Kunstmuseum Bonn
Bonn
Bright colours and simple shapes are two of the qualities perfected by the Rhenish Expressionists in their expressive paintings of Rhenish history, tradition, and landscape. Composition meant everything for them, as they considered the arrangement of surfaces and the exaggeration of colour worlds a means of expressing emotional experience. Art enthusiasts striving to enter this cosmos have come to the right place at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, where they will find the world’s largest collection on the subject.
On top of some major works by August Macke, this site on Bonn’s “museum mile” also features some works by Heinrich Campendonk, Hans Thuar, Paul Adolf Seehaus, Carlo Mense, and Max Ernst. The juxtaposition of Macke’s “Gemüsefeld” and Thuar’s “Messdorf”, two paintings created in the same location near Bonn at the same time back in 1911 is particularly impressive. These artists shared a lifelong friendship, still reflected today in the way their exhibits harmonise.
Presentation on artists’ spaces
The Rhenish Expressionists are not the only ones making their grand entrance in the temple of art that opened in 1992, adjacent to the Bundeskunsthalle. German art after 1945 is another focus here, with exhibits staged deliberately in artists’ spaces. No more than three creators share any one area with each other. Visitors keep on entering into new dialogues characterised by tensions and harmonies. Colourful Emil Schumacher, for instance, may meet A.R. Penck, a painter famous for his black and white symbolic worlds, among other things, in the same room.
The building on Bonn’s “museum mile”, designed by architect Axel Schultes, supports this interaction as well with its strong light from above, unusual corner passages, and large open spaces that help to approach Baselitz, Beuys, Richter, Polke, Gursky, Mucha, Kiefer, and Palermo in entirely new contexts of meaning. The graphic and photo- and video-art collections also are certainly worth a visit with their 7500 exhibits.
