Kunstbau Lenbachhaus

Description

Located in the Kunstareal München, the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München is a municipal art museum in Maxvorstadt. It is housed in the listed villa of the painter‑prince Franz von Lenbach at Luisenstraße 33, directly opposite the Königsplatz with the Propylaea.

The villa was built at the end of the 19th century (1887–1891) and received extensions in the 1920s and in the late 1960s/early 1970s. In 1929 the building was opened as a municipal gallery; from 2009 to 2013 it underwent an extensive general renovation and a modern extension was added. Parts of Lenbach’s representative living quarters have been preserved in their original state and are accessible as part of the exhibition tour. Since 1994 the Kunstbau above the Königsplatz U-Bahn station has been part of the institution; this underground exhibition space is mainly used for large temporary exhibitions and was awarded an architecture prize in 1995.

The collection developed from a municipal assembly of Munich painters of the 18th and 19th centuries and comprises works by representatives of the Munich School, the Munich Secession, as well as selected examples of Dresden Romanticism and the Berlin and Düsseldorf schools. Internationally significant is the museum’s world‑renowned collection of the group Der Blaue Reiter, which, thanks to a major donation in 1957, made the collection an international reference; among those represented are Alexej Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Franz Marc, August Macke, Marianne von Werefkin and Paul Klee. Since 1979 contemporary art has also been acquired; key holdings include works and environments by Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter’s Atlas (1996), as well as more recent additions such as Der Laden (2015). In total the collection comprises around 28,000 works (as of 2016); the proportion of female artists is historically low and rose from around 1% before 1900 to about 11% in the period 1946–2015.

The institution has long carried out systematic provenance research and has made numerous restitutions, beginning in 1950 with the return to the heirs of Michael Berolzhimers. Following the Washington Principles and with municipal support since 1999, further works have been restituted to rightful claimants; recent cases culminated in the 2024 restitution of a painting from the Jacques Goudstikker collection to his heir Marei von Saher. More than 10,000 digitized items from the collection are available in the Bavarikon of the Free State of Bavaria as public domain. The Lenbachhaus is protected as a monument under file number D-1-62-000-4134.