Dresden City Art Gallery

The Dresden City Art Gallery (Städtische Galerie Dresden – Kunstsammlung) is the municipal art collection of Dresden, Germany, housed in the city's Landhaus. It was formed by the 19th and 20th century artworks of the Stadtmuseum Dresden, split off from the Museum and given a separate display in 2000. In 2002, Dr Gisbert Porstmann became the founding director of the Dresden City Art Gallery, which officially opened in 2005.

The Dresden City Art Collection, which is located on the first floor of Dresden's city hall, was erected in 1770–1775 to the designs by the court architect Friedrich August Krubsacius and originally served as the conference building for the Saxon estates. Other nearby museums are the Dresden Fortress Museum and the Albertinum Museum, the latter hosting the New Masters Gallery of the Dresden State Art Collections.

The Collection of the Dresden City Art Gallery was established with the founding of the Society for the History and Topography of Dresden and its Surroundings in 1869. Its members had gathered evidence of bourgeois urban culture and purchased the first paintings. The emphasis was placed on portraits of significant personalities of Dresden's society, scenic views of the city and landscape paintings that depict the city's surroundings. For many years the fast-growing municipal collections were dispersed in various buildings until they were moved to the rooms around the atrium of the newly constructed city hall on 1 October 1910, where they remained before being relocated again during World War II.

Paul Ferdinand Schmidt, director of the municipal collections from 1919 to 1924, started to redesign the art collection completely. Schmidt's purchases were based on specific art-historical categories and included major works by Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Dix, Oskar Kokoschka, Kurt Schwitters and Lasar Segall. Schmidt succeeded in building up a world-class collection of German Expressionist art.

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