The Golden Age of Dutch and Flemish Painting from the Städel Museum

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presented “The Golden Age of Dutch and Flemish Painting from the Städel Museum” from October 7, 2010 to January 23, 2011. The exhibition brought around 130 masterworks from the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main, spanning more than eighty artists including Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Peter Paul Rubens, the Brueghels, Gerard ter Borch, and Jan Steen. Installed across the museum’s third floor, the selection was arranged thematically through five sections corresponding to the major genres of the period: history and allegory, portraiture, genre and interior scenes, landscape, and still life. The exhibition was curated by Jochen Sander, Deputy Director and Head of German, Dutch, and Flemish Painting at the Städel, and it was the first time the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao had hosted an exhibition devoted entirely to the Dutch and Flemish Golden Age.

Vermeer’s The Geographer (1669) served as the centrepiece of the show and was displayed in Spain for the first time. One of only two surviving Vermeer paintings to feature a solitary male figure, the canvas brought the Städel’s most celebrated painting before a Spanish audience that had never previously had occasion to see it. The loan was exceptional in scale: the Städel was undergoing a major renovation at the time, and this touring exhibition represented the largest dispersal of its holdings since the institution’s inauguration in 1816.

The Bilbao presentation was the opening leg of an international tour. Following the close of the Guggenheim showing in January 2011, the exhibition travelled to Japan under the subtitle “Vermeer’s ‘Geographer’: The Golden Age of Dutch and Flemish Paintings from the Städel Museum,” appearing at the Bunkamura Museum of Art in Tokyo (March 3 to May 22, 2011) and subsequently at the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art in Aichi Prefecture (June 11 to August 28, 2011).