Quelle meilleure raison d'aller à Francfort que pour cette exposition ? J'ai déjà écrit ici que Cranach, Holbein et Dürer font partie de mes peintres préférés...

Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Judgement of Paris (detail), ca. 1512-14. Oil on beechwood, 43 x 32,2 cm. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. Courtesy: Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

FRANKFURT, GERMANY.- In a comprehensive exhibition which will open its doors to the public on 23 November 2007, the Städel Museum will be assembling more than a hundred masterpieces by Lucas Cranach the Elder, the great painter of the Reformation period. More popular and economically more successful than his contemporary Albrecht Dürer, it was Lucas Cranach who presumably exerted the longest-lasting influence on the world of German imagery. His early landscape depictions were trailblazing, he inspired old religious themes with completely new life, as well as inventing entirely new pictorial types for the reformed faith. His portraits of Martin Luther, Frederick the Wise, Philipp Melanchthon and others have shaped our conception of these personages to this very day. Another of his specialties were exquisitely painted erotic depictions. In them he created a timeless ideal of female beauty which was still inspiring such artists as Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti in the early twentieth century. In addition to offering a superb cross-section of Cranach’s oeuvre, the exhibition will endeavour to shed more light on the secret of his success. The lenders include numerous national and international private collections and museums, among them the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, the National Gallery, Washington, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the National Gallery, London, the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and others. Following its presentation in Frankfurt, this exhibition – a Städel Museum production – will be shown at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

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Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Judgement of Paris, ca. 1512-14. Oil on beechwood, 43 x 32,2 cm. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. Courtesy: Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas