Städel Museum exhibits drawings from Max Beckmann to Gerhard Richter

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