“Borders are not only artificial, they are senseless,” says Martin Roth, the director of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. “[Why] do we still think in national terms when our collections and our research programs are totally international?” It is a question Roth has been asking since he took over his post, in 2001. At the time, he recalls, the Kunstsammlung’s constituent museums hadn’t really changed since the fall—or, for that matter, the rise—of Communism.

In only seven years, Roth, 53, has brought the organization—which oversees 11 institutions, including Germany’s most prestigious Old Masters collection and Europe’s most famous porcelain museum—into the 21st century by dramatically expanding its connection to the rest of the world. He has been the driving force in creating a cooperative relationship among the Dresden collections, the Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin and Munich’s Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen. The three have begun to work in tandem with the new Dubai Culture and Arts Authority, which is planning to build an ambitious new museum complex based on the trio’s collective advice. Currently the German players are acting mainly as consultants, but Roth stresses that the Dubai institution may also serve as a home for future exhibitions including work from the three museum groups.

Dresden is now a model for globalizing a fine-arts institution, and Roth has become an ambassador for the idea of the universal museum, which is rooted in 19th-century Germany’s ambitious attempts to create public institutions covering the whole history of civilization. Miguel Zugaza, director of the Prado, calls Roth “one of the great defenders of the European museum identity.”

For his entire career, Roth has been breaking down borders of one kind or another. A Stuttgart native and a trained anthropologist who now splits his time between a Baroque apartment in Dresden and a high-modernist villa in Berlin, he first found his way across the East-West German divide, and into the museum world, in the early 1990s. Not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, he became director of the Deutsche Hygiene-Museum Dresden, an early 20th-century science museum in the former East Germany, which had languished under the Communists.

“Our identity was never German,” Roth says of West Germans of his generation, who grew up in the shadow of Nazism. “The only chance for an identity was to have an international one.” His internationalism is on ample display this month. His long relationship with the Palace Museum in Beijing led to an exhibition at Dresden’s Royal Palace that displays works from China’s imperial court alongside pieces created for the Saxon electors in their Baroque heyday. Meanwhile, the Prado is hosting an exhibition of Dresden’s Classical sculptures, and the J. Paul Getty museum is featuring highlights of the city’s Old Masters in a show about Renaissance and Baroque art from Bologna.

“This is a beautiful collection,” Roth says of Dresden’s stellar holdings. “Not Saxon, not German, but a beautiful international collection.” "Profile: Martin Roth"" originally appeared in the December 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's December 2008 Table of Contents.