Kunsthalle Bremen

Kunsthalle Bremen's holding runs from the fourteenth century to living artists, but its center of gravity is nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and French painting, assembled by a private art society rather than a princely collection, which gives the walls a different logic than most European museums of comparable size. The Kunstverein bought forward rather than inherited backward: Delacroix and Courbet before French painting was fashionable in Germany, then Monet, Manet and Van Gogh while conservative critics were still calling Impressionism a fad, then Beckmann and the Worpswede painters while they were still living neighbors of the city rather than art-historical names. The print cabinet, at roughly 220,000 sheets, is one of the largest study collections of its kind in Europe and rarely finds a place in the popular account of the museum next to the paintings upstairs.

Kunsthalle Bremen did not begin as a museum. It began in 1823 as the Kunstverein Bremen, an art society founded by 34 local businessmen who wanted, in the society's own words, to spread a sense of beauty and form in a port city better known for trade than for painting. Membership grew quickly, from a founding handful to 575 people by 1846, and the collection grew with it: by 1833 the Kunstverein already owned 13 paintings, 585 drawings and nearly 4,000 prints, weighted toward Dutch and Flemish Old Masters such as Jan van Goyen. It took until 1849 for the society to put that collection behind its own front door. Lueder Rutenberg's building, a two-story structure with round-arched windows and four stone figures of Raphael, Michelangelo, Duerer and Rubens over the entrance, made the Bremen Kunstverein the first art society in Germany to own a purpose-built home for its collection rather than renting rooms or sharing a building with something else.

The building has been added to three times since 1849, and each addition tells its own story. Eduard Gildemeister's monumental sandstone facade of 1902, with sculpture by Georg Roemer and Georg Wrba, turned a modest society building into something closer to a civic monument, and it is still the face most visitors photograph from Am Wall. Eighty years later a Werner Duettmann extension caused a genuine scandal: the approved plans called for stone to match the existing building, and what went up instead was red brick, a decision that provoked public argument in Bremen at the time and still divides opinion on the building today. The most recent change, completed in 2011, is the opposite gesture: two glass-and-concrete cubic wings by the Berlin firm Hufnagel, Puetz and Rafaelian, adding 5,560 square meters against the 7,410 square meters of the fully renovated historic building, funded in equal thirds by the Luerssen family and the Karin and Uwe Hollweg Foundation, the state of Bremen, and the federal government, at a cost of about 30 million euros.

On 5 September 1942 an air raid destroyed the museum's central staircase and six upper rooms, and burned Emanuel Leutze's monumental Washington Crossing the Delaware, too large to move to safety; a second version of the same composition survives today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. What had already been evacuated fared little better. Paintings, drawings and prints sent for safekeeping to four castles, including roughly 50 paintings, 1,715 drawings and about 3,000 prints at Karnzow Castle, were seized when Soviet forces reached Karnzow in May 1945. More than 1,500 works from the Bremen collection are still unaccounted for, among the largest wartime losses suffered by any German museum, alongside Dresden. A Soviet officer named Viktor Baldin personally rescued 362 drawings and two paintings from the ruins of Karnzow and carried them to Moscow, where they remain in a Russian state collection; Bremen has formally asked for their return since 1989, and in 2005 Russia's culture minister called the idea out of the question. The Baldin drawings are not a closed chapter. They are an open one this museum has been unable to close for eighty years.

In 1910 the Kunsthalle's first scientific director, Gustav Pauli, paid 30,000 marks for Vincent van Gogh's 1889 Mohnfeld, a poppy field painted the year before the artist's death. Conservative critics, led by the Worpswede painter Carl Vinnen, treated the purchase as a symptom of something larger: on 17 April 1911 Vinnen published an 80-page pamphlet, Ein Protest deutscher Kuenstler, denouncing what he called the great invasion of French art into German museums, and 123 artists signed it, including Kaethe Kollwitz. The response came within two months. Im Kampf um die Kunst, a counter-pamphlet defending Pauli and modern collecting, carried 47 artists' signatures and 28 more from gallerists, writers and dealers, among them Max Beckmann and Wassily Kandinsky. Bremen's own conservative politicians tried in 1913 to curb the museum's purchasing independence in response to the row; they did not succeed, and Pauli's successors kept buying the French and German modernists the protest had tried to keep out. The painting that started it hangs in the collection today.

Walk the museum in order and the collection tells its own history. Old Master paintings and the Leibl-circle realists give way to French Impressionism and the German painters who answered it, Liebermann, Corinth, Slevogt, before a room built around the Van Gogh that caused the 1911 uproar. The Worpswede rooms hold Paula Modersohn-Becker in depth, an artist who spent her whole working life in the villages outside Bremen and died in 1907, months after the birth of her only child, before most of Europe had noticed what she had painted. Max Beckmann, whose paintings and near-complete print graphics the museum counts among the largest Beckmann holdings anywhere in Germany, occupies the modern rooms alongside Picasso, Franz Marc and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. A small, concentrated sculpture collection is built around Antonio Canova's marble Psyche and Auguste Rodin's Das Eherne Zeitalter, the bronze that caused its own scandal in 1877 when critics wrongly accused Rodin of casting it from a living body. The 2011 glass wings, finally, hold video and light-based contemporary work, a program that has included Olafur Eliasson and Pipilotti Rist alongside earlier new-media pioneers such as Nam June Paik.

The museum's Nazi-era history did not end with the 1942 bombing raid. Between 2009 and 2016 Kunsthalle Bremen returned or settled several works looted or forced onto the market under Nazi persecution: Wilhelm Leibl's Peasant Girl went to the heirs of Alexander Lewin in 2009, an agreement with the heirs of Michael Berolzheimer covered a Giacomo Cavedone painting sold under duress in 1937 and led to the restitution of a Francesco Trevisani Madonna and Child in 2014, and a drawing from the Arthur Feldmann collection was returned to heirs in 2016. Not every claim has been settled on the claimant's terms: the museum rejected a claim over a George Grosz work, arguing the artist lost it to debt rather than persecution, a position the family disputes. Provenance researchers at the museum are still working through the wartime dealings of three Bremen art dealers, Arnold Blome, Heinrich Glosemeier and Hugo Oelze, whose full role in moving looted and forced-sale works through the Bremen market during and after the Nazi period is not yet completely mapped. A museum built on buying ahead of taste is still, a century later, accounting for what that buying cost other people.

Visitors consistently describe Kunsthalle Bremen as a compact, high-quality survey of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and French painting that rewards two to three hours rather than a full day, and praise how the collection reads as a single walk through art history from Romantic landscape to contemporary light installation inside one building. Reviewers frequently single out specific works, a Van Gogh, a Rodin, Canova's Psyche, as reasons the museum punches above its size, while several note that it sits comfortably alongside, if smaller than, its better-known Hamburg namesake.