2009 - Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

View of the exhibition “Ideals”
in the Tapestry Hall
if through a window – had its counterpart in the exhibition
in the 1990 work “Dresdner Frauen” (Women of Dresden),
a group of monumental yellow-painted rough-hewn
wooden sculptures on high plinths.
Defining the place of Dresden
A completely different light was cast on Dresden by the
exhibition “Wunschbilder. Sehnsucht und Wirklichkeit.
Malerei des 18. Jahrhunderts für Dresden” (Ideals. Yearnings
and Reality. 18th-century Painting for Dresden). For
the first time the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister devoted a
large-scale exhibition to a survey of Dresden painting in
Dresden itself, showing the city on the River Elbe as a place
that attracted artists from many countries in the 18th
century. Names such as Anton Raphael Mengs, Louis de
Silvestre and Anton Graff are representative of the numerous
artists to whom 18th-century Dresden painting owes
its significance for European art. Painters such as Giovanni
Battista Tiepolo and Antoine Pesne worked elsewhere
on behalf of Dresden. Fifty paintings came to
Dresden on loan for the exhibition – works which were
created in Dresden or commissioned for Dresden and
which are now held in collections around the world where
they bear testimony to the life of the court and the bourgeoisie
of Saxony in the 18th century. The title of the exhibition
– “Wunschbilder” (literally: ‘desired pictures’) – was
deliberately ambiguous. On the one hand the paintings
showed illusions and ideal representations of persons and
events during the period in question and presented an
idealistic image of Dresden and the surrounding country-
Irina Antonova, Director of the Pushkin Museum
in Moscow and Stanislaw Tillich, Prime Minister
of the Free State of Saxony, unveil “The Holy Family”
by Andrea Mantegna at the Pushkin Museum.
side. On the other hand, this exhibition fulfilled the desire
of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister and its long-serving
Director, Prof. Dr. Harald Marx, to present these fantastic
works from national and international collections in
Dresden. “I am pleased,” says Harald Marx, “that I have
been able to retire with an exhibition that brings together
that which has always been at the focal point of my interest
as a scholar: paintings produced for Dresden in the 18th
century.”
Broadening horizons
If one surveys all the special exhibitions held by the Staatliche
Kunstsammlungen Dresden between January and December
2009 in Dresden and Madrid, Helsinki and Beijing,
the resulting impression is rich and varied. The farsightedness,
political power and financial resources of the electors
and kings, as well as the efforts of all the later generations
brought extremely rare and particularly high-quality works
into the collections. Conducting background research and
preserving the objects is today made possible through the
cooperation of selected institutions around the world which
hold comparable or related items in their collections. High
quality is a scarce asset. Cooperation agreements with such
institutions as the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, the
Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, Rosenborg Castle
in Copenhagen and the Palace Museum in Beijing bear living
testimony to the challenges presented and opportunities
offered by international collaboration between museums.
The past of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden is
simultaneously its present and future.
11