Main Building
This exhibition will present 125 prints by artists working during the late 18th-century and early 19th-century in the German-speaking regions of Europe, including Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Drawn entirely from the Museum's own collections, the exhibition will reveal the exceptional accomplishments of artists celebrated in the past, but little known today. The range of prints shown will include examples in the late 18th-century neo-classical style which was embraced so whole-heartedly by German artists. Many of these artists lived and worked in Rome, like Johann Christian Reinhart (1761-1847). Prints produced in the early 19th-century after the Napoleonic Wars show the influence of Albrecht Dürer (1472-1528), whose reputation was enhanced as German Romantic artists rediscovered the Gothic art from their own Medieval past. A remarkable print from this period is the Gothic Church in a Oak Grove of 1815 by the Romantic visionary Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841), executed in the new technique of lithography that had been invented in Germany in 1798. The final section will feature prints from 1850 by Adolph Menzel(1815-1905), the foremost Realist painter of the period. The exhibition can be seen in the Berman-Stieglitz Galleries and is one of an ongoing series that demonstrates the richness and depth of the Muriel and Philip Berman Gift of 42,000 old European prints.