The Städel Museum is located on Frankfurt’s Museumsufer, or museum embankment, and is one of the oldest museums in Germany. This home of fine artworks was founded in 1815 as a directive of the will of Frankfurt banker Johann Friedrich Städel, who donated his paintings to form its first collection. Today, the Städel Museum’s collection contains over 2,900 paintings, 600 sculptures and 500 photographs from over 700 years of art history.
The museum is split into three sections: Old Masters, Modern Art and Contemporary Art. The emphasis is placed on the Modern Art section, but all three areas have grown to a considerable size through two centuries of collecting.
Tour the Old Masters to see works spanning the years from 1300 to 1800. The section begins with religious art. Watch as the paintings progressively represent more secular subjects, such as portraits and landscapes, as time passes. Some of the highlights of this section include 15th-century German painter Albrecht Dürer’s Portrait of a Young Woman and Hieronymus Bosch’s portrayal of Christ, Ecce Homo.
The Modern Art section contains art from 1800 to 1945. It focuses primarily on the early 20th-century paintings of French and German artists. Enjoy many works by Pablo Picasso, including the highly abstract Fernande Olivier. Inspect the many photographs that appear among the paintings in this section. Fans of German modernism will appreciate the whole rooms dedicated to the works of Max Beckmann and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
The Contemporary Art section features works from 1945 to the present in a sleek, all-white exhibition space. Look for works by Jackson Pollock and Gerhard Richter.
The Städel Museum is open every day of the week except Mondays. There is an admission fee, which is reduced during the week. Stops for the U-Bahn and tram stop are within a five-minute walk of the museum. Parking is available for a fee in two garages within a 10-minute walk of the museum, on the other side of the Main River.
