The exhibition "Beautiful Anarchy. Johan Thorn Prikker and his time" at the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum (KWM) in Krefeld pays tribute to the important Dutch artist Johan Thorn Prikker (1868-1932). From May 17, 2026 to August 2027, the show will present a major retrospective of his extensive oeuvre, staging his work on this scale for the first time since the 1960s.
Thorn Prikker, who worked in Krefeld from 1904 and later also taught in Düsseldorf and Cologne, was one of the most influential artists of the 1910s and 1920s in the Rhineland, combining painting, applied art and architecture in the sense of a Gesamtkunstwerk. The exhibition is based on the world's largest collection of Thorn-Prikker works: The Kunstmuseen Krefeld own around 1000 objects, including stained glass windows, posters, paintings as well as designs for textiles, murals and mosaics.
The monumental mosaic and stained glass window designs that he created for the groundbreaking GeSoLei exhibition in Düsseldorf in 1926 are particularly impressive. In the show, they are an example of the successful combination of socially committed "art work" and spirituality, ornament and abstraction.
