Qualla: Museum Folkwang

Museum Folkwang: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Raimond Spekking, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1932 the Harvard curator Paul J. Sachs - the man who had effectively invented the museum-studies profession in America - visited Essen and called the Museum Folkwang the most beautiful museum in the world. Five years later, Joseph Goebbels's commission for the purging of so-called degenerate art removed more than twelve hundred works from its walls: Cezannes, Matisses, Munchs, Braques, Derains, de Chiricos. Roughly five thousand of the seventeen thousand pieces stripped that year from German museums were later burned. The Folkwang never tried to recover them. The seizures, the institution acknowledges, had been technically legal under German law.

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Image: Raimond Spekking | CC BY-SA 4.0

Museum Folkwang: The Name and the Patron

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vincent van Gogh, Public domain. Folkvangr is the meadow of the dead in Norse mythology - the afterlife field presided over by the goddess Freyja, where half of those slain in battle go (the other half going to Odin's Valhalla). Karl Ernst Osthaus, a banker's son with an inheritance and a passion for new art, fo...

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Image: Vincent van Gogh | Public domain

Museum Folkwang: The Most Beautiful Museum

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul Gauguin, Public domain. Through the 1920s and into the early 1930s the Museum Folkwang became one of the leading collections of modern art in the world. The director Ernst Gosebruch and his curators bought aggressively and well; the museum was where Germany's most ambitious patrons of new painting went ...

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Image: Paul Gauguin | Public domain

Museum Folkwang: Twelve Hundred Works

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit László Lakner, CC BY-SA 4.0. Over twelve hundred pieces were taken from the Museum Folkwang. The names read like a roll call of the artists who had defined the early twentieth century: Cezanne, Matisse, Munch, Braque, Derain, de Chirico, Henri-Edmond Cross. Across all German state collections roughly sevente...

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Image: László Lakner | CC BY-SA 4.0

Museum Folkwang: The Photography Collection

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Armin Kleiner, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Folkwang has another distinction that less famous than its painting catastrophe. In 1929 it hosted Fotografie der Gegenwart - Photography of the Present - one of the seminal exhibitions in the history of the medium, gathering the leading photographers of Germany, Austria, and...

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Image: Armin Kleiner | CC BY-SA 4.0

Museum Folkwang: The Chipperfield Building

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DerHexer, CC BY-SA 3.0. In March 2007 the British architect David Chipperfield won an international competition - over proposals from David Adjaye, Volker Staab, and Zaha Hadid - to design a new wing for the Museum Folkwang. The 16,000-square-metre extension opened in January 2010, the year Essen and th...

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Image: DerHexer | CC BY-SA 3.0