EXHIBITION

Collection Schack

18.11.2009 - 31.12.2010
Sammlung Schack

`From Emperor Wilhelm II to the City of Munich, to further its glory and the memory of great artists¿, reads the inscription on the gable of the Sammlung Schack on Prinzregentenstrasse in Munich, which was opened on 18 September, 1909. The building was erected at the instigation of Emperor Wilhelm II who wanted to honour the art city of Munich with this gesture.
With its extensive holdings of work complexes by Moritz von Schwind, Arnold Böcklin and Anselm Feuerbach, the Sammlung Schack is one of the most important museums of German 19th-century painting. It was founded by Adolf Friedrich von Schack (1815¿1894) who, along with Ludwig I, was the most important collector of contemporary art at that time in Germany.
On the occasion of the building¿s centenary last autumn, the gallery was renovated and the collection re-hung. The paintings are now accompanied by texts from the same era. Lyric poetry by Goethe to Plato and Mörike to Hofmannsthaal recalls the intellectual cosmos in which Count Schack moved as a collector and man of letters and which he shared with many of the artists who enjoyed his patronage. The correlation between painting and literature, between the collector and writer, Count Schack, and the artists and the paintings in his collection is clearly underlined in this way.
The new Copy Room was also opened in the jubilee year, in which some of the copies of paintings that Count Schack commissioned from artists such as Franz Lenbach, after works by the Old Masters, can once again be displayed for the first time in decades.
Giorgione¿s and Titian¿s painting can now be seen in dialogue with the most important and famous works in the collection, the atmospheric paintings by Arnold Böcklin and Anselm Feuerbach, just as the founder, Count Schack, had envisaged.
Visitors gain an insight into 19th-century painting and intellectual thought which can hardly be felt so intensively in any other museum than in the Sammlung Schack.