Albertinum Museum, Staatliche Kunstammlungen Dresden

We happened upon the Albertinum while wandering around Aldstadt Dresden on a drizzly, gray day. We still had a slight buzz from our breakfast of Freiberger Bier and hard-boiled eggs so a ditch inside a renaissance relic to see some art from the romanic period sounded lovely.

The Albertinum hosts an expansive amount of work in two main collections: The Galerie Neue Meister and the Skulpturensammlung. We had nothing but time, so we enjoyed ourselves and slowly made our way through both.

Happy and humbled to be in the midst of so many masterpieces I studied in school, it was the German Expressionist painter Otto Dix' haunting triptych of human suffering, "Trench Warfare" (1929-1932), that finally brought me to tears.

Another Dix favorite is his portrait "Dancer Anita Berger" (1925). His use of red is unlike anything I've seen before.

Another hit from the day, German Impressionist Max Slevogt's "Bathing House on the Havel River",

German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich's use of light is astounding. I fell completely in love.  "Schiffe im Haben am Abend" (1828)

Onto the contemporary art!
Dresden born Gerhard Richter. I especially loved his recent series of enamel painted on the back of glass, "Aladdin".

Sigmar Polke's "White Room" (1994). He used thin curtain soaked in eight layers of resin to make it a transparent base for his painting.

My favorite painting from the contemporary collection is Dutch painter Koen Vermeule's "Tokyo Dreamer" (2010).