Lenbachhaus

This museum owns the world's largest collection of Blauer Reiter paintings, and if you know nothing about the Blauer Reiter, you're about to understand why Munich matters to modern art. In 1911, Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc founded Der Blaue Reiter — The Blue Rider — in Munich, a movement that pushed painting toward pure abstraction and changed everything that came after. Kandinsky, Marc, Gabriele Münter, August Macke, Alexej von Jawlensky, and Paul Klee all worked in and around Munich, and their most important works ended up here.

The collection exists because of Gabriele Münter, Kandinsky's partner and a formidable artist in her own right. When the Nazis came to power, Münter hid hundreds of paintings from both her own collection and Kandinsky's in her house in Murnau, south of Munich. The Nazis had classified the work as "degenerate art" and would have destroyed it. Münter guarded the paintings for decades and donated them to the Lenbachhaus in 1957, on her 80th birthday. Without her, the collection — and a significant chapter of art history — would have been lost.

The building itself began as the Tuscan-style villa of Franz von Lenbach, a portrait painter so fashionable in the late 19th century that he could afford to build an Italian palazzo on Königsplatz. The villa was converted into a gallery in 1929 and expanded dramatically by architect Norman Foster in 2013, who wrapped the original building in a shimmering golden façade that divides opinion exactly as intended.

The permanent collection traces Munich's art scene from the 19th-century Romantic landscapes of the Munich School through Jugendstil, Expressionism, and the Blauer Reiter to contemporary art by Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, and Anselm Kiefer. Kandinsky's "Composition VII" and Marc's "Blue Horse I" are here — two of the most reproduced paintings of the 20th century, hanging in the city where they were conceived.