| Museum
für Angewandte Kunst
The Museum of Applied Art
 |
|
The
Museum of Applied Art |
The museum preserves and expands one of the most
important German collections of European applied art from the
Middle-Ages to the present-day and a high-quality collection of
design from 1900 onwards. It offers a tour through rooms designed
to illustrate the most various epochs and styles since the Gothic
period. Furniture and tapestries, objects used in dining and banqueting,
utensils and textiles designed to the highest standard, small
sculptures, luxury objects and objects of ornamentation tell the
story of interiors furnished with a high regard to quality –
nowadays referred to as interior design. Major works, for example,
are tapestries from Basel and a Venetian wedding goblet from the
15th century, a Renaissance Nuremberg cabinet with geometrical
marquetry, Baroque Gobelins from Brussels and Beauvais, two life-sized
animal figures in Meissen porcelain (J.J. Kaendler, around 1730),
furniture by Abraham and David Roentgen (around 1760 to 1790),
sets of jewellery from the 19th century by Falize and Castellani,
a silver service by Henry van de Velde (1905) and the important
Suprematist set of writing implements by N. Sujetin (around 1920).
 |
|
Part
of a coffee service made for Clemens August of Bavaria,
Elector and Archbishop of Cologne. Meissen, 1735, Porcelain |
The museum presents and discusses artists and developments
in all aspects of applied art including the fields of architecture
and fashion, photography, film and a wide variety of interdisciplinary
artistic approaches in frequently changing exhibitions.
The Museum of Applied Art in Cologne was founded
in 1888 at the instigation of enthusiastic citizens of Cologne
and was supported to an important degree by the Kölnischer
Kunstgewerbe-Verein (Cologne society of arts and crafts). The
historic core of the collection includes the collections of the
scholar and collector Ferdinand Franz Wallraf (1748-1824) and
Matthias Joseph de Noel (1782-1849) and was rapidly expanded by
high-quality gifts mainly from the citizens of Cologne. The Cologne
textile manufacturer, Otto Andreae, provided the funding for the
neo-gothic museum building on the Hansaring in the city centre
which was opened in 1900. In 1943 the building was destroyed in
the war and with it an important art nouveau gesamtkunstwerk,
the Pallenberg room by Melchior Lechter named after the benefactor.
 |
|
Frankfurter
Hochhausschrank, N. Berghof, M. Landes, W. Rang, 1985,
various precious woods, marble, ivory, brass, gold leaf |
The collection which was stored for four decades
in the Romanesque Overstolzenhaus and of which only individual
aspects could be shown, continued to grow dynamically and has
been exhibited since 1989 and presented according to an innovative
concept in the museum building An der Rechtschule (built in 1953-57
for the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum).
|
)
)
)