Reiff Museum

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The Reiff Museum, 1902

The Reiff Museum was a museum in Aachen . The foundation of the museum goes back to Franz Reiff (1835–1902); because from the founding of RWTH Aachen in 1870 as the “Royal Rhenish-Westphalian Polytechnic School in Aachen”, there was also a painting professorship that was established in the architecture department; held the position (one after the other): Franz Reiff, Alexander Frenz , August von Brandis , Hermann Haas . The collection of works of art was used to train architects and art historians at the polytechnic technical university. The stock is only partially preserved today. A cartouche with the inscription Reiff-Museum indicates the building's original use. The original collection rooms on the 2nd floor have had a different use since the 1950s. The building houses the RWTH Aachen Faculty of Architecture. The collection has been stored in a cellar depot since 2012 and cannot be viewed.

founding

The portrait and history painter Reiff, born in Aachen in 1835, studied with Erich Correns and Carl Theodor von Piloty at the Academy in Munich . Between 1861 and 1884 Reiff exhibited in Cologne, Düsseldorf, Berlin, Dresden and the world exhibition in Vienna . After these initial successes, the appreciation of his works declined towards the end of the 1880s. Franz Reiff therefore made the decision to no longer wait for orders, but to award them himself, and so he decided to create a collection of copies based on old masters.

The Schackgalerie in Munich, which he has probably known since studying at the art academy, served as a model for his collection . Schack pursued the idea of ​​making paintings by old masters that did not exist in Munich accessible to the general public and dared to try to hang modern works next to the old masters.

Franz Reiff saw his own collection as an educational benefit for the university, as he could use the copies as teaching material in the classroom. The content of the picture and its interpretation was not so important to him, he wanted to train the students' “aesthetic sensibility”. In addition, he also wanted to increase the quality of his works by including them in the series of great masters and hoped for recognition as a collector.

Financially constrained, Reiff commissioned copies that matched his preferences for select Renaissance artists and 17th-century Dutch masters. Between 1900 and 1901 he ordered copies from Franz von Lenbach in Munich, who had already worked as a copyist for the Schackgalerie. By his death in 1902, Franz Reiff owned more than 200 copies, paintings, watercolors and drawings of the modern era, 23 of his own works and a collection of plaster casts, bronze and marble imitations. He kept a part of this art collection in his studio in the main building of the university and another part in a garden pavilion in his private house on Ludwigsallee.

Since 1899, Franz Reiff planned to leave the collection to the Royal Technical University of Aachen after his death. However, he had linked this with a number of conditions that had to be met within less than three years. In his will, Franz Reiff demanded a separate building in which his collection would be housed "in a dignified manner". The building was supposed to bear the name Reiff Museum, which can still be read today above the entrance portal.

A directory from 1902 estimates the total value of the Reiff collection at 119,281 marks.

Reiff Museum

Reiff Museum in 2014

After Franz Reiff's death in 1902, the then professor of art history, Max Schmid-Burgk , took over the collection. He tried to expand the collection in the direction of contemporary art.

The museum opened in 1908. It comprised 300 works of art, a number of which were copies by old masters for educational purposes.

After Schmid-Burgk's death in 1925, the Reiff Museum's collection was curated by August von Brandis , but it increasingly fell out of the field of vision of the university and the public.

Extensive sales of paintings from the museum's holdings in 1936/37, the effects of the Second World War (but no war damage to the collection) and the improper storage of the exhibits that were still preserved after 1945 led to a desolate state of a decimated and decimated campus in their collection, which is also endangered physically.

In 1977 the Reiffmuseum building was entered in the register of monuments by the Rhineland State Conservator : “Institute building of the RWTH, Schinkelstrasse 1-3 + Templergraben 51; Opened in 1908; 3 - storey neo-baroque sandstone building in 2 storeys above a high base storey and with an additional attic storey ; changed after 1945 ”.

Directors

According to § 3 of the rules of procedure for the Reiff Museum, the director and managing director is the professor of art history as proposed by the founder.

Virtual collection today

In 2005, Professor Alexander Markschies and Martina Dlugaiczyk founded a project seminar at the Art History Institute of the RWTH, which deals with the reconstruction, inventory and restoration of the estate.

Together with students of art history, it was possible to make the forgotten collection known again beyond the borders of the region and to bring the works of art still preserved from the cellars of the university back on display. Visiting the works was temporarily possible through guided tours that were planned and carried out by the students as a training module. On the occasion of the centenary, from December 2008 to April 2009, some of the old masters' painting copies were shown in the exhibition Exemplary - Painting Copies in a New Light. The Reiff collection presented as a guest in the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum .

literature

  • Martina Dlugaiczyk: Franz Reiff . In: General Artist Lexicon - International artist database online . DeGruyter (chargeable, registration required).
  • Martina Dlugaiczyk; Alexander Markschies (Ed.): Exemplary. Painting copies in a new light. The Reiff Museum of the RWTH Aachen . Deutscher Kunstverlag, Berlin 2008.
  • Martina Dlugaiczyk: From the 'Grand Tour en miniature' to the avant-garde 'special case' - the Reiff Museum at the Technical University in Aachen . In: Dominik Groß and Stefanie Westermann (eds.): From image to knowledge? Visualization concepts in the sciences (= studies of the Aachen competence center for the history of science 1). Kassel 2007, pp. 61-91.
  • Martina Dlugaiczyk: The Reiff Museum. Autopsy of a collection . In: Dominik Groß (Ed.): The Aachen Competence Center for the History of Science , Aachen 2006, pp. 91–100.
  • Martina Dlugaiczyk and Alexander Markschies: The Reiff Museum at RWTH Aachen. On the past and future of an academic institution . In: RWTH Topics: Architecture. Reports from the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen . Issue 1/2005, p. 77.
  • Martin Turck: The Reiff Museum of the Technical University of Aachen: academic art museum and contemporary avant-garde in the province . Publishing house and database for the humanities, Alfter 1994.

Web links

Commons : Reiff Museum  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Reiff Museum of the RWTH Aachen on university collections in Germany
  2. ^ Günther Borchers (Ed.): Landeskonservator Rheinland. List of monuments. 1.1 Aachen city center with Frankenberg quarter . Edited by Volker Osteneck with the assistance of Hans Königs . Rheinland Verlag, Cologne 1977, p. 27.

Coordinates: 50 ° 46 ′ 38.2 "  N , 6 ° 4 ′ 36.8"  E