Art Lovers And Patrons : Germany

Today Germany’s museums, both traditional and modern, try to reach all segments of the population regardless of their level of education. Germans now visit a museum as casually as they used to go to the cinema; long lines form in front of the museum ticket counters when individual exhibits of the works of great classical modern painters are featured. Year in, year out, more than 100 million people visit Germany’s museums, which in some major cities have come to form entire ensembles: along the bank of the Main River in Frankfurt, for instance, along the “Museum Mile” in Bonn, or in the capital Berlin, where the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation founded in 1951 fills several museums with its collections from Prussian days.

As in the past, wealthy private patrons of the arts have been partly responsible for the current museum boom. Peter Ludwig, a Rhineland businessman who died in 1994, was one of the best-known. He donated many modern works of art to predominantly newly-built museums. The “Ludwig-Forum” in Aachen, which is housed in a former umbrella factory, focuses among other things on art from the former GDR. Ludwig’s collection of contemporary French art is on display in the former House of the Teutonic Order in Koblenz.