Doerner Institute

The Doerner Institut is responsible for the restoration and conservation care of the holdings of the Bavarian State Painting Collections and the research of artistic techniques and materials as well as the development of physical-chemical methods for the investigation of art and cultural assets.

history

As early as 1932, Walter Gräff was planning an “examination and research institute for paintings and other works of fine art”. On July 19, 1937, the institute was founded as the Reich Institute for Painting Technology under the name “State Testing and Research Institute for Color Technology” (also “Factory Testing and Research Institute”) by Max Doerner , the landscape painter and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts was in Munich . It consisted of the departments of physical chemistry, painting technique and art history.

The task of the institute was originally to deal with the painting technique of the old masters and to reconstruct them in practical experiments. However, this work was interrupted by the Second World War. In 1946 the Doerner Institute was incorporated into the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen and, in 1977, united with its restoration workshops. As a result, the institute achieved world renown under Christian Wolters and Hubertus Falkner von Sonnenburg .

In 2008, the Doerner Institute played a key role in uncovering one of the biggest art forgery scandals since World War II. During a chemical analysis of the work Red Picture with Horses , which the painter and art forger Wolfgang Beltracchi sold as a work by Heinrich Campendonk , small amounts of modern titanium white were discovered, which did not exist at the time of Campendonk. The picture had previously been auctioned at the Cologne auction house Lempertz for 2.4 million euros.

ladder

1937–1939 Max Doerner
1939–1942 Adolf Ziegler
Heinrich Neufang
1964–1974 Christian Wolters
1974–1987 Hubertus Falkner von Sonnenburg
1990–2001 Bruno Heimberg
2003–2017 Andreas Burmester
October 1, 2017–2019 Andrea Funck
since August 1, 2019 Eva Ortner

literature

Andreas Burmester: Swastika flags on waste material. The Doerner Institute from 1945 to 1956 . In: Iris Lauterbach (Hrsg.): Art history in Munich 1947. Institutions and people in reconstruction . Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-9806071-4-8 , pp. 105–122.
Andreas Burmester: The fight for art. Max Doerner and his Reich Institute for Painting Technique , 2 volumes. Böhlau, Cologne 2016, ISBN 978-3-412-50376-5 .