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| Established | 1976 |
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| Location | Cologne, Germany |
| Collection size | Sammlung Haubrich Sammlung Ludwig |
| Director | Yilmaz Dziewior [1] |
| Public transit access | 5 16 18 Köln Hbf |
| Website | museum-ludwig.de |
Museum Ludwig, located in Cologne, Germany, houses a collection of modern art. It includes works from Pop Art, Abstract and Surrealism, and has one of the largest Picasso collections in Europe. It holds many works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.
The museum emerged in 1976 as an independent institution from the Wallraf-Richartz Museum. That year the chocolate magnate Peter Ludwig agreed to endow 350 modern artworks—then valued at $45 million [2] —and in return the City of Cologne committed itself to build a dedicated "Museum Ludwig" for works made after 1900. The recent building was designed by architects Peter Busmann and Godfrid Haberer and opened in 1986 near the Cologne Cathedral. [3] The new building was home to both the Wallraf Richartz Museum as well as Museum Ludwig. In 1994, it was decided to separate the two institutions and to place the building on Bischofsgartenstrasse at the sole disposal of Museum Ludwig. In 1999, Steve Keene painted in the museum.
The building is home to the Kölner Philharmonie. The Heinrich-Böll-Platz, a public square designed by Dani Karavan, is above the concert hall at the north-east of the building. During concerts people are not permitted to walk on the square, as it creates acoustic disturbances for the concert-goers below. [4]
In 2016 the museum joined forces with the Bell Art Center to organize an unofficial retrospective of Anselm Kiefer, which opened at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts. The last stop on the tour in China was to be the new Jupiter Museum of Art in Shenzhen, but a delayed museum opening caused the works to be put into storage. At this point the museum lost track of the pieces and began to search for them. [5]
In January 2020 they located the pieces in a warehouse in Shenzhen and attempted to retrieve the piece. They were stopped by Chinese authorities. Diplomatic action has been undertaken by the German Government, the City of Koblenz, and Kiefer himself, to secure the return of the pieces, which include the monumental work Pasiphae. [6]
The museum essentially incorporates the Sammlung Haubrich, a collection by lawyer Josef Haubrich of art from 1914 to 1939 donated to the city of Cologne in May 1946. Directly after World War II, in May 1946, Haubrich presented the city with his Expressionism collection (Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Otto Mueller) and works by other representatives of Classical Modernism (Marc Chagall, Otto Dix). The second integral part of the museum is the Sammlung Ludwig, a collection of art by Picasso, Russian avant-garde and American Pop-art artists. [7]
With around 900 works by Picasso, the museum today has the third largest collection of this artist worldwide, after Barcelona and Paris. Peter Ludwig and his wife Irene later put their collection of the Russian avant-garde on permanent loan to the museum, including 600 works from the period 1905 to 1935 by artists such as Kasimir Malevich, Ljubov Popova, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, and Alexander Rodchenko. Today the museum houses the most comprehensive collection of early Russian avant-garde artworks outside Russia. [8] [9]
Since 1994 the Friends of the Museum Ludwig have honoured each year an international artist with the ‘Wolfgang Hahn Prize’, presented during the city's art fair Art Cologne. Both the annual highlight of the Friends' activities and one of the cultural features of Cologne and the Rhineland, this purchase prize is dedicated to the memory of Wolfgang Hahn (1924–1987), chief conservator and painting restorer at Wallraf Richartz Museum / Museum Ludwig and one of Cologne's most far-sighted collectors. The budget for the prize amounts to a maximum of 100,000 euros per annum. The museum also acquires a work from each prizewinner. [10]
An international jury chooses from the nominations submitted by the members. The Wolfgang Hahn Prize has been awarded to the following artists:
In 1999 the museum returned the painting Zwei weibliche Halbakte (Two Female Nudes ) (1919) by Otto Mueller to the heirs of Dr. Ismar Littmann. [19] In February 2000 the museum returned La Grappe de Raisins (1920) by Louis Marcoussis (1883–1941) to the family of El Lissitzky and Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers. [19]
In 2013 the city of Cologne agreed that the Ludwig Museum should restitute six valuable drawings looted by the Nazis from the Jewish art collector Alfred Flechtheim to his heirs. The drawings are by Karl Hofer, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Ernst Barlach, Aristide Maillol and Wilhelm Morgner. [20] The Ludwig Museum also agreed to restitute five drawings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Georges Kars to the heirs of Curt Glaser. [20]
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was a Russian avant-garde artist and art theorist, whose pioneering work and writing influenced the development of abstract art in the 20th century. He was born in Kiev, modern-day Ukraine, to an ethnic Polish family. His concept of Suprematism sought to develop a form of expression that moved as far as possible from the world of natural forms (objectivity) and subject matter in order to access "the supremacy of pure feeling" and spirituality. Active primarily in Russia, Malevich was a founder of the artists collective UNOVIS and his work has been variously associated with the Russian avant-garde and the Ukrainian avant-garde, and he was a central figure in the history of modern art in Central and Eastern Europe more broadly.
Aleksandra Aleksandrovna Ekster, also known as Alexandra Exter, was a Russian and French painter and designer.
Natalia Sergeevna Goncharova was a Russian avant-garde artist, painter, costume designer, writer, illustrator, and set designer. Goncharova's lifelong partner was fellow Russian avant-garde artist Mikhail Larionov. She was a founding member of both the Jack of Diamonds (1909–1911), Moscow's first radical independent exhibiting group, the more radical Donkey's Tail (1912–1913), and with Larionov invented Rayonism (1912–1914). She was also a member of the German-based art movement Der Blaue Reiter. Born in Russia, she moved to Paris in 1921 and lived there until her death.
The Wallraf–Richartz Museum is an art museum in Cologne, Germany, with a collection of fine art from the medieval period to the early twentieth century. It is one of the three major museums in Cologne.
Otto Müller was a German painter and printmaker of the Die Brücke expressionist movement.
Cubo-Futurism or Kubo-Futurizm was an art movement, developed within Russian Futurism, that arose in early 20th century Russian Empire, defined by its amalgamation of the artistic elements found in Italian Futurism and French Analytical Cubism. Cubo-Futurism was the main school of painting and sculpture practiced by the Russian Futurists. In 1913, the term "Cubo-Futurism" first came to describe works from members of the poetry group "Hylaeans", as they moved away from poetic Symbolism towards Futurism and zaum, the experimental "visual and sound poetry of Kruchenykh and Khlebninkov". Later in the same year the concept and style of "Cubo-Futurism" became synonymous with the works of artists within Ukrainian and Russian post-revolutionary avant-garde circles as they interrogated non-representational art through the fragmentation and displacement of traditional forms, lines, viewpoints, colours, and textures within their pieces. The impact of Cubo-Futurism was then felt within performance art societies, with Cubo-Futurist painters and poets collaborating on theatre, cinema, and ballet pieces that aimed to break theatre conventions through the use of nonsensical zaum poetry, emphasis on improvisation, and the encouragement of audience participation.
Mumok is a museum in the Museumsquartier in Vienna, Austria.
Mary Hildegard Ruth Bauermeister was a German artist who worked in sculpture, drawing, installation, performance, and music. Influenced by Fluxus artists and Nouveau Réalisme, her work addresses esoteric issues of how information is transferable through society. "I only followed an inner drive to express what was not yet there, in reality or thought", she said of her practice. "To make art was more a finding, searching process than a knowing." Beginning in the 1970s, her work concentrated on the themes surrounding New Age spirituality, specifically geomancy, the divine interpretation of lines on the ground.
Trisha Donnelly is a contemporary artist who is particularly well known as a conceptual artist. Donnelly works with various media including photography, drawing, audio, video, sculpture and performance. Donnelly is also a Clinical Associate Professor of Studio Art at New York University. She currently lives and works in San Francisco, California.
Daniel Birnbaum is a Swedish art curator and an art critic. Since 2019, he has been director and curator of Acute Art in London, UK.
Carla Accardi was an Italian abstract painter associated with the Arte Informale and Arte Povera movements, and a founding member of the Italian art groups Forma (1947) and Continuità (1961).
Melaten is the central cemetery of Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, which was first mentioned in 1243. It was developed to a large park, holding the graves of notable residents.
The term Cologne School of Painting was first applied in the 19th century to describe old German paintings generally. It subsequently came to refer more specifically to painters who had their workshops in medieval Cologne and the lower-Rhine region from about 1300 to 1550.
Lewis Stein was an American visual artist living in New York City.
Bodo Balthasar von Dewitz was a German art historian. His work focused on historical photography.
Zoé Whitley is an American art historian and curator who has been director of Chisenhale Gallery since 2020. Based in London, she has held curatorial positions at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Tate galleries, and the Hayward Gallery. At the Tate galleries, Whitley co-curated the 2017 exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which was described by ARTnews as one of the most important art exhibitions of the 2010s. Soon after she was chosen to organise the British pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale.
Caspar Johann Nepomuk Scheuren was a German painter and illustrator.
Alexander Vömel, or Voemel, was a German gallery owner and Nazi party member who took over the gallery of the Jewish art dealer Alfred Flechtheim when it was Aryanized in 1933.
Female Half-Length Nude with Hat is an oil-on-canvas painting by German artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, executed in 1911. It his held at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.
COLOGNE, Germany — Museums don't usually advertise fakes in their collections. But the Museum Ludwig here is exposing them to public scrutiny in a taboo-breaking new exhibition. The paintings on show in "Russian Avant-Garde at the Museum Ludwig: Original and Fake" are all ostensibly by artists from that radical movement of the early 20th century. Yet displayed alongside bona fide works by renowned artists like Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko and Natalia Goncharova are paintings whose previous attributions museum researchers now reject.
