An acquisition is never just an entry in an inventory ledger. It is a decision about what a museum considers worthy of collecting – and thus about how a city tells its art history. When Georg Treu acquired works by Auguste Rodin for Dresden’s sculpture collection in 1894, he backed an artist whose standing in Germany was by no means assured. The exhibition “Das große Drama. Auguste Rodin und der Streit um die Moderne” (The Great Drama: Auguste Rodin and the Dispute over Modernism) at the Albertinum takes this moment as its starting point.
As the Dresden State Art Collections explain, Treu wanted to show what sculpture in his own time could achieve. To do so, he looked to Paris, then a centre of artistic innovation. The first museum acquisitions of Rodin’s work in Germany – including works such as “The Age of Bronze” and “The Man with the Broken Nose” – were not merely additions to an existing collection. They shifted its chronological boundaries: the museum no longer collected only the acknowledged art of the past, but exposed itself to disputes over the present.
The present enters the collection
This was also a deliberate departure from the familiar model of the sculpture museum. The Albertinum had previously been closely associated with antiquity and plaster casts of ancient works. Rodin’s works represented a different conception of sculpture: not simply a self-contained, idealised figure, but physicality, surface and a deliberately visible lack of finish. What was regarded as innovation also challenged expectations of beauty and technical perfection.
Treu did not stop at Rodin. He also acquired works by Constantin Meunier, Albert Bartholomé, Alexandre Charpentier and Emmanuel Frémiet. The result was a collection that looked beyond national borders to French and Belgian sculpture. In retrospect, this seems like a determined embrace of modernity; at the time, it was a choice among many possible paths. A museum cannot represent an artistic development in its entirety. But it can give individual artists visibility, secure their lasting presence and place their work within an art-historical narrative.
The new exhibition makes this decision itself its subject. Its title promises more than a portrait of an artist, pointing instead to the disputes surrounding the concept of modernism. In its account of the exhibition, the Kulturstiftung der Länder emphasises that the innovations now regarded as canonical were by no means universally accepted when they first emerged. This is more than a historical irony: the canon, the selection of works considered particularly significant, does not come into being of its own accord. It is shaped by museums, critics, audiences, and political and social conditions.
The gaps in the success story
Yet such a narrative carries a risk. If the museum presents itself primarily as a bold discoverer of the art of its time, the history of its own collection can become a success story: a visionary director, a resistant public, and eventual vindication by art history. This explains how Dresden chose its modern art. But it does not automatically answer the question of which voices and perspectives were missing – or what conditions made it possible to build the collection.
That requires a different kind of research. Provenance research examines where a work came from, who owned it and the routes by which it entered a collection. The Dresden State Art Collections also document such work in their material on art ownership and art loss. This is not the same as assessing an individual Rodin acquisition: each object must be examined separately before specific statements can be made about its origins and the circumstances of its acquisition. Yet the principle applies to the entire collection. A work’s art-historical standing and its ownership history are different questions; neither replaces the other.
The Rodin exhibition thus brings a larger task into view. Collections do not simply preserve what an era has produced. They select, organise and confer significance – and their subsequent displays can affirm those decisions or question them anew. With Treu’s eye on Paris, Dresden became an early champion of a modern art that was still disputed at the time. How complete the resulting narrative is cannot be judged by the famous names alone, but also by whether the museum lays bare its choices and their limitations.
Original reviewed by the editors · 31 October 2026
