One of the nicest new additions hangs around the corner on the right: Otto Dix, “Köpfe”, from 1923. A man stares wide-eyed in the center of the picture, the women are blasé, averted, curious, with a fresh color, as if the sheet had only been made the evening before .

Little is known about why this bold watercolor and many other works from the turn of the 20th century to the 1960s ended up in the collection of the Darmstadt industrialist Karl Ströher (1890–1977), which was created around 1950.

Eva-Maria Magel

Head of culture editor Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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How and why they ended up in the Städel Museum now becomes clear: “A sign of friendship.

Ulrike Crespo gives presents to the Städel Museum ”is the name of a special exhibition in the graphic collection room.

It shows a large part of the 90 works that Ströher's granddaughter Ulrike Crespo (1950–2019) wanted to donate to the Städel Museum.

It is a thank you that not only encourages viewers to find counterparts in the museum's permanent exhibition.

Curator Regina Freyberger used various markings to indicate what is there and what only came through the posthumous gift: the new is embedded in the artistic context with items from the inventory. In its present environment, in a cabinet with Emil Nolde's unusual excursion to Italy to “San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice” (1924), Kirchner's only surviving print of “Erna's Head” (1912) of a colored woodcut by his partner, alongside works by Erich Heckel , a newly added act by Gustav Klimt, an overall lively gathering, the Dix watercolor, for example, literally shines out.

But the visitors are welcomed by a watercolor sketch by Oskar Schlemmer.

This delicately colored “Bauhaus staircase”, a forerunner of the “Bauhaus staircase” painting that became manifest, which was created in response to the Bauhaus closing process decided by the city of Dessau in 1932, and two dark experimental oil sketches from 1942 close a painful gap in the collection of the Städel Museum, which until now had only one colored pencil drawing by Schlemmer.

And it's not the only one.

The legacy as a healing gesture

In 1937, large parts of the Modernist collection were confiscated by the National Socialists. And when Freyberger, who was still the young director of the graphic collection from 1750, says that “we”, the Städel, lost a lot at the time, it shows what healing gesture the legacy of the philologist, psychotherapist, photographer and philanthropist Ulrike Crespo means. She died in October 2019, shortly before her 68th birthday, and long before that she had made sure that many people can grow from what her origins brought her: She has a very large part of the Ströher-Wella fortune in hers Crespo Foundation, which generously promotes from kindergarten to high-level literature and especially provides access to education for those with poorer starting conditions. The foundation's assets should be used up around 2044.

The bundle of this Crespo donation, one of the most important in many decades, has been at the Städel Museum since November 2020, but all exhibits had to be refurbished and re-framed until now, supplemented by their own holdings, the exhibition can show which gaps are could thus be closed. They are not always due to National Socialism, some things were simply not collected. Surrealism, for example, is now moving into the museum with Max Ernst's “Grätwald” from 1927. Karl Ströher, on the other hand, collected something like museums did and do: he bought the new, Cy Twombly, the painter friends Willi Baumeister and Fritz Winter, for example, early and in their time, along with classic modern art. Which leads to the fact that many of his acquisitions are connected to what already exists.

One would like to know more about the creation of this Ströher Collection.

Why, just for example, that single Dix?

Why Christian Rohlfs (1849–1938) with “Magnolia Bud” or “Bald Conifers”, discreetly colored, technically with a love of handicraft between the famous representatives of “Brücke” and “Blauer Reiter”?

Why this single, very small and very charming "The Woman with the Goose" (1902) by Paula Modersohn-Becker?

Organized according to chronology and artist groups

Several of these amazing works are now hanging as “individual items” in the exhibition, all the others are arranged according to chronology and artist groups, a tour through the 20th century.

The majority of the new acquisitions consist of works on paper, only nine paintings, including the tiny landscape "Kallmünz - Hellgrüne Berge" by Wassily Kandinsky, a sculpture and the now also exhibited tapestry "Landscape Composition with Figures" (1928/33) by Ida Kerkovius are there, so the rest now belongs to the graphic collection.

Anything that is not on display in the “Signs of Friendship” can be presented to interested art lovers in the graphic collection room.