Museum Folkwang

Museum Folkwang in Essen is one of Germany’s leading art museums, featuring extensive collections of 19th- and 20th-century art, including German and French paintings and sculptures, photography, and the German Poster Museum.

Planning your visit

Museum Folkwang has a founding idea worth knowing: Karl Ernst Osthaus established it in 1902 on the principle that art should be shown to industrial workers rather than sequestered for collectors, and he bought Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne and Matisse when German museums still considered them unserious. That original collection was among the finest holdings of modern art anywhere until 1937, when the Nazis seized over 1,400 works from it as "degenerate art" — one of the largest confiscations from any German museum. What hangs today is a rebuilt collection, and the gaps are part of the story.

The holdings now cover nineteenth and twentieth-century German and French painting and sculpture, a major photography collection, prints and drawings, and the German Poster Museum with over 350,000 posters. David Chipperfield's 2010 extension added glass-walled galleries around courtyards, giving the building a calm, daylit character that suits the work.

Essen is worth understanding as context: a Ruhr coal and steel city, home of Krupp, that reinvented itself culturally after heavy industry collapsed. The Zollverein colliery, a UNESCO site, sits nearby and makes the transformation legible.

Bookable options include guided tours in English or German covering the permanent collection and current exhibitions, tours built around specific temporary shows, and painting workshops pairing a gallery visit with practical studio work. Private city tours of Essen include the museum alongside the industrial heritage sites, which is the pairing that makes most sense of the place. Current availability is listed below.