In the middle of the picturesque old town of Schaffhausen - housed in the grounds of the former Benedictine monastery Allerheiligen - the museum presents an important art collection with works from the 15th century to the present day, alongside evidence from the monastery's past. On display are works by Cranach, Hodler, Vallotton, Otto Dix and Adolf Dietrich, among others. With the Ebnöther Collection, the museum also owns one of the most important collections of antiquities in Europe. New media and interactive presentations provide modern access to the archaeology of the region as well as to Schaffhausen's urban and industrial history. With its extensive permanent exhibitions and regular temporary exhibitions, the museum sheds light on a wide variety of topics in an attractive and understandable way. Interdisciplinary special exhibitions encourage visitors to engage with current cultural and scientific issues. Like the monastery that used to be located here, the museum is a place of knowledge, culture and encounters. The name Museum zu Allerheiligen refers to the universality of the medieval monastery and expresses the diversity of the branches of knowledge represented here.
Otto Dix - Adolf Dietrich. Two painters on Lake Constance
With Otto Dix (1891-1969) and Adolf Dietrich (1877-1957), the exhibition at the Museum zu Allerheiligen Schaffhausen brings together for the first time two important modern artists whose works show surprising similarities despite their different lives. Both painters belong to the New Objectivity movement, which became the most influential movement of the 1920s thanks to the epochal exhibition at the Kunsthalle Mannheim exactly one hundred years ago. Otto Dix, a child of the big city, found himself in the rural idyll of the Lake Constance region after being dismissed as a professor at the Dresden Academy of Art by the National Socialists in 1933 - first in Randegg near the Swiss border and from 1936 in Hemmenhofen on Untersee. Here he began to paint landscapes. Adolf Dietrich, a self-taught artist, lived just three and a half kilometers away as the crow flies on the opposite side of the lake in Berlingen in Thurgau. The painter, who was deeply connected to nature, also found his inspiration in the simple landscapes of his homeland. The exhibition brings together the perspectives of the two artists on the same landscape area on Lake Constance and highlights various central aspects of their work.
Otto Dix, Matrosenbraut, 1921, Kunsthaus Zürich, gift Margarete Bachmann, Munich, 1958, photo: Kunsthaus Zürich, © 2025, ProLitteris Zurich
On around 500 square meters, 100 paintings, drawings and prints are presented. In addition to the landscape paintings by Otto Dix and Adolf Dietrich, which were created around Untersee, the south-western arm of Lake Constance, works from other art genres are also on display, such as portraits and self-portraits, depictions of animals and forests, as well as pictures created in the context of the two world wars. A total of eight thematically structured groups of works delve deeper into the connections and differences between the two artists. A 16-meter-long timeline uses text and images to place their biographies in the context of historical events from 1877 to 1969.
The exhibition is a voyage of discovery to two artists whose works are characterized by contrasts in origin and perspective, yet share common themes and challenges of their time.
challenges of their time. It reveals surprising elective affinities between two painters who, in their own way, shaped modernism in the art of their time and achieved great success. Not least for this reason, they were presented side by side in exhibitions several times in the years around 1930 - all the more reason to bring the two artists together in a comprehensive show.
April 5 to September 17, 2025
www.allerheiligen.ch
Adolf Dietrich, Girl with red coral necklace, 1932, Kunstmuseum Thurgau, Photo: Stefan Rohner, © 2025, ProLitteris Zurich
