Art and Museum Library of the City of Cologne

Art and Museum Library of the City of Cologne
	; Entrance to the reading room in the Museum Ludwig (2010)
founding	1957
place	Cologne
ISIL	DE-Kn3
management	Elke Purpus
Website	www.museenkoeln.de

The Art and Museum Library of the City of Cologne (KMB) is one of the world's largest public libraries for modern art and photography with over 500,000 volumes. It emerged in 1957 from the libraries of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum and the Museum of Applied Arts . In August 2013, the library was included in the Red List of Culture of the German Cultural Council and classified in Category 2 as endangered .

Elke Purpus, who has a doctorate in art history, has been the director of the special library as the successor to Karl Stamm since 2004.

The library is open to the public and its holdings can be used in the two reading rooms (in the Museum Ludwig and in the Museum of Applied Arts).

The Council of the City of Cologne had decided at its meeting on 10 September 2009, in which to be built new building of collapsed on 3 March 2009 the Historical Archives of the city on Eifelwall not far from the University of Cologne , the Art and Museum Library and the Rheinische Bildarchiv accommodate . On July 18, 2013, the administration was commissioned by the Cologne City Council to continue the plans for the new building of the historical archive with the Rheinisches Bildarchiv on the Eifelwall property without the art and museum library.

history

Museum Ludwig: The reading room is behind the windows on the first floor, in May 2009.

The library emerged in 1957 from its two predecessor libraries, the library of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum and that of the Kunstgewerbemuseum (today the Museum of Applied Arts). In the 1960s, the holdings of this new library were cataloged. The late cataloging offered the opportunity to record the entire library inventory in a project that was unique at the time in cooperation with the German Computer Center in Darmstadt using EDP . The KMB did important pioneering work in this area in Germany.

In the 1970s, the library was divided into three locations due to lack of space. The administration moved to Columbastrasse, the reading room remained in what was then the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum and parts of the magazine and the bookbindery were relocated to Kattenbug, where both and the administration are still located today. A separate building was planned for KMB, but the project stopped again after construction began. The German Research Foundation began to fund the collection priorities .

In 1974 the Rheinische Bildarchiv was organizationally attached to the KMB. Since 2012, it has been directly subordinate to the Head of Culture.

At the end of the 1970s, the Bruno Uhl Library of the German Society for Photography and the library of the Agfa Photo Historama were given to KMB .

In 1986, another reading room was set up in the new building of the Museum Ludwig.

In 2000 the entire library catalog was put online. This made it one of the first German art libraries whose entire holdings (with the exception of the auction catalogs) can be researched online at any time.

In 2005, KMB took over the libraries from George Brecht and Bernard Schultze , and in 2006, as part of the 50th anniversary of Museum Ludwig, Irene Ludwig handed over her working library to KMB.

In 2010 the library was threatened with closure and destruction of its holdings due to austerity measures by the city administration. The Association of Friends of the Art and Museum Library called for a collection of signatures to make clear to the politicians in charge of the need to preserve the KMB. On the occasion of the funeral of the patroness Irene Ludwig, who died at the end of 2010, Mayor Jürgen Roters ended the discussion about the closure and announced the decision about the library's holdings.

Competition winner Felix Waechter explains his design.

Since 2009 it was planned to plan a new building for the destroyed historical archive in the Neustadt-Süd district for joint use with the KMB and the Rheinisches Bildarchiv. The architectural design by Waechter + Waechter in Darmstadt, which emerged as the winner of a competition in 2011, envisaged around 10,400 square meters of usable space for the library.

In 2014, the City Council of Cologne finally decided to build the new historical archive with the Rheinische Bildarchiv, but without an art and museum library.

In May 2015, the City of Cologne and the University of Cologne signed the agreement adopted by the Cologne City Council in December 2014 for the joint operation of the “Central Library for Art and Art History”. A solution to the space problem is still being sought.

Duration

The inventory comprises approx. 413,000 volumes, including approx. 800 current magazines and museum periodicals , approx. 45,000 auction catalogs , approx. 40,000 volumes on photography and film and approx. 33,000 volumes on applied arts (as of April 2008).

Old stocks

Despite a primary focus on modern art, the KMB contains seven incunabula , 100 prints from the 16th century, 140 prints from the 17th century and correspondingly more from the 18th and 19th centuries, some from the basic inventory and some from gifts to the library .

use

The holdings can be used in the two reading rooms. In the reading room in the Museum Ludwig you will find literature on fine arts from the Middle Ages to the present day, in the reading room in the Museum of Applied Art the holdings on the applied arts and photography are displayed. Parts of the inventory have been outsourced due to lack of space, but can be ordered in the reading rooms. Since the end of 2008, journal articles can be ordered from the Subito document delivery service.

Collection focus

The main focus areas of the KMB funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft are “Fine arts of the 20th and 21st centuries”, “Art of the BeNeLux countries” and “Image achievements of photography and film”. A study by the DFG revealed that the holdings in the main collection areas were 45 percent unique in Germany. The KMB also collects inventory, exhibition and auction catalogs.

Fine arts of the 20th and 21st centuries

After a donation from Peter Ludwig to the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, the KMB increasingly began collecting literature on modern art. Due to the resulting focus, the KMB was commissioned by the DFG in 1972 with this collection focus for the distributed specialist library art history within the framework of the working group of art libraries. Thanks to a large network of galleries, art associations, museums, etc., a large number of publications, including a large number of gray literature , can be collected.

Art of the BeNeLux countries

When determining the focus of the collection in the working group of the art libraries, geographically grown structures were taken into account in addition to content. In addition to the good art holdings of the Cologne museums in these countries, the geographical proximity to the countries of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg also supported the award of this collection focus to the KMB.

Image performances of photography and film

By handing over the Bruno-Uhl-Bibliothek of the German Society for Photography as permanent loan to the KMB (today with an inventory of over 8,000 volumes) and the library of the Agfa-Foto-Historamas, which came to the KMB with approx. 2,500 volumes, the foundation for one of the world's largest publicly accessible photography libraries was laid. In 1978, for example, the KMB was expanded to include the collective focus “Image achievements in photography and film”, which has been funded by the DFG since 1976. The holdings for this focus are growing by about 2,500 volumes annually through foundations, donations and acquisitions with the support of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and currently (2007) comprises over 40,000 volumes. In addition, the KMB has 1,255 journals on the subject, 82 of which are ongoing subscriptions.

Further focus areas

Inventory and exhibition catalogs

The library has a large collection of national and international inventory and exhibition catalogs. Catalogs from Cologne in particular are collected and archived.

Auction catalogs

The library has over 45,000 auction catalogs from the 19th century to the present day, although these are not listed in the KMB catalog.

Applied arts

Due to the close affiliation to the Museum of Applied Arts, the inventory of literature on the arts and crafts has been and is particularly maintained.

Special exhibitions

2016: Takeover of drawings. Artist books by Rolf Jahn
2016: Heroes' Books, Iron Books, Honor Chronicles . Books as monuments of the First World War
2017: Thomas Kling . Double exposure
2017: Helga Elben. Gods, heroes and other people
2017: Alternative facts. Artist books by students at the Alanus University for Art and Society
2017: The STOLPERSTEINE project . An art monument as a citizens' movement
2017/18: Every year again ... Designed cards for Christmas and the New Year from the Barbara and Horst Hahn collection
2018: All around the point. Book art from the Julia Vermes collection on dot, circle, hole.
2018: nothing fundamentally unrecognizable; only the unknown. Steffen Missmahl artist books, notebooks & boxes.
2018: multifaceted and unexpected. Book form. Artist books and objects by Friederun Friederichs.
2018/19: Christoph Mauler. Gesture Film Figur - Works from the Archive Artist Publications.
2019: Reconstruction of the universe. Contemporary Russian artist books
2019: big data. Book art by students at the Alanus University for Art and Society
2019: Wienand. Art in books since 1949.
2019/20: Gerhard Rühm . In the beginning was the Word. Books of a special kind
2020: island world. Book art from the Julia Vermes collection
2020: Fuhrwerkswaage Kunstraum "The only thing that remains". Catalog series and individual editions from the first 40 years.