Distinguished by the fast pace of scientific discoveries and technical developments, radical breaks in society and politics and the convulsions of two world wars, and seemingly reconciled by the reunification of the divided country, the twentieth century in Germany was contradictory, polyphonic and extreme. Those adjectives also characterize its art: it was a century of avant-gardes, artists’ associations and unyielding individuality. This broad artistic spectrum can be described by the two “poles” Wassily Kandinsky referred to in 1911 as fundamental for modernism: “great realism” and “great abstraction”, the representational and the non-representational. Sometimes a pair of opposites, sometimes a synthesis, these two complements together form a leitmotif that unites the nearly 1,800 works of German twentieth-century draughtsmanship in the collection of the Städel Museum’s Department of Pr

A thief made what police said was an “audacious” attempt to steal two Rembrandt paintings from a London museum but fled without them after being confronted, authorities said Thursday. The suspect broke into Dulwich Picture Gallery at about 11:30 pm (2330 GMT) on Wednesday, police said, targeting “Rembrandt’s Light”, a new exhibition showing 35 of the Dutch master’s paintings, etchings and drawings. A gallery spokeswoman declined to identify the two paintings which were briefly taken. But she told AFP that Rembrandt’s portrait of Jacob de Gheyn III — dubbed the “takeaway Rembrandt” as it has been stolen four times from the gallery — was not involved. “An intruder appears to have forced entry

Johannes Vermeer’s “Study of a Young Woman.” Peter Paul Rubens’ self-portrait with his family. Jacques Louis David’s portrait of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier and his wife. These paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection were made possible in part by the generosity of the longtime donor and trustee Jayne Wrightsman, who died in April at age 99. Now, it turns out, Wrightsman decided to continue that largesse after her death. On Wednesday, the museum announced that the arts benefactor and grande dame of New York society has left more than 375 works to the Met in a bequest that includes gifts to the departments of Drawings and Prints, European Paintings, and European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, as well as to the Department of Asian Art, the Department of Islamic Art and the Watson Library. “The Wrightsman bequest is the culmination of a half century of giving that has transformed the collection of Old Mas