From the Heydt Museum

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Von der Heydt-Museum in the cityscape of Wuppertal-Elberfeld (2008)
Entrance to the Von der Heydt Museum (2008)

The Von der Heydt Museum is an art museum in Wuppertal - Elberfeld , which was founded in 1902 as the Elberfeld Municipal Museum . Since 1961 it has been named von der Heydt in memory of the banking family that was important for the promotion of the museum. The museum's collection includes paintings , sculptures , graphics and photographs from the 17th century to the present day. One focus of the collection is French painting of the 19th century and modern art . During the time of National Socialism, numerous works in the Von der Heydt Museum were confiscated as degenerate art and subsequently sold or destroyed. Further paintings and drawings are war losses. After the war, however, gaps in the inventory could be closed again. Since the early 1990s, the museum's activities in the area of ​​special exhibitions have increased. Some of these aroused national interest. The Wuppertal Art and Museum Association also runs the Von der Heydt art gallery in the Barmer Hall of Fame .

history

prehistory

The Barmer Kaiser Wilhelm Hall of Fame around 1900

The Von der Heydt Museum has a tradition deeply rooted in the 19th century, which shaped its foundation and growth. The foundation of the Barmer Kunstverein in Barmen in 1866 , in which art-interested industrialists organized themselves, is considered to be the beginning of the history of the museum . From 1900 this association had its headquarters in the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Ruhmeshalle , which was rebuilt after the Second World War as the House of the Barmen Youth and whose part Barmer Kunsthalle is still used as Von der Heydt-Kunsthalle for side exhibitions of the museum. The focus of the collection was on Dutch Baroque painting and the Düsseldorf School of Painting . In 1907 Richart Reiche took over the chairmanship of the Barmer Kunstverein and changed the focus of activity to modern art. In 1910 he organized an exhibition of works by the Neue Künstlervereinigung München , subsequently showing works by Franz Marc , Edvard Munch and Emil Nolde .

At the same time, the Elberfelder Museumsverein was founded in 1892 with the aim of setting up a municipal museum in Elberfeld. One of the founding members was the banker August von der Heydt , who was one of the driving forces behind the establishment of a museum. Three years after its founding, in 1895, the Elberfelder Museumsverein rented a floor in Schwanenstrasse 33, behind the former town hall, at the suggestion of the Heydts, to host exhibitions of contemporary art there. Together with his brother-in-law Julius Schmits, von der Heydt took over the guarantee for the rent of these rooms. In 1896 the city of Elberfeld granted the museum association a grant of 3,000 marks per year to maintain exhibition activities and to purchase works of art. In return, the city secured a say in new acquisitions. In 1898 the city handed over the Carl Erbschloe collection, which it had inherited , which comprised 77 paintings and 230 handicraft objects, to the Elberfeld Museumsverein. Further donations and purchases expanded the collection.

Foundation of the museum and first years

The exhibition rooms on Schwanenstrasse quickly became insufficient to offer enough space for the growing collection. On April 7, 1901, the city council decided to give up the old town hall for reasons of space. The building that became vacant was then to be converted for use as a museum. On March 9, 1902, the Elberfelder Museumsverein appointed the art historian Friedrich Fries , who came from the Städel in Frankfurt am Main , as the museum's first director. The Elberfeld Municipal Museum was opened in the former town hall on October 25, 1902. In the first exhibition, Fries presented works of art from private collections from the city in addition to the museum's holdings.

Fries was taken over as a municipal civil servant the following year. In addition, the establishment of a municipal museum commission was decided. In it sat the mayor, three city councilors, Fries and three representatives of the museum association. At the beginning, Fries' work focused primarily on 19th century landscape painting . He also placed an emphasis on early realism , acquiring works by artists such as Carl Blechen , Louis Ferdinand von Rayski , Wilhelm Leibl and the Barbizon School . He placed those from the Dutch Baroque alongside these paintings. Together with members of the Elberfeld Museum Association, Fries was able to expand the museum's collection in the field of paintings, but also sculpture and graphics. In the first few years August von der Heydt kept out of the museum's interests as far as possible. This changed in 1905 when he was elected chairman of the museum association. Between 1905 and 1914, August von der Heydt, together with Carl August Jung, also donated ten paintings by the Elberfeld artist Hans von Marées and three by Ferdinand Hodler , who was still relatively unknown in Germany at the time, to the Elberfeld Municipal Museum . With these donations, von der Heydt also backed Fries, who was exposed to great criticism for an exhibition of works by Marées in 1904, for example. From 1913 the director was able to permanently show contemporary art in a room in the museum, which August von der Heydt made available on loan. The expressionist works were controversial. In general, parts of the museum association were skeptical of the new art. They feared that with his rejection of the Düsseldorf School of Painting and these collections, Fries would endanger the work of the association up to then.

August von der Heydt, his brother-in-law Julius Schmits and other Elberfeld citizens took up the impetus of the exhibitions of contemporary art by the Barmer Kunstverein and acquired landscapes by the French Impressionists and the Fauvists , among others . Von der Heydt acquired the painting Acrobat and Young Harlequin by Pablo Picasso in 1911 , which became the artist's first work in a German museum. The museum also turned to this art in its exhibition activities, for example with the highly acclaimed Courbet exhibition and the development of modern French painting in 1907. With it, the museum established the breakthrough of the latest French art with the public. Due to the rapidly growing collection, the museum was expanded in 1913 in a commercial building behind the town hall. In 1915 the museum was renamed Kaiser Wilhelm Museum , but was given its original name back after the end of the First World War and the November Revolution in 1918.

As a result of the merger of the cities of Elberfeld and Barmen to form the city of Wuppertal in 1929, the museum was renamed the Städtisches Museum Wuppertal . In that year Friedrich Fries gave up the office of director. His successor was Victor Dirksen , who in 1931 also succeeded Richart Reiche as chairman of the Barmer Kunstverein. He subsequently directed both the museum and the Hall of Fame, which continued to host exhibitions of contemporary art. After August von der Heydt died in 1929, his wife Selma had given the museum 15 important works from the heritage.

time of the nationalsocialism

During the National Socialist era , many works in the museum's collection were classified as degenerate art . In the Degenerate Art campaign of 1937 and 1938, the National Socialists confiscated 56 paintings and 355 graphic works in the Wuppertal Municipal Museum, and 85 works in the Barmer Hall of Fame. The museum lost such important paintings as Picasso's acrobat and young harlequin or Lyonel Feininger's archipelago cruiser . Other losses included works by Max Burchartz , Maurice de Vlaminck , Ewald Platte , Eduard Dollerschell , Max Peiffer Watenphul , Lyonel Feininger, Otto Weber , Paul Wellershaus and Wilhelm Nagel . The Picasso was auctioned off at the Galerie Fischer auction in Lucerne in 1939 to obtain foreign currency. The contract was awarded Roger Janssen from Brussels for 80,000 Swiss francs. The works donated by Selma von der Heydt after her husband's death were returned to her to protect against confiscation. However, the majority of them were lost when their home was destroyed in a bombing raid in 1943. To compensate for the losses suffered in the course of the Degenerate Art campaign , Eduard von der Heydt left his collection of Indonesian textiles on permanent loan to the Wuppertal Municipal Museum. It was the beginning of his increased donations to the museum, which took on greater proportions, especially after the war, after he had previously mainly supported the Berlin National Gallery .

There were also other additions to the collection, especially in the area of ​​19th century art. During the occupation of France in World War II , the Wuppertal Museum was also active on the local art market and acquired some paintings. Their provenance has not been clarified, so that it cannot be ruled out that they came from formerly Jewish property. In 1943, the museum's holdings were relocated to the Ehrenbreitstein Fortress in Koblenz to protect against air raids . During the bombing raids on Wuppertal on June 25, 1943, the museum building was also badly damaged.

In the Ehrenbreitstein Fortress, other works of art were confiscated or lost for other reasons. Overall, the Städtisches Museum Wuppertal lost 1680 paintings during the National Socialism due to the persecution of art and the war, of which 531 are considered destroyed. The graphic collection lost 1538 sheets, the sculpture collection 67 works. The paintings acquired in occupied France were returned by the French occupiers, but their original owners have not been identified. The paintings seized by the French art commissioner included works by Eugène Delacroix , Gustave Courbet , Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Pierre-Auguste Renoir .

post war period

After the end of the Second World War, the first exhibitions and lectures were held in the museum building in December 1945, but the official reopening did not take place until 1950. In 1947 the Barmer Kunstverein and the Elberfelder Museumsverein merged with their collections to form the Wuppertal Art and Museum Association , which was headed by Victor Dirksen and Klaus Gebhard . The association tried to rebuild the collection of modernism. Since the end of the war, Eduard von der Heydt has also increasingly contributed to the reconstruction of the collection with donations. In 1952 he agreed with the city of Wuppertal that all previous and future permanent loans should become the property of the city after his death and thus be permanently available to the museum. This donation also marked the end of Dirksen's tenure as director. In 1953, Harald Seiler Dirksen succeeded him as director of the museum. In 1962 he was replaced by Günter Aust . Under the leadership of Seiler and Aust, the collection was further developed without the museum's premises and technical facilities being able to keep up.

Eduard von der Heydt also got on well with Seiler as director and he continued his efforts to run the museum. In the years that followed, until his death in 1964, he also donated other works. As a result of von der Heydts' commitment, the collection was considerably strengthened, especially in the area of ​​19th century French art. In addition, Eduard von der Heydt set up a foundation that enabled the museum to make further new acquisitions. He saw his commitment as a continuation of his father's efforts. He emphasized this fact in 1955, for example, when he asked the reluctant director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle to return a still life by Paula Modersohn-Becker , which had been loaned to the museum, in order to make it available to the Wuppertal Museum. Eduard von der Heydt justified this step explicitly by saying that it had complied with his father's wish. In 1961, out of gratitude to the museum's most important donors, who contributed around 300 works to the collection and made many more available as temporary loans, it was renamed the Von der Heydt Museum in 1961. This was justified with the international reputation of the house, which is mainly due to the commitment of the von der Heydts. At the same time, concerns that other patrons would be deterred by this step were refuted with the note that no other patrons to the extent of the von der Heydts had made any contribution to the museum until then. The institution still bears the name Von der Heydt-Museum today.

During Günter Aust's tenure there were considerations to build a new museum building. For this purpose, the Wuppertal Art and Museum Association collected the so-called museum penny, with which the construction was to be supported and which were used to co-finance various planning phases. Several places for a new building were up for discussion and were evaluated by six architects from the museum association. In September 1969, the city council decided to build a new building next to the theater . Before the planned architectural competition, however, there was a hearing from museum experts, which unearthed different ideas about the purpose and use of a museum. While Aust took a more pragmatic approach to a museum, some of the experts at the January 1970 hearing had very progressive ideas about keeping the visitor the focus. Bazon Brock proposed a very variable, rapidly changing exhibition concept, which, however, was perceived by the media as conservative and contributed to the uncertainty. In February 1970, the planning was therefore temporarily suspended. The Wuppertal culture committee asked Aust for a detailed spatial planning as a basis for the continuation of the planning and the announcement of the competition. The director presented this plan in November 1970. Due to the city's tense financial situation, however, there were no further steps towards new construction. Instead, thought was given to converting the existing building. In 1973, the city council was presented with architectural proposals for the renovation, financed with the museum penny. Until 1978, however, no funds were available for the implementation of this now favored option. Nevertheless, in 1974 the city revoked the decision to rebuild the old building. Ultimately, various options for the renovation were considered in 1984 and the work itself was planned for the period 1985 to 1989 in the investment program. In March 1985, several architects presented their concepts and Busmann + Haberer were awarded the contract. On April 1, 1985, Aust resigned from his position so that his successor as director could influence the planning.

Younger story

The collection was expanded under the direction of Günter Aust, but the spatial and technical problems of the museum persisted. Sabine Fehlemann , who took office in April 1985, was appointed to succeed Aust . She came from the Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach , where she worked primarily in the field of contemporary art. Therefore, with her change there was also the fear that she might overemphasize contemporary art in her work at the Von der Heydt Museum. She made her debut in Wuppertal with an exhibition on Henri Laurens . In doing so, she placed herself in the tradition of the museum and continued it in the following years of her tenure.

After she took office, the final planning for the renovation and modernization of the museum building began. In 1986 the museum was closed for construction work, and the modernized building could not be reopened until March 25, 1990. The cost was 25.4 million marks. During the construction period, Fehlemann sent the museum's collection to special exhibitions in different parts of the world, where between 1986 and 1988 over a million museum visitors saw the works from the Von der Heydt Museum. In the 1990s and 2000s, the collection grew thanks to a number of significant donations. In addition, Fehlemann succeeded in bringing some of the paintings that were confiscated during the National Socialist era and lost from the collection back to the Von der Heydt Museum. At the same time, exhibition activity was increased. However, this was mainly due to the commitment of sponsors, as the city of Wuppertal has not provided a budget for the purchase of works of art since 1994. The Renate and Eberhard Robke Foundation has supported the Museum von der Heydt with funds for the purchase of contemporary art since 2005, and the Heinz Olof Brennscheidt Foundation has been promoting exhibition activities since 2003 . During her tenure, Fehlemann organized a total of 232 special exhibitions, of which 133 were dedicated to living artists, while the city's budget for exhibitions was falling.

Caspar Netscher , Lady with a Parrot at the Window , 1666.

In the area of ​​the permanent exhibition, too, innovations were introduced under Fehlemann. Instead of a rather static exhibition, there was an annually changing presentation of around 200 works of art. She also established the museum shop and new events such as museum nights. In 2004 the Wuppertal City Council restituted one work each by Hans von Marées , Adolph Menzel and Otto Scholderer , which had been acquired at Jewish auctions during the Nazi era, although Fehlemann was reluctant to take this decision. She refused the returns as not legally, but merely morally justified. In 2006 Gerhard Finckh replaced Fehlemann as director of the Von der Heydt Museum. He continued the work of his predecessor, especially in the area of ​​temporary exhibitions. At the end of 2012, the museum and the city of Wuppertal agreed that the museum would continue to be operated as a municipal facility and that an appropriate building would be made available to it. However, city treasurer Johannes Slawig declared that the number of full-time employees should decrease from 25 to 19, which will be compensated by the commitment of volunteers. The theater was once again brought up for discussion for the museum in the old town hall of Elberfeld, which was reaching its capacity limit .

In February 2014, the City Council of Wuppertal decided to restitute Caspar Netscher's painting Lady with a Parrot at the Window , which originally belonged to the collection of the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and which the National Socialists had sold to the Belgian collectors Hugo and Elisabeth Jacoba Andriesse in exchange for foreign currency . After the Andiessens fled to the USA, the Nazis confiscated the painting for the second time in 1942. It was added to the collection of the Von der Heydt Museum in 1952 through a donation by Rudolf Ziersch . The museum cooperated with the Andriesse community of heirs, who put the painting up for auction in order to use the proceeds for charitable purposes. The painting was auctioned on June 4, 2014 at Christie's in New York . With a result of $ 5.09 million, the estimated price, which lies between $ 2 and 3 million, was exceeded by far and a new record was set for Netscher.

List of museum names

  • 1902–1915 Elberfeld Municipal Museum
  • 1915–1918 Kaiser Wilhelm Museum
  • 1918–1929 Elberfeld Municipal Museum
  • 1929–1961 City Museum Wuppertal
  • since 1961 Von der Heydt Museum

List of museum directors

architecture

The museum building, formerly the town hall of Elberfeld (now part of Wuppertal)

The museum building of the Von der Heydt Museum is the old Elberfeld town hall. It is located in the Elberfeld pedestrian zone on Turmhof street at the corner of Wall . Its design came from the architect Johann Peter Cremer . The foundation stone was laid in 1828, in 1831 the building could be occupied by the city administration and was then completed in a second construction phase from 1839 to 1842. The building was built in the classicism style. The facade is made of sandstone , the cuboids of which have uniform layer heights on the ground floor and changing heights on the upper floors. It is structured horizontally by strong cornices . The first two floors are structured by blind arcades as the dominant architectural element. The third floor is also characterized by arcades, the position of which is narrower than on the lower floors. The facade of the building is closed at the top by a coronation cornice and an iron grille. The ceiling construction consists of cross and socket dome vaults . There are also coffered and wooden beam ceilings . Above the entrance there is a balcony with a cast iron parapet in the middle of the building.

In 1902 the building was converted into a museum. It was badly damaged by bombs during World War II and restored after the war. However, the rooms and technical equipment were neglected for a long time due to the financial situation of the city, even if several ideas from a new building elsewhere in the city to the renovation of the old town hall were discussed. Meanwhile, the structural situation worsened. The roof of the museum was leaking, in the rooms with skylights there was heat build-up with temperatures above 38 ° C and the heating could not be regulated to the required extent. In 1985, plans began to modernize and expand the building, which were carried out between 1986 and 1990. The architects Busmann + Haberer from Cologne were awarded the contract. Their concept envisaged keeping the Cremer building and building a new building in it. The inclusion of new rooms in the exhibition concept and the roofing of the inner courtyard with a shed roof increased the exhibition area from 4,000 to 7,000 square meters. With the consent of the preservationists, the Art Nouveau staircase that was added at the beginning of the century was removed and replaced by two new staircases. The lower staircase was based on Cremer's ideas, the upper staircase follows modern design principles. The exhibition rooms are located around the stairs. The equipment was adapted to the modern needs of a museum, for example with regard to the lighting with natural light through the skylights and a newly developed artificial lighting concept. In addition, the air conditioning of the rooms has been improved.

Since 1991 the two-part sculpture Early Forms by Tony Cragg has been located on the right and left of the staircase leading to the entrance instead of the two striding lions . The artist combined antique and modern utensils in it. One sculpture represents a combination of amphora and tin can, while the other combines a mortar and plastic bottle in its shape. The state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the Stadtsparkasse Wuppertal funded the purchase .

  • Entrance area with a view up to the balcony

  • Tony Cragg , Early Forms. Mortar / Bottle , 1990

  • Tony Cragg , Early Forms. Amphora / box , 1990

collection

The collection of the Von der Heydt Museum includes paintings , sculptures , graphics and photographs . The painting collection contains works from the baroque to the present day. A particular focus is on French art of the 19th century and Classical Modernism. The sculptures in the museum collection date from the 19th and 20th centuries and primarily represent French and German modernism. The collection of graphics ranges from the Renaissance to the present day. In this department, too, the focus is on French modernism. Photographs are mainly from the period after World War II and represent contemporary artists in the collection.

painting

The collection of paintings in the Von der Heydt Museum comprises a total of 3,000 works. The oldest paintings in the museum's possession date from the late 16th and 17th centuries. The 50 Flemish and Dutch paintings represent the art of the Golden Age . These are landscapes , genre pictures and still lifes by artists such as Joachim Patinir , Claes Molenaer , Floris van Schooten , Jan van Goyen and David Teniers the Younger . The pictures were added to the collection as a complement to 19th century painting, some of them were donated by August and Eduard von der Heydt. Outstanding works in this area of ​​the collection are a high mountain landscape by Joos de Momper and Jan Brueghel the Elder and Frans Snyder's still life with a wild boar's head . The forest landscape by Jacob Isaacksz. van Ruisdael was acquired in Paris for 45,000 Reichsmarks in 1910 with the support of Wilhelm von Bode , although the sale to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York had already been planned.

The focus of the collection is clearly on 19th and 20th century painting. Romantic landscape painting is represented in the Von der Heydt Museum by painters such as Carl Blechen , Jakob Philipp Hackert and Carl Rottmann . Biedermeier painting is represented by some portraits such as Heinrich Christoph Kolbe and Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller . Another collection area is the Munich School , which is present with its important representatives Wilhelm Leibl , Wilhelm Trübner , Hans Thoma and Anselm Feuerbach . One of the paintings from this period that corresponds to the Baroque Dutch is the still life of lobster, tin can and asparagus by Carl Schuch . In addition, there is also Carl Spitzweg with The Geologist in the collection. The holdings of works by Hans von Marées , who was born in Elberfeld and of whom the museum has 22 paintings, are important for the Wuppertal Museum . This is the third largest collection of his works after Munich and Berlin, which is based on donations from the artist's descendants and on targeted acquisitions, especially in the early years of the collection.

19th century French painting is widely represented in the Von der Heydt Museum. All the major painters of the Barbizon School are with works in the collection. Examples include the orchard in autumn by Charles-François Daubigny and the landscape near Étretat by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot . The museum owns the paintings by Gustave Courbet: Winter landscape near Ornans and rocky coast near Étretat . There are also works by Eugène Delacroix , Jean-François Millet and Honoré Daumier, among others . The collection is also very well positioned in the area of impressionism . Shortly after it was founded in 1902, the first director Fries began to build up this collection area with donations from wealthy citizens. It was supplemented primarily by the gift from Eduard von der Heydt after the Second World War. Important works from this part of the collection include the Vétheuil landscape by Claude Monet , Distel and The Fisherman by Édouard Manet , dancers in the rehearsal room by Edgar Degas and Le canal du Loing by Alfred Sisley . In addition, the museum also includes works by Camille Pissarro , Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Paul Cézanne, as well as by the post-impressionists Paul Gauguin , Vincent van Gogh and Paul Signac . The Nabis artist group is also represented in the Von der Heydt Museum. Modernism and all its currents are present in the collection. Examples of Fauvism are Flowers in a Jug by Henri Matisse or The Port of Antwerp by Georges Braque . Pablo Picasso's harlequin family , on the other hand, is already approaching Cubism , while Odilon Redon is one of the representatives of Symbolism .

The German development towards modernism is illustrated with works by Paula Modersohn-Becker , Max Slevogt and Edvard Munch . There are nine paintings by Lovis Corinth in the museum, which illustrate his different creative phases. The Expressionism in width with artists of the bridge , New Artists' Association Munich and the rider Blue represented. The collection includes paintings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner , Erich Heckel , Karl Schmidt-Rottluff , Wassily Kandinsky , Otto Mueller , Emil Nolde , Franz Marc , August Macke , Adolf Erbslöh and Alexej von Jawlensky . Outstanding works include Women on the Street by Kirchner and Marcs Fuchs . In addition to the expressionists, the collection also includes futurists such as Umberto Boccioni and artists who are more abstract, such as Fernand Léger and László Moholy-Nagy . The museum owns four paintings by Oskar Schlemmer , who worked in Wuppertal during World War II. There is also one of his earlier works, the Zwölfergruppe with interior from 1930. Representatives of the New Objectivity in the Museum von der Heydt collection include Otto Dix , for example with the portrait of Karl Krall and An die Schönheit (self-portrait) , Else Lasker-Schüler , George Grosz and Christian Schad . The Von der Heydt Museum owns four paintings by the Elberfeld painter Carl Grossberg , who took up the modern, industrialized world in his pictures. Another focus of the collection is Max Beckmann . In 1925 the self-portrait as a nurse was the first of his pictures in the collection. The majority of the nine paintings came to the museum after the Second World War. In 1976, Klaus Gebhard donated the central Beckmann work aerial acrobats from 1928 to the Von der Heydt Museum .

With paintings by Max Ernst , Paul Klee and Salvador Dalí is Surrealism represented in the collection of the Von der Heydt Museum. The abstract painting of the postwar period is represented diverse in Wuppertal. The picture from June 3, 1955 by Karl Otto Götz, for example, represents Tachism , as does The Fire of Rome by Georges Mathieu . With Jean Dubuffet , the founder of Art brut can be found in the collection, as is Ernst Wilhelm Nay , who had approached American color painting. Other post-war artists in the Von der Heydt Museum include Lucio Fontana , Günther Uecker , Sigmar Polke , Gerhard Richter and Francis Bacon . More recent additions to the collection are, for example, the paintings Dark Light by Sean Scully from 1998 and Caspar David Friedrich - Felsenschlucht 1821 by Hiroyuki Masuyama , a contemporary re-production of the painting from the Romantic period from 2007.

sculpture

The collection of the Von der Heydt Museum includes around 400 sculptures from the 19th and 20th centuries, most of which were created by French and German sculptors. The museum received the foundation of the collection as a donation as early as 1901, before it opened the following year. The works, including Kassandra and Badendes Mädchen by Max Klinger and sculptures by Emmanuel Frémiet and Nicolaus Friedrich, corresponded to the rather conservative taste of the late 19th century. The turn to contemporary sculpture took place in 1906, when August von der Heydt had visited the autumn salon in Paris and then donated the portrait bust of the sculptor Falguière by Auguste Rodin and the Ecce Homo by Constantin Meunier to the museum . As a result, the collection was expanded to include modern sculpture. It includes , for example, Wilhelm Lehmbruck's Inclined Woman's Head , Karl Albiker's Standing Young Man and Raymond Duchamp-Villon's Girl's Head , which was acquired by the Elberfelder Museumsverein. After the Second World War, Eduard von der Heydt expanded the stock. Apart from Edgar Degas and Maurice Sarkissoff , his acquisitions focused on German sculptors such as Klinger, Lehmbruck, Renée Sintenis and Fritz Huf .

Since the 1960s, the collection in the field of German and French sculpture has been expanded through acquisitions and donations of works by artists such as Rudolf Belling , Ernst Barlach , Käthe Kollwitz , Oskar Schlemmer , Gerhard Marcks , Eugen Roth , Aristide Maillol , Henri Laurens and Ossip Zadkine added. The museum also has sculptures by Alberto Giacometti and Alexander Archipenko , who both worked in Paris. Since 1974 there have been five works by Hans Arp in the Von der Heydt Museum's collection .

In the recent past, the sculpture collection has also been more open to international trends in sculpture. Artists such as George Segal , Donald Judd , Tony Cragg , Alexander Calder , Maurizio Nannucci and Lucio Fontana are also represented in the collection.

Graphics and photography

The Von der Heydt Museum owns around 30,000 graphic works from the Renaissance to the present day. The oldest graphics in the collection come from Albrecht Dürer and other of his contemporaries. Another focus is on works from the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th century. Here are some drawings and etchings of Rembrandt van Rijn emphasized. The center of the graphic collection are works from the 19th and 20th centuries. German classicism and romanticism are represented in the collection. An important bundle is made up of the 41 single sheets and the Neapler sketchbook by the German Roman Hans von Marées, who was born in Elberfeld . They allow a direct insight into his creative process. Other German artists of the late 19th century such as Max Klinger and Max Liebermann are also in the collection with representative holdings.

Eduard von der Heydt donated watercolors , pastels , gouaches on paper and drawings by French modern artists such as Edgar Degas , Claude Monet , Paul Cézanne , Georges Seurat and Alfred Sisley to the museum . He also donated early graphics by Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall . Particularly noteworthy is the Von der Heydt museum's collection of expressionist graphics as well as the holdings of prints, watercolors and drawings by the Brücke artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner , Emil Nolde , Otto Mueller , Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel . The collection also includes works by Edvard Munch , such as the early lithograph Vampir . As a result of the gift of the daughter of the art collector Albert Rudolf Ibach, twelve watercolors and drawings by Paul Klee have been in the Von der Heydt Museum since 1991 . Graphic works from the post-war period, for example by Joseph Beuys , are also part of the collection.

There are around 640 photographs in the museum's collection . They come from around 50 artists such as Man Ray , August Sander , Wols and László Moholy-Nagy . More recent works come from Bernd and Hilla Becher , Klaus Rinke , Peter Hutchinson and Monika Baumgartl .

Individual exhibits

Sculptures

See also: Die Sitzende , Early Forms

painting

See also: Peasant woman with cow, Osny , portrait of Gerda , lady with a parrot at the window , The geologist , thistle , The fisherman , fox , autumn morning in Éragny , girl with a red skirt , portrait of the painter Paul Eugène Gorge , simultaneous visions , still life with a coffee pot and Flowers and still life with jug and pears

Library

The library of the Von der Heydt Museum comprises around 100,000 volumes with a collection focus on artist monographs with research-relevant catalogs of works as well as hard-to-find dissertations and small letters and also unpublished materials ( gray literature ) by contemporary or regional artists. As a unique collection, the library maintains a database documentation of all museum exhibitions since 1902 as well as a Wuppertal artist database with entries on around 2,700 local artists.

Special exhibitions

Advertisement for the exhibition Monet on a carriage of the Wuppertal suspension railway

Since the 1980s, activity in the area of ​​special exhibitions has increased. These could also increasingly arouse broad, supra-regional interest. In the 1990s, major exhibitions such as Egon Schiele and his time in 1990, From Cranach to Monet took place . Masterpieces from the National Museum Bucharest 1994 and Women's Garden. Pioneers of Modernism took place in 1996. There were also monographic exhibitions on artists such as Lovis Corinth and Ferdinand Hodler , both of which were held in 1999. In 2002 the museum presented the show Imaginations. From Ruysdael to Manet, Chagall, Kandinsky , which was held for the centenary. It presented the history of the collection with regard to the two largest patrons and the losses during National Socialism.

Since 2006 the director Gerhard Finckh has continued the exhibition activity in this tradition. His first major exhibition was in 2007 Barbizon Adventure . It was followed in early 2008 by Auguste Renoir and the Impressionist Landscape , which had 95,000 visitors. The museum then showed two exhibitions with a more local focus: Marées and The Expressionist Impulse. Masterpieces from Wuppertal's private collections , both of which were shown in 2008. In 2009/10, the Monet exhibition, the Von der Heydt Museum's most successful show to date, followed . With over 100 works from all creative phases, it was the most extensive exhibition on this artist in Germany to date. It attracted 297,000 visitors, making it the museum's most-visited exhibition to date. Finckh pursued the Impressionist line by showing exhibitions on Pierre Bonnard (2010/11), Alfred Sisley (2012), Camille Pissarro (2014/15) and Edgar Degas & Auguste Rodin (2016/17). An exhibition on Édouard Manet followed in 2017/18 .

In the wake of the outsides project , an illegal corporate streetart attack on the public space in Wuppertal in 2006, took place in February 2007 under the title Still on and non the wiser at the Kunsthalle Barmen the first Wuppertal street art and graffiti exhibition held . The exhibition Freedom, Power and Splendor followed in 2009 and Street Art 2 in Wuppertal in 2011 .

The avant-garde exhibition "Der Sturm" on the occasion of the 100th birthday of the Sturm-Galerie from spring 2012 was named the best exhibition of the art year 2012 in NRW in an annual survey of ten renowned critics by the newspaper Welt am Sonntag . At the turn of the year 2012/2013 the museum showed a retrospective with 50 paintings by Peter Paul Rubens . The museum's exhibition policy was also received positively as a result. In 2014, too, ten art critics voted it a museum with the best exhibition program in the Welt am Sonntag critics survey. The critics chose the exhibition Human Slaughterhouse , in which expressionist art related to the First World War was shown, in addition to Misunderstanding Photography in the Museum Folkwang and Kandinsky, Malewitsch, Mondrian - The White Abyss Infinity of the North Rhine-Westphalia Art Collection for the exhibition of the year.

literature

  • Von der Heydt-Museum (Ed.): Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal. 19th century paintings. Wuppertal 1974.
  • Sabine Fehlemann (Ed.): From the Heydt Museum Wuppertal. On the history of the house and collection. Edition StadtBauKunst, Berlin / Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3-927469-06-8 .
  • Sabine Fehlemann (Ed.): From the Heydt Museum Wuppertal. Sculpture collection. Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal 2000, ISBN 3-89202-040-X .
  • Sabine Fehlemann, Rainer Stamm: The Von der Heydts: Bankers, Christians and Patrons. Müller and Busmann, Wuppertal 2001, ISBN 3-928766-49-X .
  • Sabine Fehlemann (Ed.): From the Heydt Museum. The paintings of the 19th and 20th centuries. Wienand Verlag, Cologne / Wuppertal 2003, ISBN 3-87909-799-2 .
  • Gerhard Finckh, Nicole Hartje-Grave: From the Heydt Museum Wuppertal. Masterpieces. From the Heydt Museum, Wuppertal 2010, ISBN 978-3-89202-076-9 .

Web links

Commons : Von der Heydt-Museum  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Finckh, Hartje-Grave, p. 7.
  2. ↑ a b c Fehlemann, Stamm, p. 13.
  3. ↑ a b Fehlemann, Stamm, p. 14.
  4. ↑ a b Finckh, Hartje-Grave, p. 8.
  5. ↑ Fehlemann, Stamm, p. 15.
  6. ↑ Fehlemann, Stamm, p. 16.
  7. ↑ Finckh, Hartje-Grave, p. 19.
  8. ↑ Finckh, Hartje-Grave, p. 9.
  9. ↑ a b Finckh, Hartje-Grave, p. 10.
  10. ↑ a b c d Fehlemann, Stamm, p. 19.
  11. ^ A b Peter Dittmer: " From Wuppertal into the world - Treibgut art ", Welt.de of December 30, 2002 (accessed on September 23, 2012).
  12. ↑ a b Finckh, Hartje-Grave, p. 25.
  13. ↑ a b c Fehlemann, Stamm, p. 13.
  14. ↑ Fehlemann, History of the House and Collection, p. 29.
  15. ↑ Fehlemann, History of the House and Collection, p. 30.
  16. ↑ Fehlemann, History of the House and Collection, p. 31.
  17. ↑ Fehlemann, History of the House and Collection, p. 33.
  18. ↑ Fehlemann, History of the House and Collection, pp. 35 and 36.
  19. ↑ Fehlemann, History of the House and Collection, p. 37.
  20. ^ Art and Museum Association Wuppertal (ed.): Living with art. Dr. Sabine Fehlemann at the Von der Heydt Museum 1985-2006. Art and Museums Association Wuppertal, Wuppertal 2006, ISBN 3-89202-062-0 .
  21. ↑ a b Art and Museums Association Wuppertal, p. 4.
  22. ↑ Fehlemann, History of the House and Collection, p. 72.
  23. ^ Art and Museum Association Wuppertal, p. 7.
  24. ^ Art and Museum Association Wuppertal, p. 5.
  25. ↑ a b Finckh, Hartje-Grave, p. 13.
  26. ↑ Looted Art - Morality or Law? ( Memento from January 6, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) In: Spiegel Online from December 12, 2003, No. 52.
  27. ↑ Stefan Melneczuk: “Saving course: job cuts in the Von der Heydt Museum” on ws.de from November 19, 2012, accessed on November 20, 2012.
  28. ↑ dpa: “Nazi looted art will be auctioned after return from Wuppertal” on aachener-zeitung.de from May 13, 2014, accessed on January 29, 2015.
  29. ↑ Information on Lot 15, Sale 2855 on christies.com, accessed on January 29, 2015.
  30. ↑ Fehlemann, History of the House and Collection, p. 26.
  31. ^ Entry in the Wuppertal monument list, accessed on September 25, 2012.
  32. ↑ Fehlemann, History of the House and Collection, p. 35.
  33. ↑ Finckh, Hartje-Grave, p. 11.
  34. ↑ Fehlemann, History of the House and Collection, pp. 40 and 41.
  35. ↑ Information on the sculpture on welt-der-form.net, accessed on September 25, 2012.
  36. ↑ Information on the collection on the museum's website, accessed on September 24, 2012.
  37. ↑ Finckh, Hartje-Grave, p. 30.
  38. ↑ Finckh, Hartje-Grave, p. 62.
  39. ↑ Finckh, Hartje-Grave, p. 100.
  40. ↑ Finckh, Hartje-Grave, p. 158.
  41. ↑ Finckh, Hartje-Grave, p. 220.
  42. ↑ Finckh, Hartje-Grave, p. 265.
  43. ↑ Finckh, Hartje-Grave, p. 339.
  44. ↑ a b Finckh, Hartje-Grave, p. 361.
  45. ↑ Finckh, Hartje-Grave, p. 362.
  46. ↑ Information on the library of the Von der Heydt Museum on vdh.netgate1.net, accessed on December 18, 2014.
  47. ↑ Finckh, Hartje-Grave, p. 12.
  48. ↑ ddp-nrw: "Big Monet Exhibition in Wuppertal - A rush of visitors expected from the Heydt Museum - Over 2000 groups already registered" on freiepresse.de from September 29, 2009, accessed on September 23, 2012.  ( Page no longer available , Search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.freipresse.de  
  49. ↑ Ralf Stiftel: "The Von-der-Heydt-Museum shows Pierre Bonnard" on wa.de from September 14, 2010, accessed on September 23, 2012.
  50. ↑ Frank Becker: The charm of the temporary. The Wuppertaler Von der Heydt Museum is showing street art and graffiti in the Kunsthalle Barmen under the heading “Still on and non the wiser…”. In: Museumsblätter - The independent culture magazine , Wuppertal February 9, 2007; Gerhard Finckh, Toke Lykeberg: still on and non the wiser: an exhibition with selected urban artists. Exhibition catalog. Publikat Verlag, Mainaschaff 2008, ISBN 978-3-939566-20-5 .
  51. ↑ Frank Becker: The frescoes of the profane cathedrals of our time. Street Art 2 in Wuppertal. In: Museumsblätter - The independent culture magazine , Wuppertal May 7, 2011.
  52. ↑ 100 Years Galerie Der Sturm , n-tv.de, accessed on May 28, 2013
  53. ↑ Article in der Welt am Sonntag of December 16, 2012, accessed on December 17, 2012
  54. ↑ The best museums in the country in the world on Sunday December 14, 2014, accessed on January 29, 2015
This article was added to the list of excellent articles on December 2, 2012 in this version .

Coordinates: 51 ° 15 '26.1 "  N , 7 ° 8' 47.7"  E