The Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt

The International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship (1986), 5, 27-38

The Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt

I. The Collection

ROLF LAUTER

From 8 February to 14 April 1985, in the Deutsches Architekturmuseum, the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art revealed its collections for the first time. This event was of special significance in that the city of Frankfurt possesses one of the most interesting Fine Art collections in the Federal Republic of Germany representative of the period after 1945, but so far has been unable to exhibit it on a permanent basis since no suitable museum facility is available. From this fact stems what must be a unique cultural/political problem for the Federal Republic--a major collection assembled from a variety of sources but with no home. Since the 1950s, Frankfurt has been outstanding as a city of trade and finance, but despite her size and wealth, and a few distinguished cultural institutions, her importance before the 1970s as a cultural city in the forefront of public interest has been restricted. Since then the city has decided to improve its image significantly. This change in cultural awareness began in the early 1970s under the slogan 'New Frankfurt', and there arose a city centre which cannot yet be regarded as completely homogeneous, but which is certainly interspersed with modern, 'Post- Modern' and carefully restored historic buildings, whose surroundings and potentialities have unquestionably been improved in comparison with the past. In the near future further restorations and new building projects should enhance still more the citizens' quality of life.

A central role within the cultural renewal of the city is performed by the 'Museumsufer' (Museum Riverbank) project, which was formulated by Hilmar Hoffmann, the cultural adviser first appointed by the SPD and later supported by the CDU. First with theoretical studies, and then from the beginning of the 1970s with concrete examples of practical transformation, this programme in its projected final form will offer citizens and visitors to the city alike an artistic and cultural/political liveliness unique in the Federal Republic. Starting with the pre-existing cultural organizations, Hoffmann intends, with the city's support, to create a wide-ranging array of museums, which--concentrated in one specific area of the city--will be linked to each other by a natural environment (gardens and lawns, parks, etc.) which is partly already in existence and needs to be completed. Thus in the general vicinity of the long-established Liebighaus and the St~idelsches Kunstinstitut (Stiidel Art Institute) have been opened in 1984 the Deutsches Architekturmuseum (German Museum of Architecture) and the Film

0260-4779/86/01 0027-12 $03.00 © 1986 Butterworth & Co (Publishers Ltd

28 The Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt

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Site plan of the Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt-am-Main, designed by Hans Hollein, with the Berliner Strasse to the north and the Braubachstrasse to the south of the building, and the Domstrasse

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Museum adjacent to it, whilst the Museum f~ir Kunsthandwerk (Arts and Crafts Museum), now extended into a large-scale complex, has been open to the public since summer 1985, and the Kunsthalle (Art Gallery) or 'Kulturschirm' (cultural umbrella)--a gigantic, elongated building adorned with a rotunda, in the immediate vicinity of the cathedral--is about to be brought into use for various cultural interests.

As an additional museum included in the cultural adviser's planning, and repeatedly stated by him to be the nucleus of the 'Museum Riverbank', the Museum of Modern Art should be started at the beginning of 1986 and completed by the end of 1987. Until very recently the project has been vehemently disputed, with the two opposing parties split into that which sees the St~idtische Galerie (Municipal Gallery) in the St~idelsches Kunstinstitut threatened in its work and very existence, and that which will not accept the St~idel's attempts to collect artists of the more recent period--i .e, from 1945 to the present day--as satisfactory. The St~idel has earned its fame principally by virtue of its 'historical' collections formed during the 19th century, and less through works by the key artists of the Modern Movement (in 1937 the National Socialists confiscated about 80 pictures and 400 drawings) or even the younger post-1945 moderns, with whom the post-war director, Ernst Holzinger, had already lost touch. Administrative regulations relating to the constitution of the Museum, and a far too low purchasing budget has made a progressive purchasing policy unrealizable, even in more recent times. So, parallel with the St~idtische Galerie in the St~idel, the Museum fiir Moderne Kunst was created in 1980 by a decision of the City Council; and with vigorous support from Frankfurt 's Chief Burgomaster, Walter Wallmann, and the cultural adviser, Hilmar Hoffmann, it has

ROLF LAUTER AND HANS HOLLEIN 29

moved into the centre of regional and international interest with some spectacular purchases of important works of art from the former Strfiher collection in Darmstadt. Appointed by the city as Director, the art and theatre critic, Peter Iden, who for decades had been demanding a modern art museum in Frankfurt, has been able in the period from 1980 to today to acquire some 135 works of art for this municipal museum. Building on the 67 works taken over en bloc from the Strfiher collection, Peter Iden has bought as many works again, thereby shifting the emphasis of the collection from the 1960s to the 1970s and 1980s.

In the first exhibition, at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum, which provided a good general view of the museum's holdings, the main features of the collection became apparent to the public for the first time. Alongside important examples of informal painting, the twin artist personalities of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns can be seen in this context as the historical starting-points, and they are represented by typical works from the early 1960s. Both artists are to be regarded as connecting links between the internationally dominant trend of Abstract Expressionism of American origin and the Pop Art movement. Thus in Rauschenberg's Combine Paintings--these are pictures which are enriched with fragments of the real world--elements of spontaneous painting achieved with impulsive brushwork are combined with elements of the everyday and worn-out consumer world. The real relics of the human environment introduced into the painted reality of the picture are transmuted by their inclusion in a work of art, yet at the same time they shift the work of art closer to society's living world, making it 'contemporary'. As with Johns, who painted a target in such a way that it is recognized first as an object and only after closer inspection as a painted article, Rauschenberg places different levels of reality over against each other, allowing the reality planes of the artist, the art and the observer to encounter each other in the work of art.

Pop Art--a movement very strongly represented in this collection--takes as its point of departure Rauschenberg and Johns, paraphrasing and quoting in these works various theme zones from the consumer world. In the works of John Chamberlin, Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, George Segal, Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann, motifs from advertising, newspapers and magazines, comic strip, supermarket or from an everyday world made up of a manifold array of domestic utensils determine the content of the picture. Not infrequently the observer feels himself recognized and exposed as a victim of special social mechanisms, even if the majority of Pop Art artists reject social criticism in the interpretation of their work. If Pop Art reached its apogee in the 1960s, there were also at that time a series of contrasting artistic positions, from which artists wanted to point, amongst other things, to problems and discoveries which constitute vital elements in the context of human perception and experience. Artists of Minimal Art--a stylistic development recognizable from the mid-1960s--try to make the observer aware, by means of a three-dimensional design method reduced to geometrical basic shapes which can be made objective, of a discrepancy between the actual and apparent form of an article. Solid spatial units such as, perhaps, the square iron plates by Carl Andre, Donald Judd's serial frame elements, Walter de Maria's geometrical basic and symbol figures Triangle, Circle, Square, or the different-coloured fluorescent tubes by Dan Gavin provide the exhibition visitor, according to location and the effect of light, with a variety of values in aesthetic perception and experience. An extension of various other categories of experience is also sought by other artists represented in the Frankfurt collection, such as Reiner Ruttenbeck--with his abstracted and ironically treated paraphrase objects--and Franz Erhard Walter--with his participation objects of cloth made for use by the observer.


Other artists are associated with Colour Painting--a more recent trend in painting and one which can be subdivided into those with a tendency towards a repertoire of geometrical forms and those preferring pictorial forms, but manipulated by the most varied design methods to turn colour into the vital expressive feature of their works. Thus Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland or Frank Stella have used multicoloured stripes to show the canvases of their pictures in apparent vibration or pulsating movement, Piero Dorazio has created the impression of unending rooms with the aid of subtly painted multi-layered coloured lattice structures, and Gotthard Graubner has established breathing Colour Space Bodies with his large-format cushion pictures shown in the 1982 Venice Biennale, whose colouristic effects evoke differing intuitive responses in the observer. From the position of the French movement of Nouveau R~alistes--a group of artists who, like the Pop artists, introduce social realities directly into their works of art--Yves Klein with his well-known monochrome blue and Piero Manzoni with his white pictures contributed extreme design positions based on emotion-orientated effects and symbolic significance of colours, which are to be interpreted in the context of the idea of the socio-philosophical collective work of art. Also deceased, like the two artists above, the German painter Blinky Palermo--a student of Joseph Beuys, who basically concerned himself with questions of colour and space in painting--is represented in the collection by a group of works unique in the Federal Republic.

Another strong section of the Frankfurt museum is provided by Abstract Expressionism, which since the late 1940s has found many significant representatives in America, France, Italy and the Federal Republic, in each case under specific designations such as Tachism, Informal or Lyrical Abstraction. Common to all artists associated with this trend is a subjective, gesticulative and spontaneous brushwork, which is to be interpreted as the expression of psychic experiences or fundamental spiritual standpoints. Along with important works by the Spanish artists Antoni T~pies and Manolo Millares, whose encoded material pictures thematicize the problem areas of law, freedom and destruction with the aid of cyphers, symbols and signs painted, etched or formed of sewn-up canvas, the American Cy Twombly represents an esoteric-intellectual position established by transcribing on slate-like tablets childish-naive formulations as pictorial primary studies from the nude. Other artists such as Karl Otto G6tz, Otto Greis, Hans Kreuz and Bernard Schulze, with their in part dynamic-explosive, in part lyrically restrained painted individual picture-worlds, document an early appearance of German art and especially Frankfurt Informal Art of the 1950s. Nevertheless, in precisely this area of Abstract Expressionism, a few additional important examples must be acquired for the museum.

In a final and large group of works in the collection, figurative and pictorial tendencies are brought together. The artists grouped within it express their views quite generally on the theme of Man and Man's Likeness at the present time. Beside an early trend-setting work by the English painter, Francis Bacon, dating from 1960, which expresses inner anxieties by means of gesticulatively blurred painting of the human body, overpaintings and overpainted photographs by Arnulf Rainer--the most strongly represented in numerical terms--should be noted together with works by George Baselitz, Helmut Middendorf, Bruce McLean, Dieter Krieg, Jiirgen Klauke, E.R. Nele and Jiirgen Brodwolf which are, from different viewpoints, concerned with man's problem areas or those around him. All these painters created metaphors or symbols for the feelings, emotions and anxieties which people experience in modern society. A particularly impressive example of this group is a charcoal drawing by Robert Morris, previously exhibited at the Berlin Zeitgeist exhibition, in which fire, rain and water storms involving


human limbs whirling upwards suggest and recall the many victims of war and atomic catastrophe. Building on these basic thematic and stylistic positions dating from the period after 1945, further purchases are planned to extend the collection in breadth and depth for the future Museum ffir Moderne Kunst. They will permit the hitherto basic collection to develop into a selective representation of movements in contemporary art and fundamental artistic attitudes of the period.

II. The Building

HANS HOLLEIN

Based on the considerations of town planning and urban development, as well as the limitations imposed by the site and its particular shape, the design for the Museum fiir Moderne Kunst necessarily follows the brief, its specific demands and the requirements of display facilities for works of Fine Art. The western end of the island site, formed by the Berliner Strasse and the Braubachstrasse, represents an important 'anteroom' in the approach towards the historical centre of the city, and the site is distinguished by its narrow triangular shape. The author of the project believes that a correspondingly dominant entrance situation should be created by means of the new building. Thus the sharp point of the road junction is to be seen as a meaningful faceted gem which is nonetheless fully integrated with the building itself. The clarity of the forms as seen from a distance and a deliberate strangeness in their design are vital factors here. As far as accessibility is concerned, and the relationship of the new building with the old city centre, the Domstrasse-Braubachstrasse is the more important. Consequently in order to establish the link with the historical centre--and the activities which have grown up there-- to greatest effect, every effort has been made to develop the main entrance to the museum at this point.

Once inside, the continuation of this approach by means of penetration into and ascending through different areas of experience also seemed important. It is essential to detach the most important action area of the entrance hall from a direct relationship with the street, and also to set it apart from secondary functions such as ticket sales and cloakroom facilities. The actual entrance hall is therefore arranged some 1.5 metres above the entrance level, and by this means the experience is intensified and interference from secondary functions is minimized. In order to avoid further disruption, say during special events, a 'by-pass' has been provided, whilst from the central hall the different areas and floors open up, both visually and functionally, from the point of view of accessibility.


Entrance level of the Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt-am-Main.

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Basement level of the Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt-am-Main, showing the triangular central lecture room beneath the exhibitions hall.

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Level 3 of the Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt-am-Main.

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Level 2 of the Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt-am-Main.


View of the model of Hans Hollein's design for the Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt-am-Main, showing the sculptural treatment of the acute angle between the

Berliner Strasse and the Braubachstrasse.

View of Hans Hollein's model showing the facade towards the Domstrasse, Frankfurt-am- Main.

ROLF LALITER AND HANS HOLLEIN 35

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Sections N - S and E - W through the centre of the

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Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt-am-Main.

Although the author, at an earlier stage in the planning, had prepared detailed proposals for a circular central space as a concourse, the demands of the brief and the strong emphasis on Fine Art in the permanent collection, together with provision for the programme of special events, proved decisive in the choice of the trapezoidal shape selected. This space can in the same way be used for events and happenings as well as a classical gallery space with adequate hanging surfaces. The museum, as already noted,' opens out from the corner of the building, and here there is also separate access to the caf~. Ticket sales and security controls for the doors are strategically well arranged so that not only is there an excellent general visibility (approximately 60 m vista penetrating deep into the building) but also simultaneous supervision of administrative access and deliveries is guaranteed. The first and lower part of the entrance hall can be closed off from the upper parts, and the maintenance of the security requirements is ensured with the additional advantage of being able to use the service functions (ticket sales, cloakroom, caf~) even when the rest of the museum is closed. Access to and utilization of the lecture room is provided by this means, and the lecture room opening out from the entrance hall also has an additional point of access into the store-room, which is of advantage for a number of special events.

The administration, video, collections and library areas are close to the security staff in the entrance hall, but they are also directly accessible from the outside, and from these areas there is also visual contact with the museum spaces proper. On one side the caf~ is arranged close to the entrance and the museum spaces, whilst on the other side it provides an independent element which is mainly intended to animate the street area as well. The museum itself is open to the great entrance hall, but doing this merely by means of high flights of stairs has been avoided: rather it is to be achieved by means of an adventurous diagonal penetration of the building. Many routes round the building are possible and the views desired are frequently arranged in zones which also serve as part of the communication. The skylight zones (and the design of the roof level) have been so

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conceived that the roof landscape stemming from the necessary superstructure is aesthetically satisfying and does not have to be covered with lantern units. Thus the height of the cornices can be kept low, whilst the exterior of the building in its compact design largely follows the already established boundaries of the site. This block-like appearance was chosen not only for economic reasons but also for those of town planning, and the exterior is articulated by means of small protruding and recessed elements and by the choice of material. Red sandstone and white plaster are the principal materials for the walls, with copper for the roofs and glass skylights.

The stepped structure of the point of the building is sculpture on an urban scale, and furnished with artworks of the most varied design, i.e. non-figurative, figurative or works of applied art. Here the intention was not art applied to the building; this concept is intended on the one hand to hint at the building's contents, and, on the other, to take into account its place within a townscape. Structurally, the building is to be constructed on supporting walls and piers of conventional design, whose surfaces are plastered inside and out, and in order to gain the variety and flexibility desired the ceilings of the smaller spaces are as far as possible supported without piers, but the basic structure of the building is such that no exceptionally wide spans are required. The structure, in both ground plan and section, is very favourable for the installation of air-conditioning and its associated ducting, and the configuration chosen is particularly happy for the integration of this equipment.

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Impression of the interior of the triangular central exhibitions hall with the steps leading up from the entrance hall.


Designed as a museum lit by both daylight and artificial light, the crucial problem is when the daylight requires reinforcement. Here, in the overhead lighting, a form of illumination is provided which simulates the effect of daylight. In the zones lit primarily by artificial lighting, provision is made by means of spatial and structural design and treatment of the ceiling to achieve the most varied lighting effects according to the requirements of the works of art. Since too great a stress on flexibility also means restriction in the specific choice of lighting, certain zones are deliberately kept more static. The large entrance hall demonstrates on the one hand that uniform, different daylight and artificial light intensities can be achieved, given the necessary control system, and on the other, from the point of view of spatial organization, that dramatic events are conjured up by accentuated lighting.

With approximately 2000 square metres of site area, there will be, after the completion of the building, a collections area of 3500 square metres which should provide adequate space for both the permanent collection and temporary exhibitions.

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The Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt