Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen
The Kunstsammlung was founded in 1961 by the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia as a foundation under private law for the purpose of displaying the art collection and expanding it through new acquisitions.
With major works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Piet Mondrian, among others, as well as a wide-ranging ensemble of circa 100 drawings and paintings by Paul Klee, the permanent collection of the Kunstsammlung offers a singular perspective of classical modernism.
[citation needed] The collection of postwar American art includes works by Jackson Pollock and Frank Stella and by pop artists Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol; other high points of the collection are works by Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Tony Cragg, Emil Schumacher, Sarah Morris, Katharina Fritsch, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell and Imi Knoebel.
Opened in spring of 2002 as an additional venue of the Kunstsammlung was the Ständehaus (K21) set alongside the Kaiserteich, a building which formerly served as the seat of the Parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia.
When it first opened in 1971, this protected landmark by Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck was home to the Galerie Alfred Schmela[1] and was the first building to be erected in the Federal Republic of Germany expressly as an art gallery.
With its accompanying programs and special projects, the Education Department strives to make the works held in the Regional Collection accessible to visitors of all ages.
The purchase—brokered by Basel art dealer Ernst Beyeler and overseen by then state premiere Franz Meyer—forms the nucleus of the collection, founded in 1961 under the title "Stiftung Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen".
The building – which resides within architectural history at the transition from postwar modernism to postmodernism – was inaugurated on 14 March 1986 in the presence of the then German President Richard von Weizsäcker, and has served ever since as an emblem of the city.
It sits on the square directly across from the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, whose building also serves as the headquarters of the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen.
While Schmalenbach had expanded the museum's holdings for the most part through the addition of masterworks of painting, it was primarily contemporary sculptures, installations, and photographs of international rank which entered the collection beginning in 1990 through the efforts of his successor.
The first artists to exhibit there were Belgian illustrator Kris Martin and German sculptor Michael Sailstorfer, who created accessible installations for the two galleries of the new building, namely the Klee Halle and the Konrad und Gabriele Henkel Galerie, which together offer almost 2.000 m².
Contributing to the new and more emphatic public presence of the Kunstsammlung – which is now able to display the art collections of this federal state more comprehensively than ever before – is the large-scale mosaic mural "Hornet", composed of colorful tiles and the work of American artist Sarah Morris.
On view from 11 September 2010 to 16 January 2011 in the K20 and the Schmela Haus was the ambitious Joseph Beuys exhibition "Parallelprozesse/Parallel Processes", organized around large-scale installation works dating from all creative periods of this artist.
Working in the tradition of Arne Jacobsen, the Copenhagen architecture office of Dissing+Weitling created a building which features details typical of its time and positions the qualities of the artworks on display in the foreground.
On 18 April 2002, the museum building known as the Ständehaus am Kaiserteich was inaugurated in the presence of German then President Johannes Rau, and became the second main pillar of the Kunstsammlung for modern and contemporary art.
Surrounding the building's central public square – which takes the form of a spacious piazza – are four wings containing continuous arcade passageways.
Among the high points are paintings by the German Expressionists, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock, and installations by Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik.
In 1960, the Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia earmarked 6 million German Marks for the purchase of 88 paintings, drawings, and color studies on paper by Klee – an ensemble which formed the nucleus of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.
Cubism forms an important focus of the collection, with works in the style by Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Georges Braque and others.
Among these are works by Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd and Jackson Pollock, whose monumental Number 32 from 1950 is one of the few mural-sized drip paintings by this artist, and is regarded as a key exemplar of Abstract Expressionism.
Installations and artist's rooms are an important focus of the Kunstsammlung, an area which has been expanded continuously in recent years (through works by Marcel Broodthaers, for example).
