Kaiser Wilhelm Museum
Coordinates: 51 ° 19 ′ 49 ″ N , 6 ° 33 ′ 34 ″ E The Kaiser Wilhelm Museum is the main building of the Krefeld Art Museum , which focuses on art from the second half of the 20th century. The building isprotectedas a monument of the city of Krefeld .
history
Already in 1872 the Krefeld suggested architect Hugo Koch to, rather than a still picture of Kaiser Wilhelm I , a museum to build. However, the time was not yet ripe for such ideas, and so a statue was created while the emperor was still alive , which was unveiled on June 27, 1880 in the city garden on St.-Anton-Strasse and destroyed by bombs in World War II.
After the death of the emperor in 1888, school board member Hermann Keussen took up Koch's suggestion again to build a Kaiser Wilhelm Museum for the maintenance of works of peace, art, education and morality . The proposal met with open ears in Krefeld, and within a few months the collections of the committee for the erection of a Kaiser Wilhelm monument reached a cash amount of 365,000 marks. Due to the sparse flow of donations in the beginning, it was feared that the project could not be financed. Therefore, some well-known Krefeld citizens were asked personally for a donation. Marianne Rhodius , Krefeld's wealthiest citizen, contributed 100,000 marks from her private fortune. By 1897, 400,000 marks had been raised by the citizens for the new building of the museum.
A dispute over the location of the museum was decided in 1890 in favor of Karlsplatz on the Westwall. From 1894 to 1897 the museum was built according to plans by Hugo Koch in the style of eclecticism . The construction management was the responsibility of the Leipzig city planning officer Burkart. The first director was Friedrich Deneken from 1897 to 1914 .
The stairwell of the museum was set up as a memorial hall for Kaiser Wilhelm I. The larger than life statue made of Carrara marble , which the Berlin sculptor Gustav Eberlein had created, stood in a niche on one landing of the grand staircase .
The resulting museum building cites the style of the palace architecture of the Italian Renaissance and functions as a hybrid of museum and memorial for Kaiser Wilhelm I.
On September 5, 1899 the inauguration of the museum and the unveiling of the statue took place in the presence of the Upper President of the Rhine Province , Berthold von Nasse ; Architect Hugo Koch became the museum's first director.
The museum, designed as a hall of fame around the imperial statue, quickly proved to be too small. In 1910–12 the north and south wings were expanded. In 1942 the museum was closed due to the war, but survived the war unscathed. In 1960 the museum closed; from 1966 to 1968 the museum was rebuilt. The large staircase was removed and replaced by a lighter, contemporary variant in the interior, the Kaiser Wilhelm statue was removed from the foyer and ceilings were suspended in the exhibition rooms. From 1969 the museum was accessible again.
The imperial monument, which was dismantled in 1966 and stored in the former hussar barracks, was re-erected on May 24, 1979 on the north side of the museum in the open air, where the statue, which was made on the soffit and whose back is not worked out as a niche figure, has since been completely out of place. Environmental influences such as acid rain and smears of paint let the statue deteriorate.
Between 2012 and 2016, the house was renovated again and equipped in accordance with international museum standards for climate and safety. The stairs had to give way to a new building. The ceilings were exposed again and the rooms were restored to their original proportions. On the second floor, the mural Age of Life by Johan Thorn Prikker with its depiction of the cycle of life was made visible again in 2015 . The artist had created the cycle in 1923 on behalf of the then director Max Creutz in Secco painting . In April 2016 the museum opened with the event KWM pur, in which the converted building was presented to the public for three days without art. On July 2, 2016, the museum was reopened with an exhibition entitled The Adventure of Our Collection I.
collection
In the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, works of art and installations from the collection of the Krefeld Art Museums are on display. The so-called Beuys block by Krefeld-born Joseph Beuys has a permanent place in the museum , a unique group of works made up of seven objects, which the artist himself combined to form an ensemble in 1984 and which has remained unchanged since then.
The graphic collection is also located here. In the Grafisches Studienkabinett, visitors can have sheets from the collection presented to them upon request.
literature
- Otto Kuntzemüller: The monuments of Kaiser Wilhelm the great . Bremen no year
- Yearbook of the district of Viersen , Viersen 1988
- Krefeld (ed.): Reconstruction of the city - Museum and Karlsplatz - Krefelderstraße and places I . Exhibition catalog, Krefeld 1990
- Home , No. 12, Krefeld 1933
- Die Heimat , No. 37, Krefeld 1966
- Annual reports of the Gustav Eberlein Research eV
- Silvia Martin: Kaiser Wilhelm Museum. Identity and Change . City of Krefeld, Kunstmuseen Krefeld (ed.), Geymüller Verlag für Architektur, Aachen / Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-943164-22-0 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Sylvia Martin: Kaiser Wilhelm Museum. Identity and Change . Ed .: City of Krefeld, Department of Marketing and Urban Development of the City of Krefeld, Art Museums Krefeld. Geymüller Verlag for Architecture, Aachen / Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-943164-22-0 , p. 16 .
- ↑ a b Art Museums Krefeld. In: www.kunstmuseenkrefeld.de. Retrieved May 30, 2016 .
- ↑ Max Creutz: The new monumental pictures Thorn-Prikkers in the Krefeld Kaiser Wilhelm Museum . , Art for everyone: painting, sculpture, graphics, architecture, March 1924, pp. 184–189
- ↑ http://www.rp-online.de/nrw/staedte/krefeld/eroeffnung-des-kaiser-wilhelm-museums-in-krefeld-vid-1.6092089
- ↑ FAZ of December 17, 2010, page 33: Beuys stays
- ↑ 2015-07-07: Art museums prepare exhibition of the graphic collection | City of Krefeld. (No longer available online.) In: www.krefeld.de. Archived from the original on June 3, 2016 ; accessed on June 3, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
