Munich, Germany.- The Neue Pinakothek is proud to present “George Stubbs (1724-1906, Science Into Art”, on view at the museum from January 26th through May 6th. As a museum holding one of most important collections of British painting anywhere on the continent, the Neue Pinakothek casts the spotlight in the upcoming year on English art with this exhibition. This will mark the first ever major showing of the artist’s works in a European museum outside of Great Britain. Stubbs achieved his high degree of fame through his realistic portraits of horses and exotic animals, which are based on a precise observation of nature. Like few other artists, he managed to forge empirical research and aesthetics into a new synthesis in his paintings.
The exhibition contains some thirty paintings which together outline the full spectrum of George Stubbs’s artistic output. The list of lenders for the Munich show includes some of the most important collections and museums in the United Kingdom, such as the Royal Collection, the National Gallery and Tate Britain in London. In addition, numerous works from various country homes and castles in Britain have been sent to Munich. These works have remained in the possession of the descendants of the original commissioners up until today and include the canvases Stubbs painted for Lord Rockingham and the Duke of Rutland. In addition, a selection of exceptional drawings for the anatomical treatise ‘The Anatomy of the Horse’ will be on view – a group of works that hold a particularly valuable place in the collections of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. As an exceptional printmaker who experimented with various etching techniques, George Stubbs also created a small yet remarkable oeuvre of engravings consisting primarily of depictions of exotic fauna. Prints of these are extremely rare, and will be on loan from the British Museum. Finally, George Stubbs’s contemporary popularity and influence – also in Germany – is evidenced by the high-quality reproductions of his paintings by such renowned engravers like Benjamin Green (1739-1798) and William Woollett (1735-1785). Both the Department of prints and drawings of the Veste Coburg Collections and the Aschaffenburg-based holdings of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München hold outstanding examples of these prints. This exhibition will provide an opportunity to view key works from these two collections, and highlights the late 18th century collecting tradition of British art in Germany.
George Stubbs’s career as a painter of horses started when he retreated to Horkstow in Lincolnshire, where he spent the years 1756 to 1758 in an isolated farmhouse and single-handedly dissected and drew dead horses. In 1766 he published his studies in a book of engravings entitled ‘The Anatomy of the Horse’, which set new standards in the depiction of anatomical subjects. After moving to London, Stubbs quickly rose to fame as the leading equine artist of his day, a position he held from the 1760s until his death. His works were largely commissioned by a circle of young aristocrats enthusiastic about horse-breeding and equestrian sports. After his death, Stubbs soon faded into obscurity. He was gradually rediscovered around the middle of the 20th century, when art historians and US collectors such as Paul Mellon recognized his true artistic quality. By the time a major retrospective exhibition was held at the Tate Gallery in London and the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven in 1984/85, Stubbs had been firmly established in Great Britain and America as one of the greatest artists of his time. This reappraisal of his artistic legacy was also reflected in developments on the art market. Just a few months ago, his painting ‘Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath’ fetched a price of 22.4 million pounds at a London auction. This set a new record price for the artist at auction, and is one of the highest prices ever paid for an old master painting. The exhibition of Stubbs’s work will be enriched by the Neue Pinakothek’s holdings of important 18th and 19th century English paintings, which includes works by Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Lawrence and David Wilkie, and John Constable and J M W Turner. The Neue Pinakothek also possesses the only painting by George Stubbs in a German museum, the “Bird Dog”, purchased in 1810 by King Maximilian I Joseph of Bavaria. This exhibition thus highlights on one of the key facets of the collection and introduces the work of the unique artist George Stubbs to a wider audience in Germany for the first time.
The Neue Pinakothek in Munich, Germany, together with the Alte Pinakothek and the Pinakothek der Moderne it is part of Munich’s “Kunstareal” (the “art area”). The focus of the Neue Pinakothek is on European Art of the 18th and 19th century and it is one of the most important museums of nineteenth century art in the world. The museum was founded by the former King Ludwig I of Bavaria in 1853. The original building was constructed by Friedrich von Gärtner and August von Voit, but was destroyed during World War II. The ruin of the Neue Pinakothek was demolished in 1949. Designed by architect Alexander Freiherr von Branca the new postmodern building opened in 1981. Ludwig began to collect contemporary art already as crown prince in 1809 and his collection has been steadily enlarged. When the museum was founded the separtation to the old masters in the Alte Pinakothek was fixed with the period shortly before the turn of the 19th century, which has become a prototype for many galleries. The delimitation to the modern painters displayed in the Pinakothek der Moderne was later fixed by taking the restart of Henri Matisse and the Expressionists into account (ca. 1900). Consequentially a painting of Matisse acquired by the “Tschudi Contribution” is displayed in the Pinakothek der Moderne. The so-called Tschudi Contribution in 1905/1914 led to an extraordinary collection of masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. In 1915, the Neue Pinakothek became the property of the Bavarian state. A self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh was confiscated in 1938 by the Nazi regime as degenerate art and sold one year later. The museum is under the supervision of the Bavarian State Painting Collections which houses an expanded collection of more than 3.000 European paintings from classicism to art nouveau. About 400 paintings and 50 sculptures of these are exhibited in the New Pinakothek. Among others the gallery exhibits works of Francisco de Goya, Jacques-Louis David, Johann Friedrich August Tischbein and Anton Graff. It also has one of the largest collections outside the United Kingdom with masterpieces of Thomas Gainsborough, William Hogarth, John Constable, Joshua Reynolds, David Wilkie, Thomas Lawrence, George Romney, Richard Wilson, Henry Raeburn, George Stubbs and J. M. W. Turner. German artists are well represented, from classicism in Rome (Friedrich Overbeck, Friedrich Wilhelm von Schadow, Heinrich Maria von Hess, Peter von Hess and Peter von Cornelius) to the German Romantics, with paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Carl Blechen among others. The Biedermeier period is represented by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Carl Spitzweg, Moritz von Schwind and Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller. French Realism and French Romanticism by Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Géricault, Gustave Courbet, Jean-François Millet, Honoré Daumier and others. German and French Impressionists are well covered, weith works by Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth, Max Slevogt, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Georges-Pierre Seurat and Vincent van Gogh. Early 20th century are is represented by, among others, Giovanni Segantini, Gustav Klimt, Paul Signac, Maurice Denis, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, James Ensor, Edouard Vuillard, Ferdinand Hodler, Franz von Stuck, Edvard Munch, Walter Crane, Thomas Austen Brown, Pierre Bonnard and Egon Schiele. Visit the museum’s website at … http://www.pinakothek.de