Collection

At the beginning of the 20th century, Bielefeld’s municipal museum was located roughly where the Kunsthalle Bielefeld stands today. It is housed in the villa of the Kaselowsky family in the middle of the “Kaselowsky Gardens”. In 1921, it is decided to organize art exhibitions in one room of the museum. A five-member “Care Committee for the Permanent Art Exhibitions in the Municipal Museum” is founded. The teacher Dr. Heinrich Becker (1881-1972), who came to Bielefeld from Braunschweig in 1908, was primarily responsible for the program. With extraordinary voluntary commitment, he organized numerous exhibitions and finally suggested that Bielefeld should have its own municipal art museum.

In 1928, the Städtisches Kunsthaus (in the former house of Kommerzienrat Tiemann in what was then Hindenburgstraße, now Alfred-Bozi-Straße) is opened. Dr. Heinrich Becker becomes honorary director. For the first time, he compiles the city’s possessions (which are also located in the town hall, offices, municipal theater, etc.) in an inventory book and begins to supplement them with initial acquisitions.

In the early days, acquisitions were mainly made from exhibitions, but also through the Kunstsalon Otto Fischer, the only gallery for modern art in Bielefeld. Becker is interested in early modern art (Ernst Barlach, Käthe Kollwitz, Emil Nolde etc.) as well as regional Westphalian modern art. His commitment to modernity led to his dismissal by the National Socialist regime on March 31, 1933.

Becker’s successor from April 1933 was initially Professor Arnold Rickert (1889-1974), who worked at the Bielefeld School of Arts and Crafts. He was succeeded in June 1934 by the Berlin-based sculptor Professor Georg Hengstenberg (1879-1959) as the new curator. His work as municipal curator ends in January 1944, when the Kunsthaus is destroyed during a bombing raid.

During this time, the focus was on promoting art that conformed to the party, especially by artists living in the region. The young modern art collection of the municipal Kunsthaus, on the other hand, is abruptly curtailed: In August 1937, over 200 objects were confiscated as “degenerate”. It was only decades after the end of the Nazi dictatorship that two of these works (Christian Rohlfs, The Sower; Emil Nolde, Pensioner) and graphic prints (Käthe Kollwitz, Homework; Emil Nolde, Christ and the Sinner) could be reacquired for the Kunsthalle Bielefeld thanks to numerous sponsors, including the Förderkreis Kunsthalle Bielefeld e. V., which was founded specifically for this purpose in 1982.

In June 1945, Dr. Heinrich Becker is reinstated as head of the municipal art collection. The Städtisches Kunsthaus was completely destroyed in the bombing raid of 1944, but most of Bielefeld’s own holdings were saved by relocating them. The cabinet with works on paper that remained in the Kunsthaus survived the attack. After provisional exhibition activities in the Rudolf-Oetker-Halle (concert hall) for the first five years after the end of the Second World War, the Kunsthaus is given the ground floor and basement of the Historical Museum in the Velhagenhaus at Wertherstraße 3 for future use in 1950.

In the post-war period, Becker tries to reconnect with the time before National Socialism and compensate for losses. Many purchases are made by local artists, also with the support of citizens.

1954 Dr. Heinrich Becker retires from office. He is succeeded by Dr. Gustav Vriesen (1912-1960) as the first permanent director of the Städtisches Kunsthaus. The author of the first catalog raisonné on August Macke not only acquires works by German artists ostracized under National Socialism, such as Max Beckmann and Willi Baumeister, he also makes the first international acquisitions for the art collection, e.g. from Robert and Sonia Delaunay. In addition, Vriesen is particularly committed to the expressionist work of Hermann Stenner, a native of Bielefeld, which he discovered in the family’s estate in Bielefeld as a “lost treasure” (Vriesen). In 1959, the first ideas for the construction of an art gallery were considered. After the sudden death of Gustav Vriesen in 1960, his colleague Eberhard Pinder (1913-1965) took over as interim manager. Further important acquisitions of Classical Modernism, including works by August Macke, Otto Mueller, Emil Nolde and Oskar Schlemmer, are realized.

In 1962, Dr. Joachim Wolfgang von Moltke (1909-2002) takes up the post of director. One focus of his acquisition activities is the expansion of the German Expressionist collection, e.g. he adds important works by Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff to the Brücke collection. However, the collection also includes individual works from other art movements, such as a cubist work by Marsden Hartley or works from the Bauhaus period by Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy. Thanks to Moltkes’ connections to South Africa, two paintings and two works on paper by the South African Expressionist Irma Stern were also acquired – the only works by this artist in a German museum collection to date.

Shortly after von Moltke took up his post, plans for a new museum building began to gather pace, with Rudolf-August Oetker providing significant support and funding. On September 27, 1968, the current building of the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, built by the American architect Philip Johnson, is opened. For the first time in decades, the art collection now has its own museum building to store and present its holdings. The bronze “The Thinker” by Auguste Rodin is installed in front of the entrance to the Kunsthalle.

Under Dr. Ulrich Weisner (1936-1994), who succeeded von Moltke in 1974, the focus of acquisitions shifted to contemporary works by German and American artists. Important works by the German “painter heroes” Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, A. R. Penck and Gerhard Richter are included in the collection, as well as works of American Minimal Art and Post-Minimal Art, e.g. by Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin and Frank Stella. The first works for the sculpture park are acquired from Henry Moore, David Rabinowitch, George Rickey, Ulrich Rückriem, Richard Serra and Giuseppe Spagnulo.

Under Dr. Thomas Kellein (1955-2025), who headed the Kunsthalle Bielefeld from 1996 to 2010, the municipal Kunsthalle Bielefeld was transformed into a gGmbH in 1999. In addition to important individual painting and sculptural positions on contemporary art, the first photographs, films and installations, e.g. by Hiroshi Sugimoto, Yoko Ono or Fischli/Weiss, are also included in the collection.

Since 2011, Dr. Friedrich Meschede (*1955) has sustainably strengthened the existing collection areas through significant acquisitions and important private donations. The US focus is complemented by works by Dan Flavin, Sheila Hicks and Tony Smith, for example. Corresponding German positions from the 1960s to 1980s are also included. The Kunsthalle Bielefeld has owned all of Ulrich Rückriem’s multiples since 2017. At the same time, paintings by Julius Bissier and Paula Modersohn-Becker fill gaps in the field of German Classical Modernism. Finally, collection-related contemporary positions such as a painting by Michel Majerus or sculptures by young contemporary artists, e.g. Esther Kläs or Johannes Wald, continue the collection into the present day

Postcolonial art history has led to a revision of the historically grown, Western and male-dominated canon. New acquisitions are intended to open up a view of things that have long been hidden from view. Since director Christina Végh took office in 2020, for example, the museum has acquisitions and donations of renowned female artists from the 1960s to 1980s, such as Christa Dichgans, who was long overlooked in the wake of German Pop Art, Teresa Burga, a central South American artist whose work is rooted in Pop Art and developed into conceptual approaches, Mary Bauermeister, who was a central figure around Fluxus in Cologne in the 1960s/70s, or Lifang, who combined Asian and Western art traditions in the context of Art Informel in Taiwan and later in Paris and Switzerland. Works by contemporary women artists, often with a feminist approach, including Yto Barrada, Katinka Bock, Monica Bonvicini, Shannon Bool, Rita McBride, Keren Cytter, Nicole Eisenman, Annette Kelm, Rune Mields and Ulrike Rosenbach have been included in the collection. With works by Kurt Kranz, Nam June Paik, but also James Welling, Oscar Tuazon or Philipp Timischl, gaps are filled or a special examination of the architecture of the house is encouraged.

The collection is the core of the museum in the Kunsthalle building designed by US architect Philip Johnson. Without a fixed space for a permanent hanging, today it is both its active and mobile protagonist. We are currently designing a collection presentation to accompany each temporary exhibition, which will add to it in dialog. This puts the collection in a different light each time, constantly creating new aspects that link the growing collection to the present through current issues. The Kunsthalle Bielefeld pursues a transhistorical approach that is always linked to the question of how the works in the collection relate to our current reality. We see our artworks as an important part of our visual and cultural memory, the values and concerns of which we are constantly discussing and questioning anew, especially in view of the major global and ecological changes. Auguste Rodin’s bronze sculpture “The Thinker” (1902/1968) next to the entrance of the Kunsthalle is thus also to be understood as an incunabulum of our museum that creates identity.