2019 jahrt sich Rembrandts Todesjahr zum 350ten Mal. Die Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden, die eine der bedeutendsten Sammlung seiner Gemalde, Zeichnungen und Druckgrafiken bewahren, nehmen dieses Jubilaum zum Anlass, den Kunstler in einer Ausstellung des Kupferstich-Kabinetts zu feiern. Rembrandts Strich wird sich auf den Grafiker und Zeichner konzentrieren und einen frischen Blick auf ihn suchen, der vielleicht wie kein zweiter bis heute als sogenannter "artists` artist" andere Kunstler zur Auseinandersetzung angeregt hat. Die einzigartige Dresdner Sammlung - etwa 20 Zeichnungen, die Rembrandt heute zugeschrieben werden und das nahezu vollstandige druckgrafische Werk - bildet die Grundlage fur die herausragende Ausstellung. Sie wird ein besonderes Augenmerk auf seine erzahlerischen Kompositionen, radierten Selbstbildnissen und die Studien seiner Frau Saskia richten. Die Ausstellung umfasst rund 100 Werke aus allen Schaffensperioden Rembrandts und etwa 50 Radierungen und Zeichnungen von Schulern seiner Werkstatt sowie von spateren Kunstlern, die Rembrandt als Autoritat und kreative Inspirationsquelle verstanden haben. Die lange Reihe derer, die ihr Selbstbildnis in Auseinandersetzung mit Rembrandt definierten, reicht von unmittelbaren Nachfolgern und Meistern des 18. Jahrhunderts wie Benedetto Castiglione und Georg Friedrich Schmidt, uber den kongenialen Francisco de Goya ins 20. Jahrhundert bis heute. Als Beispiele moegen Edouard Manet, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Lovis Corinth, Kathe Kollwitz, Max Beckmann und Pablo Picasso sowie Marlene Dumas und William Kentridge, aber auch Kunstler aus der DDR wie A.R. Penck dienen. Indem Werke dieser Kunstler einbezogen werden, wird Rembrandt als einer der wichtigsten "Kunstlerkunstler" aller Zeiten vorgestellt. Ausgewahlte Gegenuberstellungen werden den heutigen Betrachtern helfen, das Feuerwerk an Kreativitat besser zu verstehen, das Rembrandt nicht nur zu seiner Zeit freisetzte, sondern auch heute noch entzundet. Zeitlos fesselnd bleibt Rembrandt durch seine Radikalitat in Auswahl und unkonventioneller Interpretation christlicher und profaner Bildthemen, nicht weniger durch seine Experimentierfreudigkeit - besonders im Gebrauch grafischer Techniken - als auch durch seinen reflektierten und dabei oft humorvollen Intellekt, der von seinem sinnlich zupackenden Blick auf die Welt erganzt wird. Mit leichter Hand, fast spielerisch doch voller Energie, sprengte er in seiner Zeit Konventionen. Mit seinem freien, unverkennbaren Strich schuf er Bildwelten, aus denen sein schier unerschoepfliches Interesse an der Natur als Schoepfung spricht, sei es die aussere oder die innere des Menschen. Damit bietet sich eine Fulle von Anknupfungspunkten und Anregungen fur Kunstler und Betrachter.

The Dresden collection's singular group of Rembrandt works - about 20 drawings attributed to the master today and the nearly complete oeuvre of etchings- will provide the basis for this remarkable publication. It will have a particular focus on Rembrandt's narrative compositions, printed self-portraits, studies of his wife Saskia, and will include works from all periods of his oeuvre plus prints and drawings by artists from his workshop and followers. The list of artists who understood Rembrandt as a dynamic authority and source of inspiration is long, reaching from his immediate followers to masters of the 18th century, from Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione to Jonathan Richardson to the kindred spirit Francisco de Goya, into the 20th century and up to the present day. Examples include Edouard Manet, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Lovis Corinth, Kathe Kollwitz, Max Beckmann, Pablo Picasso, as well as Marlene Dumas and William Kentridge and artists from the GDR such as A.R. Penck. By including works by these artists, the exhibtion and catalogue foreground Rembrandt as one of the most important 'artists' artist' of all time. Select juxtapositions will help the reader better understand the fi reworks of creativity that Rembrandt not only lit in his own time but those he continues to ignite today. Rembrandt remains eternally captivating, not only because of his radical choices and unconventional interpretations of Christian and profane pictorial subjects, but also because of his joy in experimentation, especially in the use of printing and drawing techniques, and his refl ective, humorous intellect, complemented by his sensually direct approach to the world. With a light hand, he broke open the conventions of his era. The pictorial worlds that he created with his free, decisive mark convey his near inexhaustible interest in nature as creation, whether it be the human exterior or interior, and off er a wealth of connecting points and constellations for other artists as well as for the viewer.

Artists and travel have for centuries been intertwined where the desire to explore beyond the confines of one’s home has provoked a truly astonishing outpouring of creativity, much of which was captured through drawings and prints. Comprising over 100 such works, Connecting Worlds: Artists& Travel will be the first exhibition to approach the subject through the lens of artists’ experiences of travel from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, before the establishment of the railroad and use of photography as a means of recording changed these experiences deeply. A collaboration between the Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and the Katrin Bellinger Collection, London, the exhibition will include works by major artists, lesser known professionals as well as amateurs, mostly from Northern Europe, amongst them Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein the Younger, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Wenceslaus Hollar, Zacharias Wagner, Valentin Klotz, Maria Sibylla Merian, Angelika Kauffmann, Franz Pforr, Augusta von Buttlar, Julie von Egloffstein, Ludwig Richter, and Friedrich Preller the Elder. Divided into three sections, “On the road”, “Destination Rome”, and “Dresden”, the exhibition begins by exploring artists on the road and what they regarded as important to record in sketchbooks and individual sheets. The second section looks at Rome as one of the most important destinations for Northern travellers, with its incomparable remains of antiquity and as the seat of the Catholic Church that celebrated its religious and administrative life through processions and public spectacle. The journey ends in Dresden, as a centre for collecting, cultural exchange and glamorous festivities, ambitiously competing with other international courts since the time of Augustus the Strong. A different kind of travel, made possible by collecting images and stories of landscapes, flora, fauna, and cultures previously unknown in Europe, is explored. This section closes with the story of the Indonesian Romantic artist Raden Saleh, who first visited Dresden in 1839, and was warmly welcomed by the Saxon court. The richly illustrated catalogue will feature essays by an international panel of experts addressing such topics as the uses of artist sketchbooks across time, written and visual accounts of travel in books and prints, encounters with the Ottoman world, travel and collecting at the Saxon court.

Accompanying a landmark exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, this book examines the remarkable drawings made by Du rer as a young man from 1490 to 1495, especially those made during his journeyman years, or Wanderjahre - considered the final part of a craftsman's training - and a second shorter trip which immediately followed and seems to have brought the artist to Italy. These trips form the framework for the book, which focuses on the young artist's figure studies and has at its heart the Courtauld Gallery's double-sided drawing of a Wise Virgin and Two studies of the artist's left leg. This superbly ambitious work serves as a springboard to explore in depth the role of drawing at this stage of Du rer's career. It allows us to address a series of crucial questions: how Du rer formed 'his hand', how he responded to artistic challenges presented by contemporary and earlier art (both on a stylistic and an iconographic level), how his pursuit of professional success was linked with the quest for an individual artistic identity, and how the strategy of recording his own creative achievements in drawings dovetails with his claim for a new status for the artist in his city. The scholarly and beautifully illustrated catalogue is introduced with five essays by distinguished experts. Stephanie Buck examines the documentary evidence and attempts to reconstruct the motivations and activities of Du rer's travels as a young man. David Freedberg discusses Du rer's obsessive observation and recording of himself in portraits and in studies of his limbs. These represent the first critical steps in the artist's developing understanding of the body, and of the ways in which its movements could not just show emotion, but rouse the equivalent sense of torsion, tension and pathos in the bodies and minds of his viewers. Stephanie Porras looks at Du rer's copies of drawings or prints circulating in Nuremberg workshops or acquired during the Wanderjahre, which were used as a means of seeking inspiration, of challenging himself to draw more sophisticated figures and dynamic compositions. Michael Roth asks the question of how the three strands of the art of the line- drawing, engraving and woodcut - structurally correspond in Du rer's work and, consequently, how drawing merges with certain manual aspects of printing. A final essay presents new technical research on Du rer's early drawings undertaken collaboratively in a number of leading collections of the artist's work, and aims to enrich our understanding of the young Du rer's approach to the medium of drawing.