As of today, if you look at history in the rear-view mirror, the Folkwang Museum, founded in Hagen, Westphalia, in 1902 appears as the first museum for modern art. In fact, it was the first museum in the world to present works by van Gogh, Matisse, Kokoschka, Schiele and Marc and include them in its collection. And in 1912, paintings and sculptures by the French Cubists Henri Le Fauconnier and Alexander Archipenko were shown here for the first time in a museum, together with works of African art. The founder Karl Ernst Osthaus never understood his museum exclusively as a museum for modern art.
Growing up in the immediate vicinity of the chimneys of his grandfather Bernhard Wilhelm Funcke's screw factory and endowed with an inheritance of around three million marks, Osthaus wanted to escape the reality of the factories and the “piling up of money bags” and devote himself to the world of beauty.
“In difficult struggles I have tested myself strictly and have come to the decision that I can only find satisfaction in an ideal, yes only in the most ideal profession, in which I fully appreciate the highest goods of humanity, the true, the beautiful and the good can dedicate myself to me ”, Osthaus confessed as early as 1892 at the age of eighteen.
A modern cabinet of curiosities
At the beginning of the passion for collecting, which finally pushed towards the founding of the museum, there were not works of fine art or even modernism, but the wonders of nature: Even when the twenty-eight-year-old collector opened his private museum in 1902, paintings by the French impressionists, post and Neo-impressionists Renoir, van Gogh and Signac made the most recent acquisitions, but the Folkwang Museum was opened as a “Museum of Art and Science” and initially appeared more like a modern cabinet of curiosities.
The Flemish designer and architect Henry van de Velde, who had taken on the interior design of the museum, cleverly arranged the heterogeneous collections as evidence of an evolutionary history that ranged from nature as an artist to contemporary avant-garde artists: in the “basement of the building were the butterflies - and beetle collections ", recalled van de Velde," on the ground floor everything that Osthaus had brought home from his travels ". The climax of the development and the end of the tour were the works of modern art acquired under van de Velde's guidance in the gallery rooms on the upper floor of the museum illuminated by skylights.
Given the avant-garde history of the Folkwang Museum, which artists like Emil Nolde perceived as a “heavenly sign in western Germany”, the butterfly and insect collections, which were once the foundation of the museum, soon appeared trivial and were quickly forgotten. In fact, they had already been banished to the depot in 1908 in order to use the basement of the museum for the installation of the Spanish tile ceramics and oriental pottery items acquired by Walter Gropius and Hans Wendland in Andalusia. The blaze of color of the butterflies had given way to the glazes of the handicraft artifacts: "You can find the dark lapis lazuli, the light turquoise blue, the shimmering light brown luster faience and the sharp Turkish red," said a museum guide in 1911.And when his fellow museum colleague Alfred Lichtwark visited the Folkwang Museum in 1910, he assumed that Osthaus had already parted with “his natural history collections”.
Van de Velde wanted the decision
The painter Christof Drexel, who joined the Hagen artist circle in 1911, testified that this was not the case: Osthaus was “still very busy with his butterflies in 1911/12, and it was also a favorite child of his,” he reported in one Interview: “Its crystals could collect dust, but the butterflies had to be cared for continuously.
And I know that at that time he tried very hard to somehow connect it with the fine arts, but I think van de Velde was categorical and said to him: You have to decide! "