History
Ludwig began to collect contemporary art already as crown prince in 1809 and his collection has been steadily enlarged. When the museum was founded, the separation to the old masters in the Alte Pinakothek was fixed with the period shortly before the turn of the 19th century, which has become a prototype for many galleries.
Owing to the personal preference of Ludwig I there was initially a strong focus on paintings of German Romanticism and the Munich School. Also dynastic considerations played a role as Greece had become a secundogeniture of Bavaria in 1832. In 1834 Carl Rottmann travelled to Greece to prepare for a commission from Ludwig for a cycle of great Greek landscapes which was installed in the Neue Pinakothek, where the paintings were given their own hall.
The so-called Tschudi Contribution in 1905/1914 led to an extraordinary collection of masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Hugo von Tschudi, general director of the State Collections acquired 44 paintings, nine sculptures and 22 drawings, mostly from new French artists. Since public funds could not be used to purchase these works, Tschudi’s associates raised the money from private contributions after his death in 1911.
The delimitation to the modern painters displayed in the Pinakothek der Moderne was later fixed by taking the restart of Henri Matisse and the Expressionists into account (ca. 1900). Consequentially a painting of Matisse acquired by the "Tschudi Contribution" is now displayed in the Pinakothek der Moderne.
In 1915, the Neue Pinakothek became the property of the Bavarian state. A self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh was confiscated in 1938 by the Nazi regime as degenerate art and sold one year later.
Read more about this topic: Neue Pinakothek
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