Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte

The Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte occupies an Art Deco building in Dortmund that once served as the city's savings bank. Its collections of paintings, sculptures, furniture and applied art trace Dortmund's cultural history from early times to the twentieth century. Wheelchair users can get round the galleries without steps.

The museum began in 1883 as a collection of historical and artistic objects. Archaeological finds, decorative artworks and objects of local history came next. In the 1930s the collection turned toward fine art, above all Romantic painting. The Second World War destroyed the original building, although the collection survived evacuation almost unharmed. In 1946 it moved to Cappenberg Castle. There it gathered Westphalian furniture through the 1960s and 1970s, pieces that document furnishing styles from Gothic to Art Nouveau. The museum reached its present building in 1983.

Three permanent exhibitions await you: 'Cultural History in Time-Lapse', 'The Little National Gallery' and a display on the history of surveying. The nineteenth-century collection shows Caspar David Friedrich alongside Max Slevogt, Lovis Corinth and Anton von Werner. Temporary exhibitions have brought Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Cézanne and Édouard Manet to town. In 2008 the Museum Society for the Protection of Visual Art gave the collection an altar painting by Jan Baegert.