Pinakothek der Moderne: Four Museums Under One Dome
Why is it significant?
Walk under the slim concrete canopy and through the doors into the rotunda, and stop in the middle. Light pours down from the glass dome, the walls curve around you, and wide staircases climb away in different directions like an invitation to get lost.
Key Facts
| Place | Pinakothek der Moderne: Four Museums Under One Dome |
|---|---|
| Address | Barer Straße 40, 80333 München, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.14720, 11.57220 |
| Part of Walk | Isar-Athens: Munich's Königsplatz, the Pinakotheks & the Blue Rider |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk under the slim concrete canopy and through the doors into the rotunda, and stop in the middle. Light pours down from the glass dome, the walls curve around you, and wide staircases climb away in different directions like an invitation to get lost. After the brick palace across the road, this space feels like a deep breath.
The Pinakothek der Moderne opened in 2002, designed by the architect Stephan Braunfels. It is really four museums sharing one roof: modern and contemporary art; Die Neue Sammlung, one of the world's great design collections; the architecture museum of the Technical University; and the State Graphic Collection, with its drawings and prints. Painting, chairs, buildings and pencil sketches, all in the same house.
Go downstairs into the design collection and you meet the objects of your own life turned into museum pieces: chairs that changed how people sit, early computers, cars, even typewriters. It is a strange feeling to see the telephone your grandparents had, lit like a relic. Upstairs, the paintings run from the expressionists through Picasso and Max Beckmann to the art of today.
There is a reason modern art matters so much in this city. In 1937, in the Hofgarten arcades, the Nazis staged their notorious exhibition of so-called degenerate art, mocking works confiscated from German museums. Many of those paintings were sold abroad or destroyed. Munich spent decades rebuilding a collection of the very art it had once put in the pillory, and this museum is part of that repair.
The building was also unusual in another way: private patrons, organised in a foundation, helped pay for it. Citizens buying back their own modernity, you might say. And the building keeps growing in the city's affection: on rainy Sundays the rotunda fills with families who came in simply to look up. Now walk north along Barer Straße, past the lawns, to a quieter building where a great museum is currently asleep.