Ludewig Collection
The Ludewig Collection is a design collection by the Berlin collector Manfred Ludewig. In 2010 it was acquired by the Klassik Stiftung Weimar . The collection includes over 1500 objects and groups of objects from the period from 1780 to the late 20th century from Germany, Austria, England, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Japan, Scandinavia, Switzerland and the USA.
The collection
The starting point of the 40-year history of the collection is the accidental discovery of a tubular steel armchair by Mies van der Rohe , which Ludewig made in the attic of his student apartment in an old Berlin building in the 1960s. This discovery led the architecture student (on the advice of his professor Wils Ebert , a former Bauhaus student) to the subject of Bauhaus and thus to a weakness for objects of modern living and industrial culture, in which technology, elementary form and functionality come together to form a harmonious whole. Ludewig became a design collector and was ahead of his time. Because while Bauhaus students and Bauhaus education were influential worldwide in the decades immediately after the Second World War , the Bauhaus and the harbingers of professional industrial design had to be rediscovered as cultural heritage.
The spectrum of the Ludewig Collection ranges from furniture from the early Biedermeier period to IKEA furnishings, from modern Braun household appliances to measuring devices from the early 18th century, from exclusive designs by the pioneers of modern design around 1900 to examples of material-appropriate mass production such as the bentwood furniture by the brothers Thonet and the glass and metal designs by Wagenfeld or the first stacking chairs made of plastic, from travel cutlery and folding sets from the 19th century to a Vespa from the 1950s.
The bundle of tubular steel forms the core of the extensive design collection. The value of this more than 30 tubular steel furniture from the 1920s, most of which Ludewig acquired firsthand, is now high. In addition to tubular steel furniture from the Dessau Bauhaus era , Manfred Ludewig carried other objects from the immediate vicinity of the Bauhaus, such as De Stijl furniture and constructivist works, as well as objects that demonstrate the parallel development of the consumer industry, especially in the field of electrical appliances such as radios and Lamps from the 1920s and 1930s, together.
Another focus of the collection is the extensive bundles of the 19th century, including furniture by Friedrich Gilly , Heinrich Carl Riedel , Karl Friedrich Schinkel , Edward William Godwin , Christopher Dresser , Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Richard Riemerschmid, as well as a Velociped from the car maker Pierre Michaux , but also anonymous designs, such as a Shaker rocking chair, glasses from the late 18th century from the Lauensteiner Glashütte, a carriage (single-axle) from the 1870s, large groups of tableware, household appliances and precious metals as well as technical precision instruments and handicraft tools that the Represent the connection between design and technology.
The list of represented designers includes names such as Peter Behrens , Jan Eisenloeffel , Josef Hoffmann , Archibald Knox , Adolf Loos , Koloman Moser , Adelbert Niemeyer , Joseph Maria Olbrich , Jutta Sika , Henry van de Velde , Otto Wagner , Frank Lloyd Wright , Herbert Bayer , Theodor Bogler , Marianne Brandt , Marcel Breuer , Erich Comeriner , Walter Gropius , El Lissitzky , Gebrüder Luckhardt , Gerhard Marcks , JJP Oud , Gerrit Rietveld , Mies van der Rohe , Wilhelm Wagenfeld , Alvar Aalto , Mario Bellini , Hermann Gretsch , Hans Gugelot , Arne Jacobsen , Margarete Jahny , Vico Magistretti , Ingo Maurer , Jasper Morrison , Isamu Noguchi , Christa Petroff-Bohne , Dieter Rams and Richard Sapper .
Availability
The Ludewig Collection is currently not on display. In the new building of the Bauhaus Museum Weimar , it will form a focus of the museum presentation in the future and expand the view of 200 years of applied art and design. The Duchess Anna Amalia Library keeps the typographical holdings of the collection .