Until 6 February 2011
August Macke – a Private View

The Exhibition examines the more personal side of artist August Macke (1887 - 1914) through thematic and biographical prisms and highlights the early maturing of Macke's intense personality, artistic development, and continuous experimentation with form and color. All of the works exhibited are still in the ownership of family members and many are being shown to the public for the first time, providing an unusually intimate look into the extensive oeuvre of the artist who at the young age of 27 died on the front in the first days of the first World War and counts as one of the 20th Century's greatest colorists.

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18 February – 15 May 2011
Meeting Place and Topos: Dilborn 1911 to 1931
Artists Heinrich Nauen und Marie von Malachowski and Their Guests

For 20 years artists Heinrich Nauen and Marie von Malachowski lived in a wing of Schloss Dilborn, a moated palace located near the town of Brüggen in Germany's northern Rhineland. It also became an important meeting place for artist colleagues, collectors, patrons, museum officials and gallery owners who, like Nauen and Malachowski, were actively committed to the cause of the new and often reviled avant-garde art and found inspiration at Dilborn. For the first time, this Exhibition juxtaposes the works of Heinrich Nauen and Marie von Malachowski-Nauen and elaborates their respective positions on the artistic spectrum against the background of life at Dilborn. At the same time, images of park scenes rendered at Dilborn by Erich Heckel and Helmuth Macke in parallel with those of their two hosts highlight Dilborn as Topos and point of reference.

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Mid May to End of September 2011
Closed for Extensive Modernization and Repairs
(Made possible by the generous support of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Rhineland Regional Council)

7 October 2011 – 5 February 2012
Between Madonna and Mutter Courage – the "Mother" Image in the Art of the Period 1905 to 1935

Against the background of dramatic upheavals in social and political structures of the early 20th Century and the associated emancipation process of women, mother-and-child imagery, one of art history's most important motifs, was given unusually intensive and versatile treatment, particularly by women artists. At the end of the traumatic first World War and in the first year of the Weimar Republic artists, above all in the Rhineland and in Berlin, used Madonna imagery to express their utopian hopes for the birth of a new epoch through the birth of the New Man. Women artists usually viewed the role of mothers, and their own role as female artists and mothers, from a much more realistic and critical perspective.

CHANGES POSSIBLE