Collection in motion -

Impressionism, Rhenish Expressionism, new Bauhaus furniture and more

Sun, May 21, 2023–Wed, Dec 24, 2025

Kaiser Wilhelm Museum

With the first exhibition of Impressionist painting in Paris in April 1874, 150 years ago, a new art movement was born. At the same time, photography, as a technical innovation, created fascination and expanded the spectrum of artistic forms of expression. Since then, painting and photography have to a certain extent been powerful competitors in the visual arts. At the same time, the two media shape and influence each other. Just like technology, the environment and the reality of people's lives changed rapidly as the 19th century progressed. Everyday scenes became the focus of painting, with the aim of capturing personal impressions, changing light conditions and visual moods depending on the time of day or season. This new perception of reality ultimately gave rise to Impressionism exactly 150 years ago. The French painter and co-founder of Impressionism, Claude Monet, painted London's Parliament on the Thames at sunset in 1904. He overcame the naturalistic use of color and neglected architectural details. Just like Claude Monet because of his unconventional painting style, the first artist photographers around 1900 were also controversial. The new room at the KWM tells the story of the works of some of the protagonists from this period.

Following on from Impressionism, Expressionism emerged at the beginning of the 20th century as another important movement in art. Under the title A Perceived World, a room at the KWM is dedicated to this progressive style of painting, which is primarily concerned with the expression of the inner emotional world. While the painters of the Brücke formed in Dresden and the Blaue Reiter in Munich, a Rhenish variant emerged in 1913 on the occasion of an exhibition in Bonn. Among the participating artists were the painters Heinrich Campendonk, Helmuth Macke and Heinrich Nauen, who are now on display in a room at the KWM. All three come from Krefeld, are closely associated with the history of the KWM and are among the most important representatives of Rhenish Expressionism. The new room in Collection in Motion tells their story and shows how painting detached itself from the canvas and was transferred to furniture, textiles, glass windows and walls.

Another new room on the first floor of the KWM is dedicated to the creative ideas and innovative formal language of modernism in the 1920s. Paintings and prints by pioneering figures such as Piet Mondrian (1872 - 1944), Anni Albers (1899 - 1994) and László Moholy-Nagy (1895 - 1946) are arranged with tubular steel furniture by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886 - 1969) and Marcel Breuer (1902 - 1981), which recently entered the collection of the Kunstmuseen Krefeld as new acquisitions. The formal interplay of everyday objects and paintings shows how fluid the boundaries between image, spatial and object design were at the time. The artists and designers were concerned with a systematic organization of means, a generally understandable expression and a reduction to elementary design elements. Teaching at the State Bauhaus, where Marcel Breuer and Anni Albers, among others, studied and which Ludwig Mies van der Rohe later directed, was also based on these ideas.

Another room in Collection in Motion shows three works of art that appear very different at first glance. However, they are dedicated to a common theme: silence and contemplation. Here, a Christian panel painting from the 16th century, a Japanese Buddha statue from the 19th century and the monochrome painting by the English conceptual artist Alan Charlton (*1948, Sheffield, UK) from the 1970s come together. The contrast between the paintings could not be greater. Each stands for a different type of intensive reception and demands a particular form of attention. While the Buddha statue and the panel painting serve religious worship, Charlton aims for a free and individual experience through pure engagement with the image. Inner peace, concentration, meditation and reflection are brought to bear in different visual ways. This creates a sound of silence in the room.

Serial repetition and color contrasts - Günter Fruhtrunk's (1923 Munich, DE - 1982 ibid.) Metastable compositions from 1963 as well as the concept of the contemporary sofa au mètre by designer Éric Chevallier (1979 Suresnes, FR), which together form another new space of collection in motion. Günter Fruhtrunk would have been 100 years old in 2023. As the silkscreen portfolio shows, in the early 1960s Fruhtrunk knew how to use color to combine his pictorial elements into a dynamically balanced composition without foreground or background. With clear lines, geometric shapes and high-contrast secondary colors, he developed an original, unmistakable formal language in his paintings and drawings. His precise compositions are based on repetitions and rhythmize the pictorial space and are also partly subject to the use of mathematical methods such as geometric calculations and ratio equations. The French designer Chevallier created the seating furniture with the upholsterers *Domeau & Pérès in 2014, which was donated to the collection of the Kunstmuseen Krefeld. The sofa consists of geometrically uniform, colored modules and can be extended endlessly - "meter by meter" according to its title. However, it is not the product of industrial series production, but of craftsmanship.

In 2020, the Kunstmuseen Krefeld launched a new concept for the presentation of its collection that introduces the extensive holdings in a dynamic, varied way and with diverse themes. Under the title Collection in Motion, 15 stories line up like a string of pearls in the 15 rooms on the second floor of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum. Again and again, a new room emerges, and sculptures, paintings, photography and design objects come together to form other surprising stories. Other rooms are thematically dedicated to, among others, Herbert Zangs, Street Photography and Pop Art.