Langen Foundation

Her husband, Viktor, who held several patents for technical innovations in automobile production, had traveled regularly to visit customers in Japan, where the couple's collection was formed.

[4] The building has double-skin volume and two half-buried temporary exhibition wings with a total area of 900 m2 (9,700 sq ft); the structure mainly consists of reinforced concrete, glass and steel.

Situated within the ground-level concrete slab is the so-called Japan Room – an unusually long and narrow gallery conceptualised by Ando as a space of “tranquillity” especially for the Japanese segment of the Langen Collection.

[7] The Langen's collection of modern art includes works from major artists such as Paul Cézanne, Max Beckmann, Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko, Jean Dubuffet, Francis Bacon, and Sigmar Polke.

While the Japanese and non-European collections remain intact,[8] in 2014 the Langen consigned ten works of art to be auctioned at Christie’s in New York, including Fernand Léger's Grande Nature Morte (1939), Georges Braque's Le Modèle (1939), Picasso's Portrait de femme (Dora Maar) (1942) and Wassily Kandinsky's Strandszene (1909).