Donation house
The donation house , built in 1518, is one of the oldest preserved secular buildings in the district town of Reutlingen in the southwest German state of Baden-Württemberg . It survived the devastating fire of September 1726, in which around four fifths of Reutlingen's building was destroyed, undamaged.
Originally used as a storage building for donations of mainly agricultural products until the middle of the 19th century , it has served as the central city art museum since 1989 after various other public uses (weaving school, city library, local history museum) . Among other things, works by woodcutters of the 20th century such as HAP Grieshaber , Wilhelm Laage , Werner Höll , Wolfgang Mattheuer and Ernst Wilhelm Nay are among the main exhibits of the art collection. The half-timbered building is located south of the market square between Spendhausstrasse and Lederstrasse on the medieval city limits.
History and historical use
The building was erected in 1518 as a municipal storage building for the maintenance of donations, a kind of support fund for the poor and citizens in need, and was primarily used to store agricultural products. The name Spendhaus can also be derived from this determination. The ground floor is a massive stone building made of natural rubble and has a barrel-vaulted cellar on the north side of the building, which is accessed through an arched portal on the east side, from Spendhausstraße, and served as a wine store. Above the ground floor there are three full floors in half-timbered construction, which protrude slightly from floor to floor on both gable sides. The strikingly high and steep gable roof comprises another three storeys plus a narrow level under the roof ridge.
The donation house retained its function as a warehouse well into the 19th century. In the 1840s, a room for the city's book collections was created on the ground floor. In 1858 the house was given a new use. The weaving school founded in 1855, the forerunner of the technical center for the textile industry and thus today's Reutlingen University of Applied Sciences , moved into four floors of the building, which had been converted for the considerable sum of more than 7,000 guilders according to plans by the building inspector Johann Georg Rupp . The first two upper floors had been converted into spacious weaving rooms, on the ground floor there was still a room for the city library, in addition to another smaller weaving room and the wooden store. A little later (1864/65) the weaving school was expanded to include a department for mechanical weaving; For which mechanical looms , a steam engine , pipelines were installed on the ground floor and on the outside of the building facing Lederstraße - a steam boiler house with a chimney pipe extending over the roof ridge. To improve the lighting conditions, four windows were installed on each of the long sides of the building. On the former fruit floors under the roof, additional rooms were set up for the commercial training school and a large drawing room for the later women's work school.
In 1871 the city of Reutlingen acquired the property rights to the building from the poor relief organization for 20,000 guilders. After the weaving school moved out in 1891, it initially housed the collections of the Natural Science Association, from which the Natural History Museum later emerged, and the recently founded Association for Art and Antiquity, which formed the basis of what would later become the Reutlinger Heimatmuseum . In 1898 the city library also returned to the ground floor, which was now reserved for it alone. In December 1934 the newly built Friedrich List Archive was added on the ground floor, which increased the space problems for the library. In the spring of 1935, the city undertook a major renovation of the house. The library's hope of expanding to the first floor, which became available in 1939 when the antiquities collection moved into the new local history museum, was not fulfilled; the rooms were already planned for home use by the BDM and the HJ . After extensive reconstruction and renovation work on the inside of the building in 1950/1951, the city library finally received a reading room and the first floor for shared use. On the third floor, additional exhibition rooms were created for the natural objects collection, and the attic, which was redesigned for presentation purposes, was henceforth the venue for numerous art exhibitions.
The rapid increase in library holdings led the city administration to look for more generous and permanent solutions for the library and museums in the early 1970s. In 1979 the local council approved the project of a training center along Spendhausstraße. In 1982 the demolition of the old houses on both sides of the traditional half-timbered building began. In the summer of 1985 the library moved to its newly constructed building, and in March 1987 the Natural History Museum also cleared the donation house. The former donation care fruit box was empty and the way was clear for a comprehensive renovation and conversion to the municipal art museum, which opened in 1989.
Use as an art museum
On October 15, 1989, the donation house was opened as the home of what is now the Reutlingen Art Museum (formerly: the Reutlingen Municipal Art Museum). In its collection activities, the museum is dedicated to modern woodcuts from the end of the 19th century to the present day. The renovation - awarded by the Baden-Württemberg Chamber of Architects with the Prize for Exemplary Building - has brought the early modern building with its venerable beams back to full advantage and at the same time created the conditions for a modern art museum. The building thus bridges the gap between the modern and contemporary art that is shown or stored there, back to the historical roots of the oldest print medium.
Collection strategy
The focus of the collection and exhibition activities of the Kunstmuseum Reutlingen is on artistic high pressure in the 20th and 21st centuries. This specific profile has historical causes; There were two wood cutters who stood out among the Reutlingen artists of the past century and whose works form the core of the collection: Wilhelm Laage (1868–1930) and above all HAP Grieshaber (1909–1981). During their lifetime, both artists made an individual contribution to making the woodcut a genuine medium of modern art and expanding its possibilities of expression in a variety of ways. In 1980, with the acquisition of 316 woodcuts, 26 painting letters and 101 drafts, watercolors, gouaches and drawings from the possession of HAP Grieshaber, an important bundle was acquired that shapes the collection to this day. In 1988, a foundation by Alfred Hagenlocher brought numerous works by Wilhelm Laage into the collection, and in 1989 almost all of the woodcuts by the Reutlingen artist Werner Höll were added to the collection. The museum also owns almost all of Wolfgang Mattheuer's printing blocks . The last major donation to date comes from the Hamburg collector Peter Kemna , who donated his important woodcut collection to the museum in 2004.
Through systematic acquisitions and the important foundations, a representative collection on the letterpress of the 20th century has been built up since the 1980s, especially in Germany, and is constantly being expanded. In the field of contemporary art, in addition to the work of German artists, the most important international tendencies are to be exemplarily documented.
Exhibition activities
Since 1989, numerous special exhibitions with historical and thematic content as well as with contemporary artists have taken place in the Spendhaus. For example, several presentations with works by the Dresdner Brücke artists Erich Heckel , Ernst Ludwig Kirchner , Hermann Max Pechstein and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff were shown. National and international artists such as Strawalde , AR Penck , Bettina van Haaren , Hartwig Ebersbach , Francisco Toledo , Armando , Lucian Freud , Shiko Munakata and Cees Andriessen were also presented in exhibitions. With a solo exhibition in 2016/17, the museum commemorated the Jewish painter Alice Haarburger from Reutlingen, who was murdered by the Nazis .
Other museum activities
The woodcutter association XYLON Germany has had its office at the Kunstmuseum Spendhaus since 1997 . The association has set itself the task of gathering the artistic forces in Germany who, in their work, have achieved a creative renewal of letterpress printing, in particular of woodcuts. The Jerg-Ratgeb Prize, originally founded by HAP Grieshaber and Rolf Szymanski, as well as the HAP-Grieshaber scholarship are awarded through the Municipal Art Museum Spendhaus Reutlingen.
Head of the Spendhaus art museum since 1989
- 1989–2005: Beate Thurow
- 2005–2019: Herbert Eichhorn
- Since 09/2019: Ina Dinter
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ après tout - your own feeling: Alice Haarburger on her 125th birthday . Municipal Art Museum Spendhaus Reutlingen, November 20 to April 2, 2017. Ed. Municipal Art Museum Spendhaus Reutlingen, Reutlingen 2016. With contributions by Herbert Eichhorn and Joana Pape. ISBN 978-3-939775-57-7 .
Coordinates: 48 ° 29 ′ 24 ″ N , 9 ° 12 ′ 39 ″ E