Werner Kruse (art historian)

Werner Kruse (born October 3, 1886 in Altena ; † April 20, 1968 in Mülheim an der Ruhr ) was a German art historian and from 1922 the first full-time director of the Municipal Museum in Mülheim an der Ruhr.

Live and act

Werner Kruse was the son of the Prussian district administrator and later district president Francis Kruse and Margarete († 1917), a born paper manufacturer's daughter Zander . After attending various humanistic grammar schools, he studied - initially without a high school diploma - from 1905 at the music academies in Berlin and Leipzig . At the same time he attended both literary and art history lectures and worked as a dramaturge at the Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf .

After completing his Abitur in 1915, he studied art history, archeology and history in Munich , Berlin and Bonn . At the University of Bonn he received his doctorate in 1919. phil. His first job took him to Belgium as a research assistant, where he made an inventory of Belgian art monuments. At the same time he helped to set up the castle museum in Koblenz .

On June 1, 1922, he took over the management of the Municipal Museum in Mülheim an der Ruhr, which until then had not been supervised either full-time or scientifically. In the more than 30 years of his activity he has given the museum a reputation that extends far beyond the city limits as a place for the promotion of young, contemporary artists such as Otto Pankok , Hermann Lickfeld , Carl Altena , Werner Gilles or Heinrich Siepmann . The type of funding was varied: it ranged from arranging scholarships and free lunch to public contracts and purchases.

In 1929 Kruse organized the first annual exhibition of Mülheim artists, which is still held annually at the end of each year.

In 1937 Kruse's collecting activities suffered a severe blow when 15 works by modern German artists were classified as " degenerate art " by the Nazi regime and withdrawn from the museum without compensation. Valuable pictures by Franz Marc , August Macke , Emil Nolde and Karl Hofer were lost as a result. The great air raid on Mülheim on 22/23 brought another loss. June 1943 when around 80 percent of the museum's holdings were burned.

After the war, Kruse worked hard to rebuild the museum until he retired in 1951. His services were honored in 1967 with the award of the “job” by the Mülheim civil society Mausefalle .

literature

• Mülheimer Stadtspiegel 1956 issue 11, p. 1.
• Kai Rawe: 100 Years of the (Art) Museum Mülheim an der Ruhr , Mülheimer Jahrbuch 2010, pp. 89–100.

Other sources

• City archive Mülheim an der Ruhr, holdings 1550 No. 70 (Mülheim personalities)
• City archive Mülheim an der Ruhr, inventory 1210 No. 64 (personnel files)