The Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte or MKK (''Museum of Art and Cultural History'') is a municipal museum in

Dortmund Dortmund (; Westphalian nds, Düörpm ; la, Tremonia) is the third-largest city in North Rhine-Westphalia after Cologne and Düsseldorf, and the eighth-largest city of Germany, with a population of 588,250 inhabitants as of 2021. It is the la ...

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 ...

. It is currently located in an

Art Deco Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the Unite ...

building which was formerly the Dortmund Savings Bank. The collection includes paintings, sculptures, furniture and applied art, illustrating the cultural history of Dortmund from early times to the 20th century. There are regular temporary exhibitions of art and culture, as well as a permanent exhibition on the history of

surveying Surveying or land surveying is the technique, profession, art, and science of determining the terrestrial two-dimensional or three-dimensional positions of points and the distances and angles between them. A land surveying professional is ca ...

, with rare geodetic instruments.Das Museum

History

It was founded in 1883 as a collection of historical and artistic objects. It changed location several times in the early years, and came to include

archaeological Archaeology or archeology is the scientific study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscap ...

finds,

decorative art ] The decorative arts are arts or crafts whose object is the design and manufacture of objects that are both beautiful and functional. It includes most of the arts making objects for the interiors of buildings, and interior design, but not usual ...

works and local historical artefacts. It was reoriented as a fine art museum in the 1930s, with the acquisition of Romanticism, Romantic paintings in particular.Museumsgeschichte
The collection was evacuated during the war, and survived almost unharmed. The building, however, was destroyed, so the collection was moved into

Cappenberg Castle Cappenberg Castle (german: Schloss Cappenberg) is a former Premonstratensian monastery, Cappenberg Abbey (german: Kloster Cappenberg) in Cappenberg, a part of Selm, North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany. It stands on an elevation, the Cappenberg, nea ...

in 1946. (The ruins of the old site were rebuilt into the

Museum am Ostwall The Museum Ostwall (known as Museum am Ostwall until 2010) is a museum of modern and contemporary art in Dortmund, Germany. It was founded in the late 1940s, and has been located in the Dortmund U-Tower since 2010. The collection includes ...

.) During this time the MKK was put in charge of artworks evacuated from various bombed

Westphalia Westphalia (; german: Westfalen ; nds, Westfalen ) is a region of northwestern Germany and one of the three historic parts of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. It has an area of and 7.9 million inhabitants. The territory of the regio ...

n churches, including

Conrad von Soest Conrad von Soest, also ''Konrad'' in modern texts, or in Middle High German ''Conrad van Sost'' or "von Soyst", (born around 1370 in Dortmund; died soon after 1422) was the most significant Westphalian artist and painted in the so-called ''soft ...

's ''Mary Altar'' from St. Mary's Church in Dortmund. In the 1960s and '70s the MKK acquired examples of Westphalian furniture, documenting the history of furnishing from the

Gothic Gothic or Gothics may refer to: People and languages *Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes **Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths **Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoken b ...

Art Nouveau Art Nouveau (; ) is an international style of art, architecture, and applied art, especially the decorative arts. The style is known by different names in different languages: in German, in Italian, in Catalan, and also known as the Modern ...

. In 1983 it moved into its present location, an Art Deco former bank built in 1924. The director from 1982 to 1986 was Gerhard Langemeyer, the future Lord Mayor of Dortmund.

Exhibitions

The permanent exhibitions are ''Kulturgeschichte im Zeitraffer'' ("Cultural History in Time-Lapse"), ''Die kleine Nationalgalerie'' (an annexe of the

Alte Nationalgalerie The Alte Nationalgalerie ( ''Old National Gallery'') is a listed building on the Museum Island in the Mitte (locality), historic centre of Berlin, Germany. The gallery was built from 1862 to 1876 by the order of King Frederick William IV of Prussi ...

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...

), and the exhibition on the history of surveying. The sections are ordered chronologically, from "Back to the Stone Age" and "Antiques" through to "The New City". The permanent collection of 19th-century paintings includes works by

Caspar David Friedrich Caspar David Friedrich (5 September 1774 – 7 May 1840) was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscape ...

(''Winter Landscape'' and '' The Temple of Juno in Agrigento''),

Max Slevogt Max Slevogt (8 October 1868 – 20 September 1932) was a German Impressionist painter and illustrator, best known for his landscapes. He was, together with Lovis Corinth and Max Liebermann, one of the foremost representatives in Germany of th ...

Lovis Corinth Lovis Corinth (21 July 1858 – 17 July 1925) was a German artist and writer whose mature work as a painter and printmaker realized a synthesis of impressionism and expressionism. Corinth studied in Paris and Munich, joined the Berlin Se ...

and Anton von Werner. Some of the previous temporary exhibitions have been devoted to

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (6 May 1880 – 15 June 1938) was a German expressionist painter and printmaker and one of the founders of the artists group Die Brücke or "The Bridge", a key group leading to the foundation of Expressionism in 20th-centur ...

Friedrich Karl Waechter Friedrich Karl Waechter (3 November 1937 in Danzig – 16 September 2005 in Frankfurt) was a renowned German cartoonist, author, and playwright. Life Waechter was born in Danzig as a son of a teacher. His family fled over the Baltic Sea af ...

Paul Cézanne Paul Cézanne ( , , ; ; 19 January 1839 – 22 October 1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionism, Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century conception of artistic endeavour to a ...

Édouard Manet Édouard Manet (, ; ; 23 January 1832 – 30 April 1883) was a French modernist painter. He was one of the first 19th-century artists to paint modern life, as well as a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism. Born ...

, and

Frank Lloyd Wright Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) was an American architect, designer, writer, and educator. He designed more than 1,000 structures over a creative period of 70 years. Wright played a key role in the architectural movements o ...

and The Living City (2000). In 2008, the ''Museumsgesellschaft zur Pflege der bildenden Kunst'' (Museum Society for the Protection of Visual Art), a sponsorship society for the MKK, donated an altar painting of the

Holy Kinship The Holy Kinship was the extended family of Jesus descended from his maternal grandmother Saint Anne from her ''trinubium'' or three marriages. The group were a popular subject in religious art throughout Germany and the Low Countries, especially ...

by Jan Baegert (active c. 1505–1530) to the museum, to mark the society's hundredth year. This work is part of an

altarpiece An altarpiece is an artwork such as a painting, sculpture or relief representing a religious subject made for placing at the back of or behind the altar of a Christian church. Though most commonly used for a single work of art such as a painting o ...

that had been divided into four parts.Aus eins mach vier
Kulturstiftung der Länder.

Notes

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Museum fur Kunst und Kulturgeschichte Museums in Dortmund Art museums and galleries in Germany Art museums established in 1883 1883 establishments in Germany