Art News

Städel Museum in Frankfurt opens exhibition of Claude Lorrain’s enchanted landscapes

FRANKFURT.- “In Claude Lorrain, nature declares itself eternal,” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe noted enthusiastically on the French Baroque artist’s landscape paintings in 1818. According to Germany’s prince among poets and most famous “Grand Tourist,” Lorrain’s idealized, timeless landscapes possess “the highest truth, but no trace of reality.” As of February 2012, the Städel Museum will show one hundred and thirty works created at different points in Claude Lorrain’s (c. 1600 or 1604/05–1682) career, among them thirteen paintings and numerous drawings and prints. Prepared in partnership with the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, “Claude Lorrain. The Enchanted Landscape” will present the work of the most important landscape painter of the seventeenth century in a monographic exhibition for the first time in Germany after almost thirty years. Besides five drawin