The Art Newspaper

Germany sends art to China

By The Art Newspaper. Museums, Issue 192, June 2008
Published online: 01 June 2008

LONDON. The German state museum associations of Berlin, Dresden and Munich have sent works to the National Art Museum of China in Beijing for two exhibitions.

Over 60 pieces charting the history of German landscape painting over the past 200 years are currently on display in “Living Landscapes: A Journey through German Art” (until 2 July). The artist Gerhard Richter has also chosen 56 paintings for a touring retrospective on view in the same museum (until 2 July). Most of these are on loan from the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden.

This exhibition programme is part of a series of cultural exchanges established last year when the directors of the respective German museum bodies and the German Federal President Horst Köhler signed a cooperation agreement with the Chinese President Hu Jintao. Under the new arrangement, four further exhibitions will take place in Dresden and Beijing. These include a show of Chinese landscape paintings at the Schloss Pillnitz in Dresden on loan from the National Art Museum of China (28 June-31 October).

“Cultural exchange is, in our opinion, an indispensable instrument to help support democratic tendencies that have to be established in China in the future,” says a spokeswoman for the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich.

G.H.