Lucas Cranach the Elder and Martin Luther have a lot in common. Cranach and his wife were witnesses at Luther's wedding, the painter from Upper Franconia portrayed the reformer several times, but looking back they both have one thing in common: their ideas and works live on to this day.
For the Luther Year 2017, in which we celebrate 500 years of the Reformation (see also "Martin Luther – up and down the country"), the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf also shows this survival. In more than 200 works, it presents the status quo of Cranach research with "Meister - Marke - Moderne".
Generously hung and divided into easily digestible chapters, the curators Gunnar Heydenreich and Daniel Görres have brought together works from all over the world. "Judith with the Head of Holofernes" (around 1530) comes from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the "Madonna with the Child" (around 1510) from the Breslau Cathedral, and "Melancholy" (1532) from the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar. or from the Saint Petersburg Hermitage "Venus and Cupid" (1509), the first secular nude depiction in the North.
They have also managed to reunite the fragments of the Prague Altar, for example, which are scattered across Europe today, and thus make a rare sight possible. The exhibition is rounded off by "Modernism", in which Cranach juxtaposes artists such as Picasso, Kirchner, Duchamp, Giacometti and Warhol, as well as contemporary positions such as those of Katerina Belkina and Yasumusa Morimura. A worthy, impressive exhibition.
