those innovative artistic and literary movements that seek to break with tradition in order to “march with the times”.

It is thanks to the force of images that true revolutions will be able to take place over time. Andrè Breton

surrealism

Surreal means above real, outside reality. Surrealism was the last great avant-garde movement. It began in France in 1924 with the “First Surrealist Manifesto”, signed by writer and psychiatrist André Breton, expressing a desire to liberate man’s full potential, including that of his dreams. The Surrealists revisited dreams and the subconscious in a creative vein. A crucial role in the movement’s development and in their works was the growth of psychoanalysis, with its task of interpreting and revealing desires and taboos. According to the Surrealists, an artist’s work should reflect an immediate link between the subsconscious and the act of painting. Communication with the observer is based on the free association of ideas, representations and symbols. Surrealist art was addressed to the imagination, and its ultimate aim was to provoke a change in consciousness and in society.This led Surrealists to get involved in politics and it also accounted for the name of their magazine: Surrealist Revolution. Surrealism adopted an attitude of rebellion against the repression of instincts in bourgeois morals and society.The Surrealist painter par excellence was Max Ernst. His images, populated with fantasmagorical figures, develop a complex game of associations and analogies that don’t always follow a logical thread. In his painting Nature at Dawn, Ernst creates a scenario that is at once both alluring and disquieting. Under the clear sky of a mountain scene, a thick tangle of plants invades the foreground. From the left, a bird in human shape makes his way through the undergrowth to reach the female figure hidden in the right-hand corner.

Max Ernst, Nature at Dawn, 1936, Städel Museum, Frankfurt

12 frottage is a technique based technique on rubbing, that was already being Surrealist works are often compositions of fragments of real images, put together used in ancient China and classical and combined without any logical order. They create new and unknown worlds Greece to take copies of bas-reliefs in a fusion of reality and dreams, portraying man’s deepest hidden reality with all on rice paper or parchment. its desires, its frustrations and its restlessness. Surrealist painters experimented It was rediscovered in the modern with numerous kinds of techniques and processes. The most important one was called era by German artist Max Ernst. frottage and it was invented by Max Ernst, who took his inspiration from a child’s game based on rubbing a pencil over a sheet of paper laid on top of a rough or bumpy surface. grattage is a technique based This process produces random and unpredictable light-and-shade drawings and graphic on scraping the film of paint motifs. Ernst often adapted the technique to paintings, too, by applying oil paints to impress an effect of random with a palette knife and scraping the surface. The artist often mixed frottage with motion on the color. another invention of his known as grattage, which consists in scraping the uppermost surface of the film of paint once it has dried. There was also decal, which involved decal is a technique invented pressing two colored surfaces together and then pulling them apart; and dripping, by Spanish Surrealist Oscar an effect that was achieved by pouring or dripping paint straight from the tube Dominguez. It allows the artist or from a can hanging from a wire, onto a canvas or sheet of cardboard on the ground. to produce an image by tracing Other techniques used by the Surrealists, thanks to their skill in creating bizarre it from one surface to another. matches, were photomontage, collage, assembly and ready-made, in other words a common-or-garden object removed from its normal context that becomes dripping is a technique that a work of art because the artist has chosen it and is presenting it as one. consists in allowing the color to drip onto the canvas by soaking the paintbrush, or even just by activity punching holds in the can of paint. frot frot American painter Jackson Pollock The first frottages were produced by chance, tracing the veining in a wooden floor onto was responsible for making paper with a pencil lead. After this initial experiment, Max Ernst starting rubbing every this technique famous. object he could get his hands on, achieving unexpected and evocative results in which he transformed matter into a vision. To familiarize with this technique, place several different bumpy surfaces – wood, leaves, bags, sandpaper, polystyrene – under a sheet of paper and then color it using wax crayons and rubbing to capture their shape. The matter takes on a new aspect, and with the help of scissors and glue, it can become an image for use in many new compositions.

the lure of the absurd To depict the world of dreams and to create unusual and ambiguous associations, you can leaf through newspapers and magazines looking for different objects, textures, backdrops and figures. Photocopy or cut out whatever you think looks most interesting. Take a sheet of drawing paper to glue your cutouts on, and cover it completely. You can mix realism and the imaginary by setting seemingly incompatible pictures and objects next to one another. Let chance be your guide! When you look at the finished composition, you’ll feel as though you’re entering another world, a world of dreams and make-believe!

Max Ernst, Aquis submersus, 1919, Städel Museum, Frankfurt © Max Ernst by SIAE 2011

13 100 masterpieces from the Städel Museum in Frankfurt. Impressionism, Expressionism, Avant-Garde. 1 April • 17 July 2011 exhibition file credits project designed by Educational Services Art Workshop director Paola Vassalli project manager suggestions for further reading Francesca Romana Mastroianni from the Art Bookshelf with Chiara Bandi for adults suggestions for further reading Giulio Carlo Argan, Achille Bonito Oliva, L’Arte moderna. 1770-1970. Giulia Franchi L’Arte oltre il Duemila, Sansoni, 2002 organized by Felix Krämer, 100 capolavori dallo Städel Museum di Frankfurt. Impressionismo, Elena Fierli Espressionismo, Avanguardia, Giunti, 2011 (exhibition catalogue) with Giulia Franchi english translation for children Stephen Tobin AA.VV., Les fauves,DADA n. 136,Mango 2008 graphic design AA.VV., Manet, Picasso et les autres,DADA n. 142,Mango 2008 rocchi pavese design AA.VV., Monet,DADA n. 158, Arola 2010 AA.VV., Picasso Cubiste,DADA n. 129,Mango 2007 AA.VV., La révolution surréaliste,DADA n. 81, Mango 2002 information Christina Bjõrk, Linnea nel giardino di Monet, Giannino Stoppani 1992 at first sight Cristina Cappa Legora, Il cavaliere azzurro, ovvero La storia di due amici e un santo visit and workshop cavaliere, Mazzotta 2003 Pinin Carpi, La collana di pietre blu. Una fiaba di fiamme e di campi, di vento e di mare schools • kindergarten and primary nata dai colori di Emil Nolde,Vallardi 1993 schools Ada Ceola, Io e l’espressionismo, Mazzotta 2002 Tuesday to Friday 11.30 am and 1.30pm Sophie Curtil, Paul Klee. En rythme, Centre Pompidou, coll. L’art en jeu 1993 admission 4.00 Pablo Echuarren, Terremoto Picasso,Drago 2006 (kindergarten:e admission free) activities 80.00 per class group James Mayhew, Carlota descubre a los impressionistas, Serres 1997 two classese can be accommodated Catherine Prats-Okuyama, Max Ernst. Loplop présente une jeune fille, Centre Pompidou, at once (max 25 children per class) coll. L’art en jeu 1991 reservations compulsory (there is no Francesco Salvi, Les impressionistes. Ces peintres ivres de couleur,Hatier 1994 charge for this service) Angela Wenzel, Edgar Degas, dance like a butterfly, Prestel 2002 families • children 7 to 11 Sunday 11 am to 1 pm activity + admission to the exhibition 12.00 websites booking recommendede (there is www.staedelmuseum.de a 1.50 charge for this service) www.staedelschule.de e family offer www.marmottan.com activity + admission to the exhibition www.kirchnermuseum.ch 10.00 per child admission to the exhibition 10.00 per adult (max 2) www.bruecke-museum.de e www.musee-picasso.fr children aged 7 to 11 who attend www.zpk.org/ww/en/pub/web_root.cfm two workshops associated with www.maxernstmuseum.lvr.de the major exhibits at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni and the Scuderie del Quirinale in any one month, may purchase a special combined workshop ticket for 18.00 e Palazzo delle Esposizioni via Nazionale 194, 00184 Rome www.palazzoesposizioni.it information and reservations schools: 06 39967 200 others: 06 39967 500 Monday to Friday 9am to 6 pm Saturday 9am to 2pm

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