Wallraf-Richartz Museum

The museum holds the art Ferdinand Franz Wallraf personally rescued from Cologne's dissolved churches and monasteries in the early nineteenth century, still visible today as one of the deepest concentrations of medieval Cologne School panel painting anywhere, alongside Dutch and Flemish Baroque painting and, since 2001, the Fondation Corboud's more than 170 Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings on permanent loan. Read together, the three painting departments cover close to seven centuries with real depth rather than a token example of each period, which is the museum's own claim and is broadly borne out by the named highlights on this page. The graphic collection of drawings and prints, including sheets by Durer and Leonardo, is comparatively little seen because it is not permanently hung. The collection's single largest gap in the twentieth century is not a matter of taste: the museum's own history states that 630 works were sold off by its director from 1941 as 'low-value' or 'worthless', with the proceeds used to acquire art of questionable ownership from the German-occupied East, and the building that then held everything else was destroyed in an air raid in June 1943. What survives today is what could be recovered, stored, or reacquired after 1945, not an unbroken nineteenth-century holding.

The museum's name joins a collector and a donor who were a generation apart and, on the museum's own account, most likely never met in life; they now share a double grave in Cologne's Melaten cemetery. Ferdinand Franz Wallraf (1748-1824) was a canon and university professor who spent decades rescuing what he could of Cologne's ecclesiastical art during the Napoleonic-era secularisation, when close to forty churches in the city were demolished, their contents thrown into the street, reliquaries melted down and painted panels burned as firewood. When Wallraf died in 1824 he left the city his entire estate: close to 10,000 paintings, drawings and woodcuts, about 13,000 books, more than 3,000 seals, roughly 1,000 manuscripts and documents, antiquities, coins, minerals and fossils. The city then had nowhere adequate to put any of it, and made do with temporary quarters for thirty years.

The building came from Johann Heinrich Richartz (1795-1861), a Cologne merchant who had made his fortune in the wild-hide trade. In 1854 he endowed 100,000 Taler for a purpose-built museum, and kept adding to the sum as costs rose: another 10,000 Taler for the tuff-stone facing, 12,000 for parquet floors, 24,000 for the staircase frescoes. He died shortly before the building opened in 1861 and did not live to see it in use. That first building, by the architects Felten and Raschdorff, does not survive; it stood until the Second World War.

Otto H. Foerster became director in 1933. According to the German-language Wikipedia account of the museum's history, a tertiary source not independently verified for this page beyond what is stated there, Foerster sold off a total of 630 works from 1941 onward that he classified as 'geringwertig' or 'wertlos' - low-value or worthless - among them a large landscape by August Weber and a work by Max Liebermann. The proceeds, on the same account, were used to acquire works of questionable ownership ('zweifelhaftem Besitz') from the German-occupied territories in the East. This page has not been able to independently confirm which works were involved, whether any post-war restitution claim has ever been traced to this specific acquisition programme, or how the museum's own current provenance research treats it; it is recorded here as an open question rather than a settled fact, because a claim this serious deserves a primary source this page has not yet located, not a paraphrase of one secondary account.

What is not in dispute is the building's fate. On the night of 28 to 29 June 1943, in the raid Cologne remembers as the Peter-und-Paul-Nacht, the 1861 museum building was completely destroyed. Whatever of the collection had not already been moved into storage for protection went with it, on top of whatever Foerster had already sold or lost track of during the preceding two years.

Reconstruction took until 1957, when a new museum by the architects Rudolf Schwarz and Josef Bernard opened on the old site, now addressed An der Rechtschule. It was criticised for its room layout almost as soon as it opened, and judged too small within a decade, a pressure that increased sharply after the city acquired Peter Ludwig's contemporary art collection in 1968. A design competition in 1975-76 produced the Busmann and Haberer building, which opened in 1986 as a shared home for the Wallraf-Richartz collection and the new Museum Ludwig under one roof - not a comfortable arrangement long-term, since the two collections had different audiences and different needs.

The split came in 2001, when the Wallraf-Richartz collection moved into a new building of its own, a cube-shaped structure by the German architect Oswald Mathias Ungers at Obenmarspforten, beside Cologne's town hall. The same year, the Swiss collectors Gerard J. Corboud and his Cologne-born wife Marisol placed their collection of more than 170 Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings with the museum as a permanent loan, and the institution added 'Fondation Corboud' to its name in recognition. The artist names carved into the Ungers building's stone facade - Cranach, Durer, Rubens, Rembrandt, Courbet, Pissarro, Morisot, Munch and others among them - read as a index of exactly this combined collection.

The Ungers building needs work that goes beyond redecoration: corroded water and waste pipes, a cooling system from 1999 at the end of its working life, fire-alarm systems due for total replacement, and lifts that need replacing, according to the City of Cologne's own January 2025 statement announcing the closure. An adjoining extension building, designed by the Swiss firm Christ & Gantenbein and already under construction since spring 2024, will add roughly 1,000 square metres of new exhibition space and 500 square metres of storage and work space, linked to the renovated Ungers building by an underground tunnel. The museum's own 'Auf einen letzten Blick' (One Last Look) page, inviting a final pre-closure visit, fixes the exact closure date precisely: the museum stayed open to the public through 2 August 2026 at 6pm and has been closed since 3 August 2026, a firmer figure than the September or summer 2026 estimates in the January 2025 press coverage below.

Every account of when this will be finished disagrees with the last one. Kunstforum International, in December 2024, reported the closure running from summer 2026 to March 2028, quoting a critic in the Koelner Stadtanzeiger who called the plan a tragedy. A month later, at the city's own January 2025 press conference, the Baudezernent (buildings deputy) Markus Greitemann gave a maximum of eighteen months from around September 2026, with reopening 'early' in 2028, while the city's own written statement the same month put the extension's opening 'from mid-2028'. The museum's own website, read for this page in August 2026 with the closure notice already live, now says 'late 2028', restated in the same short paragraph as 'until the end of 2028'. No two of these four accounts, all traceable to the museum or the city itself, agree on a single date, which is exactly the pattern this publication's house rules treat as a target rather than a confirmed reopening.

The Japan tour question can now be answered, in part. The museum's own tour page, 'Van Gogh and Co. on tour', read 13 August 2026, confirms that seventy paintings from the collection - including Van Gogh's The Drawbridge and Monet's The Seine at Asnieres, works by Cezanne, Gauguin, Manet, Matisse, Renoir, Cross, Caillebotte and Signac among them - did travel to Japan under the title 'Van Gogh and the Impressionists': the Utsunomiya Museum of Art (19 April to 21 June 2026), the Abeno Harukas Art Museum in Osaka (4 July to 9 September 2026, the leg running as this page was checked) and the Nagoya City Art Museum (19 September to 29 November 2026), presented on the museum's own page as the collection travelling 'as ambassadors for Cologne' while the home building is shut. What is not resolved is the flat contradiction this leaves standing on the museum's own site: the separate closing-notice page still states 'our artworks will not be shown at other locations either', a sentence the tour page directly contradicts, and nothing on the museum's own site reconciles the two. The more likely reading is that the Japan tour was a commitment made before the closure and is being honoured as an exception, while the 'not shown elsewhere' line describes policy on any new loan request going forward - but that reading is this page's inference, not a statement either museum page makes.

The Wallraf-Richartz closure is not an isolated case in Cologne. At the time it was announced, the city's opera house and Schauspielhaus (playhouse) had already been under renovation for more than thirteen years, with costs still rising; the main buildings of the Roman-Germanic Museum and the Cologne City Museum were also both already closed for extended periods; and Museum Ludwig's own director was reported as unable to envisage finding a suitable interim home in central Cologne when that museum's turn for a comparable renovation comes. None of this proves the Wallraf-Richartz will run over its own current target, but it is the documented context the museum's own site does not mention, and it is the reason this page treats every reopening date read here as a target rather than a commitment.

We publish no visitor review prose and cite no single review as representative. Google's own aggregate, drawn from before and up to the closure, sits at a strong 4.6, and the venue's own listing there is tagged 'Temporarily closed' rather than open, which matches the museum's own site. Visitors consistently single out the concentration of medieval Cologne panel painting and the Rembrandt-to-Impressionism run as reasons to visit, and set the museum apart from its larger neighbour, Museum Ludwig, as the quieter, more classical of Cologne's two big picture collections. The most repeated complaint before the closure was about staff confidence in English rather than about the collection itself.