Academy of Fine Arts Dresden

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In 1764 the General Academy of Painting, Sculpture, Copperplate Engraving and Architecture was founded by the Elector, Friedrich Christian.
This was the successor institution to the first Drawing and Painting School, which had been established in 1680. Numerous well-known artists taught here, including Canaletto, Giovanni Casanova, Caspar David Friedrich, and Gottfried Semper, ensuring that the Academy enjoyed international recognition. The teaching of Oskar Kokoschka and Otto Dix established a long-lasting painting tradition in Dresden.
In 1950 the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts was merged with the State Academy of Applied Arts, the successor of the Royal Saxon School of Applied Arts, founded in 1875/76.
Each year, nearly 600 students attend the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts to study Fine Art, Art Technology and Conservation Science, Restoration of Art and Cultural Assets, Stage Setting and Costume Design, Theatre Setting and Costume Design or KunstTherapie (a postgraduate course in art therapy).
Courses take place in spacious studios, workshops, and seminar rooms at three locations. The Academy’s buildings on the Brühlsche Terrasse, Güntzstraße, and Pfotenhauerstraße have been comprehensively refurbished and now provide facilities which create an excellent study environment. These facilities include the Laboratory Theatre (a modern, practice-oriented stage test room) and the Octagon, a remarkable exhibition space used to study and present contemporary art. Founded in 1764 as a “Principal Academy of the Arts,” the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts is one of Europe’s oldest art academies.
The archive department manages the Academy’s art collection and written records. Part of the art collection dates back to the 18th century. It contains former sets of teaching material, graphic aids, and the significant Anatomy Collection, which has been preserved almost entirely. The other section of the Academy’s art collection consists of a substantial volume of student-created art and photographic material dating from 1947 and 1989. The archive department also holds written records on the history of the Academy and a small number of files from the former Academy of Applied Art archives.
Run as a reference library; this facility makes around 55,000 individual items and a total of 112 journal titles available to both Academy affiliates and interested outside visitors. Library users benefit from a regularly updated, well-structured media inventory focussing on the fields of art history, media art, painting/graphic art/sculpture, architecture, conservation, philosophy, costume design, and stage setting. Currently, under development, the media center provides technical equipment required for the use of new media. It keeps its own media collection, which essentially consists of artist résumés, art documentation, recordings of performances put on by performing arts classes, and documentation of in-house projects, conferences, and courses.
When the Academy has first founded, the students used the Royal Library. It was only at the beginning of the nineteenth century that an independent Academy Library was established. In 1894, when the Academy moved into the new building on Brühlsche Terrasse, the Library comprised 4,400 volumes.
On 13 February 1945, the Library was gutted by fire, and the whole of the modern book collection was lost. The historical collection had been removed and stored elsewhere and so survived intact. However, very little of the collection ever returned to the Academy, being transferred instead to the Central Arts Library of the State Art Collections in Dresden.
In 1990, thanks to special funding, the relatively low stock was rapidly expanded. The Library was modernized to bring it in line with contemporary library standards by implementing a new cataloging system and computerization.
Over almost 250 years, the Dresden Academy of Art has acquired an abundance of teaching materials, including the painting, graphic, costume, plaster cast, porcelain, and anatomy collection. As is often the case in similar old-established academies, many of these objects have acquired exceptional historical and museum value over the years. However, due to losses sustained during the war and other irreversible removals, the items that make up the individual collections have been significantly diminished or even completely lost. The majority of the so-called “Reception Pieces,” works of art (mostly paintings) donated to the Academy by each professor when they took up their posts and annually after that, have been given to the Dresden galleries.
Of the remarkable Plaster Cast Collection, only a few large sculptures, busts, reliefs, and fragments remain. The Academy also retains very little of the Costume Collection, which once comprised over a thousand items. The Academy‘s Graphics Collection also lost several valuable pieces during the war and in the post-war period, some of them being transferred to other collections after the war.
Apart from the remains of the historical collections, there are now more than 1,500 works from 1945 and 1989. Most of these are a final year and end-of-year pieces. Also, there is a fine graphics collection from the same period, which comprises around 6,000 items.
Among the most valuable objects in the Archives are the 232 folios from the estate of the Academy professor, Gottfried Semper. In 1999 the architectural drawings were returned to the Academy. The collection initially numbered 1,201 folios but was severely devastated due to losses sustained during the war. In addition to these, the Archives also houses valuable architectural drawings by Constantin Lipsius.

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