From 13 September, the Frankfurt museum will be presenting two outstanding artists – Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) – in an exhibition that is the first in Germany to bring these key modern masters together. At the heart of the comprehensive presentation is the friendship between the two French artists which lasted for over forty years. Both painters shared a preference for the same range of subjects: interiors, still lifes, landscapes and the female nude. With a selection of more than a hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints, the exhibition opens a dialogue between Matisse and Bonnard and offers new perspectives on the development of the European avant-garde from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end of the Second World War.

After the successful conclusion of the extensive loan negotiations, the Städel is looking forward to presenting outstanding works from internationally renowned collections, among them the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the State Hermitage in Saint Petersburg and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

The selection of works is complemented by a substantial group of photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson who visited the artists on the French Riviera in 1944. A particular highlight of the exhibition are the two paintings the artists owned by one another, which will be shown together for the first time. Another highlight is Matisse’s “Large Reclining Nude” of 1935 – a key work which has not been on display in Germany for more than thirty years and which will be on loan from the Baltimore Museum of Art.