Media Kit Article: European Masters - The exhibition

• European Masters: Städel Collection 19th – 20th Centuries will come to the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) from one of Germany’s oldest and most respected museums, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt.

• The seventh exhibition in the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series, European Masters will bring together an astonishing collection of over 100 works by the greatest luminaries of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

• The Städel is one of the leading and best known art museums in Germany. With its rich holdings, the Städel museum presents an overview of seven major movements in European art.

• Visitors to the exhibition will be stunned by the quality and range of these masterpieces, which are on display for the first time in Australia and exclusive to Melbourne.

• The exhibition will present a superb survey of the key artistic movements of the time through the works of over 70 artists. Impressionism, Post Impressionism, Symbolism, German Expressionism and Modernism are all on display in this fascinating show.

• This exhibition brings together highlights of the Städel collection beginning with large-scale romantic German paintings from the late 1700s including Johan Heinrich Wilheim Tischbein’s Goethe in the Roman Campagna through to landscapes by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Gustave Courbet.

• It also presents beautiful Impressionist works by Monet, Renoir, Degas and Cézanne. A highlight of the exhibition will be a series of masterpieces by well-known German Expressionist Max Beckmann, which will leave the Städel for the first time to be shown together at the NGV.

• European Masters concludes with important paintings by other European masters whose works are rarely seen in Australia including Max Klinger, Edvard Munch, and Pierre Bonnard. Other highlights will include works by Delacroix, Picasso and Rodin.

• The exhibition will be on display at NGV International, St Kilda Road from 19 June until October 2010.