Qualla: Kunstmuseen Krefeld

Kunstmuseen Krefeld: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sciarinen 08:38, 31 May 2007 (UTC), Public domain. Two hundred Deutsche Marks. That is what the director of a small museum in a Rhineland silk town paid in the late 1950s for two paintings by Piero Manzoni. Five hundred Deutsche Marks bought a Yves Klein. Paul Wember had almost no acquisitions budget at the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld. So he bought what no one else wanted yet - and within a decade his three buildings would be hosting some of the most radical exhibitions in postwar European art, in two private homes that one of the twentieth century's greatest architects had designed for a pair of silk manufacturers in 1928.

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Image: Sciarinen 08:38, 31 May 2007 (UTC) | Public domain

Kunstmuseen Krefeld: The Silk Merchants' Houses

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, CC BY-SA 3.0. Hermann Lange and Josef Esters ran textile mills in Krefeld. In the late 1920s, both commissioned new villas on adjoining lots on the Wilhelmshofallee, and both chose the same architect: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, then vice president of the Deutscher Werkbund. Built between 1928 a...

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Image: A.Savin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kunstmuseen Krefeld: The Director Who Bought the Future

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eduard Bendemann (1811-1889), Theodor Hildebrandt (1804-1874), Julius Hübner (1806-1882), Friedrich Wilhelm von Schadow (1788-1862), und Karl Ferdinand Sohn (1805-1867), Public domain. Paul Wember had been director since 1947. He was buying Romantic drawings and Impressionist sheets to round out gaps in the collection - normal work for a provincial museum on a shoestring. Then Haus Lange opened in 1955, and Wember found himself with a domestic-scale building th...

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Image: Eduard Bendemann (1811-1889), Theodor Hildebrandt (1804-1874), Julius Hübner (1806-1882), Friedrich Wilhelm von Schadow (1788-1862), und Karl Ferdinand Sohn (1805-1867) | Public domain

Kunstmuseen Krefeld: Yves Klein Sets the Garden on Fire

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, CC BY-SA 3.0. For that 1961 retrospective at Haus Lange, Klein lit temporary fire columns in the garden. He also took a small chamber, seven square metres of floor area, and whitewashed it in a grainy white he had mixed himself. That room - the Raum der Leere, the Room of Emptiness - exists to...

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Image: A.Savin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kunstmuseen Krefeld: The Beuys Block

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Steffen Schmitz (more photos), CC BY-SA 4.0. Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld in 1921. His first commission, a small fountain for the Krefelder Edelstahlwerke in 1952, came through Paul Wember. Across the next twenty-five years the museum quietly acquired fifty-three further Beuys works. The centrepiece is the Barraque D'Du...

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Image: Steffen Schmitz (more photos) | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kunstmuseen Krefeld: How to Visit

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Department of State. Office of the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany. Office of Public Affairs. 9/21/1949-1953?, Public domain. The Kunstmuseen Krefeld is three buildings under one administration. The Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in the city centre, founded in 1897 and renovated 2012-2016, holds the permanent collection: the Beuys Block, paintings by Monet and Mondrian, twelve thousand drawings and prints in the...

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Image: Department of State. Office of the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany. Office of Public Affairs. 9/21/1949-1953? | Public domain