Neue Pinakothek: The Sleeping Museum
Why is it significant?
Stand on the lawn and take in the low building of pale stone and sloping glass, with its bay windows and terraces stepping back like a fortress softened by water. Doors shut, scaffolding and site fences coming and going.
Key Facts
| Place | Neue Pinakothek: The Sleeping Museum |
|---|---|
| Address | Barer Straße 29, 80799 München, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.14990, 11.57090 |
| Part of Walk | Isar-Athens: Munich's Königsplatz, the Pinakotheks & the Blue Rider |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand on the lawn and take in the low building of pale stone and sloping glass, with its bay windows and terraces stepping back like a fortress softened by water. Doors shut, scaffolding and site fences coming and going. The Neue Pinakothek has been closed for renovation since 2019, and for now you can only admire it from the outside.
Even closed, its idea deserves a moment. When Ludwig the First founded this museum in 1853, it was a radical thing: a public gallery for the art of his own time, not for dead masters. Most princes collected old paintings with safe reputations. Ludwig bought from living painters, and he wanted ordinary Munich citizens to see what the nineteenth century was making.
The first building, by August von Voit, the same architect who built the Glass Palace you heard about at the start of this walk, was wrecked by bombs in the Second World War. The ruin was cleared away. In 1981 this new building by Alexander von Branca opened on the same site, deliberately low and broken into parts, so it would not overpower its old neighbour across the road.
The collection that lives here runs from the Romantics to the impressionists and beyond. It includes one of Vincent van Gogh's famous paintings of sunflowers in a vase, made in Arles in 1888, along with works by Manet, Monet, Cézanne and Klimt. Imagine Ludwig, a man of Greek temples, sharing a roof with van Gogh's yellow chaos.
There is something rather poetic about a museum of modern life that is itself being modernised, quietly, behind fences. The pictures are waiting, and so is the city that loves them. And the newest museum of the quarter is just around the corner: walk east along Theresienstraße, and look out for a building striped in many colours like a giant box of crayons.