Кёльн қаласындағы Людвиг мұражайы

Museum in Cologne, Germany

Museum Ludwig, located in Cologne, Germany, houses a collection of modern art. It includes works from Pop Art, Abstract and Surrealism, and has one of the largest Picasso collections in Europe. It holds many works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

The museum emerged in 1976 as an independent institution from the Wallraf Richartz Museum. That year the chocolate magnate Peter Ludwig agreed to endow 350 modern artworks—then valued at $45 million —and in return the City of Cologne committed itself to build a dedicated "Museum Ludwig" for works made after 1900. The recent building was designed by architects de and de and opened in 1986 near the Cologne Cathedral. The new building was home to both the Wallraf Richartz Museum as well as Museum Ludwig. In 1994, it was decided to separate the two institutions and to place the building on Bischofsgartenstrasse at the sole disposal of Museum Ludwig. In 1999, Steve Keene painted in the museum. The building is home to the Kölner Philharmonie. The Heinrich Böll Platz, a public square designed by Dani Karavan, is above the concert hall at the north east of the building. During concerts people are not permitted to walk on the square, as it creates acoustic disturbances for the concert goers below. In 2016 the museum joined forces with the Bell Art Center to organize an unofficial retrospective of Anselm Kiefer, which opened at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts. The last stop on the tour in China was to be the new Jupiter Museum of Art in Shenzhen, but a delayed museum opening caused the works to be put into storage. At this point the museum lost track of the pieces and began to search for them. In January 2020 they located the pieces in a warehouse in Shenzhen and attempted to retrieve the piece. They were stopped by Chinese authorities. Diplomatic action has been undertaken by the German Government, the City of Koblenz, and Kiefer himself, to secure the return of the pieces, which include the monumental work Pasiphae.

The museum essentially incorporates the Sammlung Haubrich, a collection by lawyer Josef Haubrich of art from 1914 to 1939 donated to the city of Cologne in May 1946. Directly after World War II, in May 1946, Haubrich presented the city with his Expressionism collection (Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt Rottluff, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Otto Mueller) and works by other representatives of Classical Modernism (Marc Chagall, Otto Dix). The second integral part of the museum is the Sammlung Ludwig, a collection of art by Picasso, Russian avant garde and American Pop art artists. With around 900 works by Picasso, the museum today has the third largest collection of this artist worldwide, after Barcelona and Paris. Peter Ludwig and his wife Irene later put their collection of the Russian avant garde on permanent loan to the museum, including 600 works from the period 1905 to 1935 by artists such as Kasimir Malevich, Ljubov Popova, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, and Alexander Rodchenko. Today the museum houses the most comprehensive collection of early Russian avant garde artworks outside Russia.

In 1999 the museum returned the painting Zwei weibliche Halbakte (Two Female Nudes ) (1919) by Otto Mueller to the heirs of Dr. Ismar Littmann. In February 2000 the museum returned La Grappe de Raisins (1920) by Louis Marcoussis (1883–1941) to the family of El Lissitzky and Sophie Lissitzky Küppers. The Ludwig Museum also agreed to restitute five drawings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Georges Kars to the heirs of Curt Glaser.