Georg Schäfer Museum

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Georg Schäfer Museum
Schweinfurt MuseumSchäfer.jpg
Loggia on the Main side,
with a southern entrance
Data
place Schweinfurt
Brückenstraße 20 Coordinates: 50 ° 2 ′ 38.1 ″  N , 10 ° 14 ′ 10.2 ″  EWorld icon
Art
architect Volker Staab
opening 2000
Number of visitors (annually) 45,000
management
Website
ISIL DE-MUS-751515

The Georg Schäfer Museum (MGS) is a museum of German art from the late 18th to the early 20th century in Schweinfurt . It houses the largest Spitzweg collection in the world and at the same time the most important private collection with works from the German-speaking area of ​​the 19th century . The museum is of national importance and comparable to the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin and the Neue Pinakothek in Munich. In 2011, the museum was included in the list of 200 highlights of German cultural travel destinations by a jury made up of editors from the Merian magazine and cultural workers .

The museum building was financed from privatization proceeds of the Free State of Bavaria and is owned by the Free State of Bavaria . The city of Schweinfurt is responsible for the museum. The collection of the industrialist Georg Schäfer is shown . It emerged from the collection-Dr.-Georg-Schäfer Foundation for German painting of the 19th century, with a focus on late rococo over the Classicism and Romanticism to Impressionism . The museum is one of the most important new museum buildings of the present, received architecture prizes and is part of a new city ​​ensemble , an entrée that leads from a bridge over the Main into the old town.

The museum

location

The museum is located on the north bank of the Main , at the entrance from the Maxbrücke to the old town , on the edge of the former Zurich castle district . This is where the bridge gate was located , the presumed founding place of today's National Academy of Sciences from 1652. The Georg Schäfer Museum is part of a cultural quarter, together with the city library in Ebracher Hof , the natural history museum , the small industrial museum in the spinning mill and the disharmony . A public underground car park of the same name is located under the Georg Schäfer Museum. The ground floor (mezzanine floor) of the museum is freely accessible, with a café, museum bookshop and lecture hall.

History of the museum

Mies van der Rohe:
Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin,
recourse to a design for the
Georg Schäfer Museum in Schweinfurt

As early as the late 1950s, the Karlsruhe architect Erich Schelling presented plans for a Schäfer Museum. A design by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1964, with a pillar-less, self-supporting museum pavilion in Fichtels Garten , a section of the northern ramparts, was not implemented because the city council did not want to cover the maintenance costs for the museum. This plan was finally implemented as the New National Gallery in Berlin. Because of Van der Rohe's relationship with Schweinfurt ( see also: Schweinfurt # Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Schweinfurt ), an exhibition with collages by Van der Rohe took place at the Museum Georg Schäfer in 2017 on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York .

Later, the city of Schweinfurt brought a new location into play, the Ebracher Hof , which dates back to the 16th century , and launched an architectural competition in the early 1990s, which was won by the Munich architect Alexander von Branca . The action of the city was later criticized as being hasty, as important prerequisites for the museum building, in particular the financing, had not been clarified.

The new Lord Mayor of Schweinfurt Gudrun Grieser (since 1992) had the idea of ​​solving two problems at once with the new museum building. Opposite the Ebracher Hof was the ruins of the technical town hall from the 1980s, where only the underground car park had been built. In March 1995 Grieser brought the new location in the underground car park into play for the first time, with little enthusiasm on the part of the Schäfer families. However, building it on top of the garage was less risky than converting the medieval Ebracher Hof. In addition, it was much cheaper and offered freedom of design. Grieser managed to convince then Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber of the idea in lengthy, persistent conversations . In 1996 it was decided to provide funds from the privatization proceeds of the Free State of Bavaria for the project. After the heirs had transferred the central part of the Georg Schäfers collection to a foundation on December 29, 1997 after the company crisis of FAG Kugelfischer had been overcome , the project could be realized. The Berlin architect Volker Staab emerged as the winner of a new architectural competition on February 1, 1997. Since the Free State's funds were only available for a limited period of time, Grieser commissioned Staab to immediately implement the competition design one-to-one on February 1, without any influence from the building administration or municipal committees. After two years of construction, the museum was opened on September 23, 2000. Ultimately, however, the town hall extension became unavoidable, which is why the city administration building directly opposite the museum, the three- story so-called Stadtkasse, was closed in 2018 and is to be replaced by a seven-story successor building by 2022.

Architecture and evaluation

The museum building is a major work of the Berlin architect Volker Staab and was built in the historic old town. The building, which has received several awards, is considered to be one of the most outstanding modern German museum buildings. In the artificial light rooms on the first floor there are temporary exhibitions and the skylight rooms on the second floor house the permanent collection. The staircase hall, modeled on the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, connects two loggias at the north and south entrances. This publicly accessible axis is part of a long sequence of squares, open stairs and courtyards, which stretches through almost the entire eastern old town from Martin-Luther-Platz via the market square and the inner courtyard to the Main Promenade.

  • Loggia on the main side

  • Stair hall

  • Skylight rooms on the second floor

The Georg Schäfer Museum (MGS) is part of a building ensemble that was awarded the Theodor Fischer Prize in 2007 . Together with the MGS, the only branch of the Bavarian State Social Court , the new main customs office and the new city library were built, some of which were integrated into the historic Ebracher Hof . In 2008 the ensemble was named one of the 24 best buildings in Germany by the German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt am Main . It shows "how tradition and modernity [...] unite in the most excellent way."

The collection

History of the collection

Schäfer had already inherited several old German paintings from his father of the same name, who died in 1925. Since the 1950s, he has invested a large part of the assets he had acquired with roller bearings in the collection, which found a home in his Obbach Castle . The Schweinfurt Museum received the core inventory of paintings and graphics from the 19th century. In 1988 the city of Schweinfurt and the Schäfer family agreed to set up a museum. But the plans had to be put on hold when FAG Kugelfischer got into a crisis that threatened its existence in 1993 and the collection was pledged to banks.

The original holdings of the Schäfer Collection are not completely identical to the paintings in today 's Dr. Georg Schäfer Foundation , which have been exhibited in Schweinfurt since 2000. Of the parts not transferred to the foundation, 42 old German paintings from the Dürer period were acquired in 2003 by the Free State of Bavaria for the art collections at the Veste Coburg . Further paintings from peripheral areas of the collection were auctioned at Neumeister in Munich (1999 and 2005) and Christie's in Düsseldorf (2000); the proceeds of these paintings were over 12 million euros. In 2005 the Schäfer family made a notable donation of paintings that had recently been acquired on the art market. The collection was curated by the Kiel art historian Jens Christian Jensen . The museum director was Sigrid Bertuleit from 2000 to 2014. Wolf Eiermann has been director of the museum since 2015 .

In addition to the Dr. Georg Schäfer Foundation in the Georg Schäfer Museum (MGS), there is another collection from Otto Schäfer's industrialist family . His library is one of the most important private libraries in the world and is part of the Schweinfurt Otto Schäfer Museum (MOS).

description

The Georg Schäfer Collection is the most important private collection with works from the German-speaking area of ​​the 19th century . The MGS contains the largest Spitzweg collection in the world, with the well-known works The Bookworm (around 1850), The Intercepted Love Letter (around 1855), The Cactus Friend (before 1858) and a total of 160 paintings and 110 drawings, which is why the MGS is also Spitzweg- Museum is called. All of the famous pictures by the Munich painter Spitzweg, with one exception, are in the MGS. The poor poet (1839) hangs in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich; due to a gift from his nephew, which means that even the most potent art collectors are denied access to this work.

Carl Spitzweg was enterprising, which is why he painted the bookworm , which was selling well, a second time in 1851, albeit with small discernible differences so that the new work was not mistaken for a copy. This copy hangs in the Central Library of Milwaukee today . In 1854 he painted a third copy, which is probably in a private collection.

  • Famous pictures of Spitzweg in the MGS

  • The bookworm
    around 1850

  • The intercepted love letter
    1855

  • The cactus friend
    before 1858

  • Well-wisher presents bouquet of flowers
    1870–72

The collection also includes works by Caspar David Friedrich , Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller , Carl Rottmann , Domenico Quaglio , Albrecht Adam , Wilhelm von Kobell , Fritz von Uhde , Wilhelm Leibl , Adolph Menzel , Franz von Lenbach , Hans Thoma , Heinrich von Zügel up to to Lovis Corinth , Max Liebermann , Max Slevogt , Max Beckmann and others.

In addition to changing exhibitions, the main focus of the permanent presentation is on 19th century painting from the German-speaking world, from late Rococo to Classicism and Romanticism to German Impressionism .

In 2009, the Georg Schäfer Museum received Edouard Manet's portrait of 28-year-old Émile Zola from 1868 as a counter-loan for three Lovis Corinths from the Musée d'Orsay in Paris .

For conservation reasons, the house's graphic collection is only made accessible to the public in special exhibitions.

Importance and evaluation

The collection is comparable with the collections of German art in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin and with the holdings from German-speaking countries in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich. The Schäfer Collection covers the same period and the same important representatives, in addition to those already mentioned, Arnold Böcklin , Anselm Feuerbach , Ludwig Richter , Carl Friedrich Schinkel and Johann Friedrich August Tischbein .

In contrast to some other art collections, such as the Würth Collection, the Schäfer Collection was never criticized as a randomly assembled collection without a focus.

Looted art

The provincial researcher Monika Tatzkow proved that at least 25 pieces in the collection are to be classified as looted art , the owners of which were expropriated in the Third Reich. Among them is Max Liebermann's painting "Martha Liebermann in an armchair".

As early as 2007, an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung drew attention to the problem in Schweinfurt. A new discussion developed in 2013/2014, fueled by the Gurlitt case .

In an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , Julia Voss criticized the fact that the new director Wolf Eiermann spoke of "provenance research" on the occasion of its introduction in 2015, but did not mention the term "looted art", although numerous works in the collection were from the holdings of the auctioneer Adolf Weinmüller , one of the largest Nazi auctioneers. The private Georg Schäfer Collection does not feel bound by the Washington Declaration of 1998, although the Bavarian state finances the construction of the museum and the city of Schweinfurt covers the running costs of the house. Voss concludes: "This permanent support from tax money can only be given to a collection that sees itself as public".

In 1998, 44 states and numerous organizations committed themselves in the Washington Declaration to the active clarification and restitution of such cases. The management of the Georg Schäfer Museum, however, emphasized that private collections were not affected by the Washington Declaration and repeatedly refused to return the affected pieces.

See also

literature

  • Jens Christian Jensen : Carl Spitzweg in the Museum Georg Schäfer Schweinfurt . Museum Georg Schäfer, Schweinfurt 2014, ISBN 978-3943017052
  • Jens Christian Jensen, Bruno Bushart , Matthias Eberle: Museum Georg Schäfer Schweinfurt. Explanations of the exhibited works . Museum Georg Schäfer, Schweinfurt 2002, ISBN 3-9807418-0-X .
  • Sigrid Bertuleit (ed.): Masterpieces of portrait art. From the entire inventory of the important private collection of 19th century art. Sandstein Verlag, Dresden 2010, ISBN 978-3-942422-03-1 .

Web links

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

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In and around Schweinfurt: 500,000. Visitor to the Georg Schäfer Museum. Retrieved February 22, 2018 .
  2. ↑ a b c d Schweinfurt-City-Culture-Topics. Publication of the Schweinfurter Tagblatt for the Handelsblatt and DIE ZEIT, May 20, 2009, pp. 3, 8, 9.
  3. ↑ Main-Post: Museum Georg Schäfer one of 200 cultural highlights , June 14, 2011
  4. ^ Art The art magazine: Mies van der Rohe. The collages from MoMA. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on March 1, 2017 ; accessed on February 28, 2017 . 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. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.art-magazin.de
  5. ↑ a b c Main Post, online edition from June 28, 2016: How to get a museum: 20 years of the Georg Schäfer Museum
  6. ↑ Schweinfurt City | Culture | Topics. Special edition of the Schweinfurter Tagblatt for the Handelsblatt and DIE ZEIT: The most beautiful entrée. P. 3, May 20, 2009.
  7. ^ Time Machine Architecture , Fourth Architecture Week of the Association of German Architects (BDA) in Schweinfurt 2008, p. 2.
  8. ↑ Olga Kronsteiner: Schäfer Collection auctioned. From: artmagazine.cc, March 3, 2005. Retrieved July 22, 2015.
  9. ^ City of Schweinfurt: Georg Schäfer Museum. Retrieved February 26, 2018 .
  10. ↑ a b c Gabi Czöpppan, Nele Husmann: New struggle for large pictures. On: focus.de, April 19, 2014. Retrieved July 22, 2015.
  11. ↑ Sonja Zekri : What an opportunity! In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , January 20, 2007, p. 15. Retrieved July 22, 2015.
  12. ↑ Julia Voss: No looted art? Provenance researchers wanted in Schweinfurt. The Schäfer Museum in Schweinfurt is in need of an explanation : It is supported with public funds, but does not feel bound by the Washington Declaration on Looted Art . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of September 9, 2015