Gallery view, Upper Gallery rooms, Room V
© Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich, Photo: Elisabeth Greil
Gallery view, Upper Gallery rooms, Room V
© Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich, Photo: Elisabeth Greil

Collection Presentation

Old Masters on the move

Alte Pinakothek
25.10.2022 — 29.03.2026
Upper Gallery

In rehanging the permanent collection display, about two hundred paintings have changed places. Throughout the Upper Gallery rooms, they now engage in new encounters opened up by unexpected contexts. Featuring dialogical juxtapositions and thematically arranged clusters of works, the new display invites visitors to rediscover familiar masterpieces.

For the first time in the history of the Alte Pinakothek, the traditional hanging scheme, developed along chronological and geographical lines, was consciously challenged, resulting in a considered reordering of the display. Many of the museum’s best-known works, previously shown in separate galleries far apart from each other, are now direct neighbours, despite belonging to different epochs and styles. Their unusual juxtaposition reveals hidden parallels and directs our attention to rarely thematized connections and shared qualities. This opens up new perspectives on the paintings and their creators, on the content and form of the depictions as well as on the contexts in which they were produced.

Eccentric. Aesthetics of freedom

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On the occasion of the ECCENTRIC exhibition at the Pinakothek der Moderne, the curators of the Alte Pinakothek have selected around 20 paintings that combine ‘eccentric’ qualities in very different ways, sometimes more, sometimes less obviously. Coloured buttons indicate the selection.

Artistic creation is defined again and again by innovative, sometimes even revolutionary achievements and by the liberal endeavour to transcend and shift boundaries. This applies not only to modern and contemporary artists, for whom we take this quality for granted, but also to the Old Masters. Many of their creations are characterised by an attitude that can be described as ‘eccentric’ - even if this term was not used in earlier times to describe exceptional works of art.

Thanks to their novel and often artificial character, numerous outstanding paintings from the late Middle Ages to the Age of Enlightenment push the boundaries of what was customary in their time in terms of motif or technique. In addition to daring innovations and exaggerations, this also includes provocation and rule-breaking - for example with regard to the form and appropriateness of the depiction. And in many cases, these works have lost none of the challenging and sometimes disturbing effect they had on contemporary audiences.

Short films are available for five works, which you can find here.

  • Gabriel Dette: Hieronymus Bosch (Nachfolger), Fragment eines Jüngsten Gerichts, c. 1515/20
  • Andreas Schumacher: Sandro Botticelli, Beweinung Christi, c. 1490/95
  • Elisabeth Hipp: zu El Greco (und Werkstatt), Die Entkleidung Christi, Between 1580 and 1595
  • Mirjam Neumeister: Peter Paul Rubens, Helene Fourment „im Brautkleid", c. 1630/31
  • Andreas Schumacher: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Die Verehrung der Trinität durch den hl. Papst Clemens, c. 1739

More Impressions

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