The collections of the Kunstmuseen Krefeld comprise about 24,000 objects, including a small stock of so-called ethnographic objects of non-European origin, which found their way to Krefeld between 1891 and 1930 in the context of European colonialism and German colonial history. In total, there are about 115 objects, the majority of which come from Africa, South and East Asia, and Oceania.

At this time, the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum pursued a collection and exhibition program that ascribed special importance to folk art. "Folk art," which included cultural products of African, Asian, and Oceanic societies, was to serve as a source of inspiration and a model for local art and design production. Thus, a transformation of objects with colonial contexts into museum and art objects took place at the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, which opened in 1897 as the Museum of Art and Applied Art.

For example, textiles were acquired on the occasion of the "Dutch-Indian Art Exhibition" in 1906 and ritual objects from the region of present-day Papua New Guinea for the exhibition "Color," which was shown in 1928. By far the largest part of the ethnographic object inventory is a bundle of 53 wickerwork objects. They entered the collection of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum through the acquisition of the core holdings of the "Deutsches Museum für Kunst in Handel und Gewerbe" in 1923 (from the estate of Karl Ernst Osthaus). In addition, the collection includes a number of 25 weapons, Japanese baskets and some individual objects.

The objects come from various European colonial territories. Their geographical and cultural origins can be located in the present-day territories of Egypt, Nigeria, Cameroon, Togo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, China, Japan, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, the Marshall Islands and Samoa, among others. They were obtained through art and ethnographica dealers such as J.F.G. Umlauff, Bruno Antelmann (Deutsches Kolonialhaus), Rex & Co. or "Kunst- und Verlagshandlung R[udolph]. Wagner, Berlin." A provenance chain up to societies of origin could not be determined so far.

The collection, which fell into oblivion in the post-war period, was already partially catalogued and published in the 1980s and 1990s for the exhibition projects The West German Impulse and Beauty and Everyday Life. For the first time, the entire collection is now being inventoried, restored, photographed, and digitized. The previously uncatalogued works are primarily from the large holdings of so-called commercial prints, which—with advertisements, commercial letterheads, visiting cards and menus, typeface sample books, invitations, postcards, etc.—comprise a panorama of cultural history.

In the course of the cataloguing, the fragile stock of paper works will not only be restored and thus preserved for the future, but also archived in digitized form. The digitized copies will make it possible to sustainably preserve the findings for research and will be available for future study. They can also be used for modern knowledge transfer in the digital age.

The cataloguing also makes it possible to gain an overview of all the artistic personalities who Osthaus integrated into his German Museum of Art in Trade and Commerce. In addition to leading figures such as Peter Behrens, Henry van de Velde, Lucian Bernhard, Fritz H. Ehmcke, and Richard Riemerschmid, these also include almost forgotten artists who can be identified on the basis of the inventory as important protagonists of modernism: for example, Johannes Weidenmüller as the forefather of German advertising science, the Berlepsch student Maria La Roche, and Elisabeth Stephani-Hahn as a pioneer of shop window design, to name only a few. They and their colleagues created the foundations of the ideas of consumer culture, advertising, and marketing that are still valid to this day. The exhibition planned for November 2023 and the accompanying catalog will use the research results to shed light on the German Museum with its innovative impulses for contemporary collecting, museum, and mediation activities.

Between June 2018 and May 2019, the researchers traced the history of the paintings since the 1920s, evaluated archive material, and spoke with experts both in Germany and abroad. In the process, they did not come across any indications that the works could be unlawfully in the possession of the City of Krefeld.
The summary of the researchers' dossier explains the findings in detail.