The New Media section features works by John Cage, Otto Piene, Peter Campus, Olafur Eliasson, and Nam June Paik.

The first years of the association's activities were focused on private art exhibitions, with the acquisition of works backed financially from ticket proceeds and business donations.

As the severity of air raids on Bremen increased, Mayor Böhmcker finally decreed that the collection should be housed outside the city in safety.

However, the losses of the Kunsthalle Bremen stand alongside those of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and the Dresden art collections as the largest and most devastating of any German museum from the war.

In 1990 the Art Society secured financing for the renovation of the workshops, storage areas and the main Print Room of the now structurally and functionally obsolete building.

As a result of the renovation, golden oak parquet replaced the linoleum, while the 24 halls and intimate cabinets in which the permanent collection is grouped are bathed in color.

[11] Between 2009 and 2011, the older constructions of 1961 and 1982 were demolished and two modernist, cubic wings with 5,560 square metres (59,800 sq ft) of gross floor area were added to the old main building according to the plans by architects Hufnagel, Putz and Rafaelian.

The families of Friedrich and Peter Lürßen of Lürssen shipyard fame and the Karin and Uwe Hollweg Foundation contributed a third, and the city of Bremen and the Federal Government each one-third of these costs.

[12] Among the collection's highlights are French and German works from the 19th and 20th centuries, including important pieces by Paul Cézanne, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Vincent van Gogh.

[14] Artists include:[12] The New Media section features works by John Cage, Otto Piene, Peter Campus, Olafur Eliasson, Nam June Paik and others.

In order to protect them from complete destruction, he grabbed drawings by Rembrandt, Titian, Rubens, Goya, Van Gogh and Édouard Manet and brought them to the Soviet Union in a suitcase.

In the autumn of 1989 he visited the Bremen Kunsthalle and reported to the chairman of the Art Society that he had the time to get two paintings and 362 drawings out of Castle Karnzow and had handed them over to the Schtschusev State Research and Science Museum for safekeeping.

In February 2003, the then Russian Minister of Culture, after a formal request of the Kunstverein in 2000, provided a written commitment that the Baldin Collection should be returned to Bremen.

"[15] In 2009 Wilhelm Leibl's 'Bauernmädchen (Peasant Girl)' which was on loan to the Kunsthalle Bremen was restituted to the heirs of Alexander Lewin, a Jewish collector who was persecuted and plundered by Nazis.

[16] In 2013, the Kunsthalle Bremen reached an agreement with the Berolzheimer heirs concerning "Rückenfigur einer Frau im faltigen Gewand“ von Giacomo Cavedone (1577–1660) which the museum had acquired in 1941 after the Jewish owners had been forced to auction it in 1937.

[18][19] In 2016 the Kunsthalle restituted then repurchased a drawing 'Felsige Waldlandschaft mit weitem Ausblick' by Isaak Majo looted from Arthur Feldmann, a Jewish collector murdered in the Holocaust.

[20] The Kunsthalle rejected a claim from the heirs of the artist George Grosz stating that he had lost the artwork due to debt and not Nazi persecution.

[21] There have been many more claims and it is not known how many Nazi looted artworks remain in the museum; research is ongoing, focusing on Bremen collectors and art dealers Arnold Blome, Heinrich Glosemeier and Hugo Oelze.