The Kunstmuseum Bonn or Bonn Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in

Bonn The federal city of Bonn ( lat, Bonna) is a city on the banks of the Rhine in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, with a population of over 300,000. About south-southeast of Cologne, Bonn is in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ruhr r ...

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

, founded in 1947. The Kunstmuseum exhibits both temporary exhibitions and its collection. Its collection is focused on Rhenish Expressionism and post-war German art. It is part of Bonn's "Museum Mile".

Architecture

The present building, which opened in 1992, was created by the BJSS firm (Axel Schultes) and Jürgen Pleuser at a cost of about DM-100 million. It has three entrances, symbolising openness. The design of the staircase has been described as a ''"precise geometry, cut like jewellery. The conception of light brings the collection to life."'' The total exhibition area is around .

Rhenish Expressionism and art since 1945

The collections of the Kunstmuseum focus on three strong points:

Rhenish The Rhineland (german: Rheinland; french: Rhénanie; nl, Rijnland; ksh, Rhingland; Latinised name: ''Rhenania'') is a loosely defined area of Western Germany along the Rhine, chiefly its middle section. Term Historically, the Rhinelands ...

Expressionism (the largest collection in the world), post-war German art (particularly the 1960s to the early 1990s), and an international collection of post-war prints. German artists on display include

Georg Baselitz Georg Baselitz (born 23 January 1938) is a German painter, sculptor and graphic artist. In the 1960s he became well known for his figurative, expressive paintings. In 1969 he began painting his subjects upside down in an effort to overcome the ...

Joseph Beuys Joseph Heinrich Beuys ( , ; 12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and art theorist whose work reflected concepts of humanism, sociology, and anthroposophy. He was a founder of a provocative art mov ...

Hanne Darboven Hanne Darboven (29 April 1941 – 9 March 2009) was a German conceptual artist, best known for her large-scale minimalist installations consisting of handwritten tables of numbers. Early life and career Darboven was born in 1941 in Munich. She gr ...

Anselm Kiefer Anselm Kiefer (born 8 March 1945) is a German painter and sculptor. He studied with Peter Dreher and Horst Antes at the end of the 1960s. His works incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac. The poems of Paul Celan hav ...

August Macke August Robert Ludwig Macke (3 January 1887 – 26 September 1914) was a German Expressionist painter. He was one of the leading members of the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). He lived during a particularly act ...

Blinky Palermo Blinky Palermo (2 June 1943 – 18 February 1977) was a German abstract painter. Early life and education Palermo was born Peter Schwarze in Leipzig, Germany, in 1943, and adopted as an infant, with his twin brother, Michael, by foster pa ...

and

Wolf Vostell Wolf Vostell (14 October 1932 – 3 April 1998) was a German painter and sculptor, considered one of the early adopters of video art and installation art and pioneer of Happenings and Fluxus. Techniques such as blurring and Dé-coll/age are ch ...

. Selected non-German artists are integrated into the display, such as

Robert Delaunay Robert Delaunay (12 April 1885 – 25 October 1941) was a French artist who, with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others, co-founded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. His later works were more abstra ...

in the Macke section, Richard Long in combination with Palermo,

Lucio Fontana Lucio Fontana (; 19 February 1899 – 7 September 1968) was an Argentine-Italian painter, sculptor and theorist. He is mostly known as the founder of Spatialism. Early life Born in Rosario, to Italian immigrant parents, he was t ...

with Beuys, and

Jannis Kounellis Jannis Kounellis ( el, Γιάννης Κουνέλλης; 23 March 1936 – 16 February 2017) was a Greek Italian artist based in Rome. A key figure associated with Arte Povera, he studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. Life and work K ...

with Gerhard Merz. image:August Macke 043.jpg, ''Self Portrait'' (1909) image:August Macke 014.jpg, ''Vegetable Fields'' (1911) Image:August Macke 030.jpg, ''Houses with a Chimney'' (1911) image:August Macke 041.jpg, ''The Tightrope Walker'' (1914)

Prints collection and video art

The prints collection, featuring around 5,000 works from the 20th and 21st centuries, includes so-called "multiples" by Beuys, illustrated books by

Max Ernst Max Ernst (2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German (naturalised American in 1948 and French in 1958) painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism ...

, and printed graphics from the Bolliger Collection. The Oppenheim Collection of

video art Video art is an art form which relies on using video technology as a visual and audio medium. Video art emerged during the late 1960s as new consumer video technology such as video tape recorders became available outside corporate broadcasting ...

includes works by

Dennis Oppenheim Dennis Oppenheim (September 6, 1938 – January 21, 2011) was an American conceptual artist, performance artist, earth artist, sculptor and photographer. Dennis Oppenheim's early artistic practice is an epistemological questioning about the nat ...

Joan Jonas Joan Jonas (born July 13, 1936) is an American visual artist and a pioneer of video and performance art, and one of the most important artists to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s.Klaus vom Bruch Klaus vom Bruch (born 1952 in Cologne) is a German media artist who is considered a pioneer of German video art. Biography Vom Bruch studied conceptual art at the California Institute of the Arts with John Baldessari from 1975 to 1976, and philos ...

Marcel Odenbach Marcel Odenbach is a German video artist. In the 1970s, with Ulrike Rosenbach and Klaus vom Bruch, he formed the producer group ATV. Odenbach's works criticize the conditions of German society. Life and work Odenbach was born in 1953 in Cologne, ...

and

Julian Rosefeldt Julian Rosefeldt (born 1965 in Munich) is a German artist and filmmaker. Rosefeldt's work consists primarily of elaborate, visually opulent film and video installations, often shown as panoramic multi-channel projections. His installations rang ...

. The Videonale festival of contemporary video art, now based at the Kunstmuseum, has taken place biennially in Bonn since 1984.

New direction

In 2005, the museum sold the former ''Grothe Collection'' to a married pair of collectors, the Ströhers, for

€ The euro sign () is the currency sign used for the euro, the official currency of the eurozone and unilaterally adopted by Kosovo and Montenegro. The design was presented to the public by the European Commission on 12 December 1996. It consists ...

50m. This triggered a wide-ranging set of changes to the permanent exhibition, beginning in 2007, described by the incoming director Stephan Berg as a "certain rejuvenation".''"Es wird eine deutliche Verjüngung geben."'
Stephan Berg wird neuer Intendant des Kunstmuseums
Thomas Kliemann, ''

General-Anzeiger The ''General-Anzeiger'' is a regional daily newspaper based in the city of Bonn, the former West German capital in the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. The paper was first published in April 1888. In addition to the city and it ...

'', 8 November 2007. Retrieved 15 September 2010. The works on the way out included ''Degenerate Art'' by

Sigmar Polke Sigmar Polke (13 February 1941 – 10 June 2010) was a German painter and photographer. Polke experimented with a wide range of styles, subject matters and materials. In the 1970s, he concentrated on photography, returning to paint in the 1980s ...

and ''Assisi Cycle'' by

Gotthard Graubner Gotthard Graubner (13 June 1930 – 24 May 2013) was a German painter, born in Erlbach, in Saxony, Germany. Graubner studied at the Academy of Arts, Berlin, the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts in Germany, be ...

. Their place was taken by the work of younger artists. Some of the sculptures in front of the building were also acquired by the Ströhers.

External links

Home page in English

Notes

{{Authority control Art museums and galleries in Germany Museums in Bonn Art museums established in 1947 1947 establishments in Germany