DRESDEN.-In his day, August III (1696–1763), Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, was fascinated by the Bolognese school of baroque painting. In the grand manner, he acquired paintings by the most important artists of this period for his collection. Now, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and the J. Paul Getty Museum are to be joint organisers of Captured Emotions: Baroque Painting in Bologna, 1575–1725, an important exhibition offering a unique insight into this crucial period in the history of art, which opens in Los Angeles in December.

On the occasion of the visit to Dresden of James Wood, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, Dr Michael Brand, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, and Professor Thomas W. Gaehtgens, director of the Getty Research Institute, Dr Brand and Professor Martin Roth, general director of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden today (25.07.2008) signed the cooperation agreement for this exhibition. Twenty-seven masterpieces from the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden are the essential works that make this exhibition possible. They will be augmented and complemented by a further 17 works from the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (both in Los Angeles), the Norton Simon Museum (Pasadena), the Timken Museum of Art (San Diego) and a private collection. At the heart of the exhibition is the discovery of affect by the visual artists in the 17th century. They decisively developed the rhetoric of painting and succeeded in conveying the full range of human emotions in the gestures of the people they depicted: it is for this reason that the exhibition is entitled Captured Emotions.

At the signing ceremony, Martin Roth emphasised that cooperation on such a wide scale as this clearly demonstrates the unique potential of the ongoing collaboration with the Getty Center. The most recent exhibitions to be shown by the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden in Los Angeles were From Caspar David Friedrich to Gerhard Richter – German Paintings from Dresden (2006/07), and The Herculaneum Women (2007). For his part, Michael Brand underlined that this exhibition will be one of the three major exhibitions at the J. Paul Getty Museum during 2009.

He also stressed that it is specifically the great historical breadth of an institution such as the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden that makes it particularly attractive for comparatively young museums like the Getty Center, and that the public of Los Angeles is reaping the benefits.

The exhibition is curated by Dr Andreas Henning, conservator of Italian painting at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, and Dr Scott Schaefer, senior curator of paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum.