Location: Altes Rathaus, Maximilianstr 33
Tel. +49 0921/ 764 5310
Open: 10am- 5pm Tue- Sun
10am- 5pm July- Aug
The Bayreuth Art Museum is the museum for modern art in the city of Bayreuth. In the historic rooms of the Old Town Hall[note. 1] at the junction of Brautgasse and Maximilianstrasse, exhibitions on contemporary art and classical modern art are presented. Guided tours, museum educational events and lectures for everyone complement the museum's exhibition program.
The beginnings of the building known as the Old Town Hall go back to
the 16th century. After the destruction of Bayreuth by the Hussites in
1430 and the major city fires of 1605 and 1621, the property came into
noble ownership. After 1679 it was converted into a representative city
palace with two-story bay windows. The widowed Baroness Sponheim sold
her palace in 1721 to the Hospital Foundation, which gave it to the city
to use as a town hall. The building was to serve this function until
1917. The new role as a public building and town hall was associated
with a baroque transformation between 1722 and 1727 under the leadership
of the margrave's master builder Johann David Räntz. From 1797 to 1812
the Old Town Hall was the seat of the city court, and from 1816 to 1832
the district court met there. Until 1916, various municipal facilities,
such as a trade school or the office of the city post office, found
accommodation in the old town hall. With the inauguration of the first
New Town Hall in the Reitzenstein Palace on Luitpoldplatz in 1916, the
Old Town Hall temporarily lost its administrative tasks.
During
the Weimar Republic, the Old Town Hall housed the city library on the
ground floor from 1921 to 1928. After the Reitzenstein Palace was
largely destroyed in the air raids on Bayreuth in World War II, the Old
Town Hall was reintroduced to its representative functions in 1945. With
the opening of the second New Town Hall on the site of the demolished
ruins of the first in 1972, there was another change in function to the
office building of the Bavarian State Police. The Old Town Hall used
this until 1995.
After Mayor Dieter Mronz gave the Dr. The Helmut
and Constanze Meyer Art Foundation was able to win over Bayreuth, the
decision was made in favor of the Old Town Hall as the home of the art
museum that was now being built, which was handed over to its new
purpose in December 1999.
The art museum offers events for people
of all ages and from all cultures (“people from here, there and there”).
It is barrier-free accessible. Under the heading BarriereFREI, the art
museum invites people with and without disabilities to various events.
The focus
of the museum's collection is art of the 20th century. By far the
largest group of the approximately 20,000 managed objects are works on
paper. The prints, drawings and watercolors are in the depot. Individual
objects and groups of objects are presented in changing exhibitions. The
Poster Museum in the Bayreuth Art Museum contains around 22,000 posters.
The poster motifs focus on cultural content such as literature, theater
and exhibitions. But there are also many variations on topics such as
contemporary history, sport, travel or gastronomy.
the dr In
1991, the Helmut and Constanze Meyer Art Foundation and the Caspar
Walter Rauh Collection of the Upper Franconia Foundation formed the
basis of the museum, which was expanded in 1992 with a donation of works
by the expressionist Georg Tappert. With the founding of the art museum
in 1999, the tobacco history collection of British American Tobacco was
established. Since 1999, this has no longer been housed in the Bayreuth
Art Museum. In 2002 the Prof. Dr. Klaus Dettmann Art Foundation founded.
This was followed in 2009 by the Voith-von-Voithenberg Foundation and in
2014 by the Viola-Schweinfurter Art Foundation. With the Froemel
collection in 2010 and the estate of A. D. Trattenroth in 2019, further
large collections were added to the collection holdings as permanent
loans from the Oberfrankenstiftung.
The museum took over the
municipal collection of works from the Freie Gruppe Bayreuth
(exhibitions 1951 – 1980, successor Kunstverein Bayreuth) and has been
growing continuously since 1999, mainly thanks to very intensive citizen
commitment. Hertha Drescher and Günter Ruckdäschel already donated their
collection to the young museum. They were followed by other collectors,
such as Felix and Sybille Böcker and other artists. The most extensive
artist donations include works by Max Ackermann, Ulrike Andresen,
Herbert Bessel, Paul Eliasberg and Jeanne Gedon, Hasso von Henninges,
Werner Knapp, Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd, Anton Russ, Eduard Sauerzopf,
Kurt Teuscher and Hansjörg Voth. The Friends of the Bayreuth Art Museum
have also been giving gifts to the house since it was founded in 2005.
Modern artists in particular have repeatedly referred to the works
of people with psychiatric experience. An extensive collection of
outsider art rounds out the museum's art collections. After the first
donation of gouaches by Hildegard Wohlgemuth by Heike Schulz in 2013,
the district of Upper Franconia donated works by people with psychiatric
experience to the museum that had been created in the Bayreuth district
hospital.
In 2012, the Bayreuth Art Museum took over the Small
Poster Museum, which has been based in the museum ever since.