Unterlinden Museum - The Collections

The Collections

With roughly 200,000 visitors per year, the museum is the most visited in Alsace. Famous above all things for the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald, it also displays a major collection of Upper Rhenish medieval and early Renaissance art, among which the Colmar native Martin Schongauer occupies the most prominent place with several altarpieces and a large number of original drawings, engravings and woodcuts. Other famous names include Albrecht Dürer (engravings only), Lucas Cranach the Elder and Hans Holbein the Elder as well as local painters Caspar Isenmann and Jost Haller. Most of the earliest paintings, however, are the work of anonymous German, Alsatian or Swiss masters, such as the Master of the Stauffenberg Altarpiece. Other sections displayed by the museum are : local and international archeology; medieval, Renaissance and baroque sculpture (religious as well as profane) and stained glass; weapons, furniture, music instruments and toys from the 14th to the 19th century; ancient, ornate wine barrels (a collection donated by Jean-Jacques Waltz in 1927); modern and contemporary art. Because of a general lack of space, this last collection, although very well furnished (works by Pablo Picasso, Jean Dubuffet, Fernand Léger, Serge Poliakoff, Georges Rouault, Pierre Bonnard, Robert Delaunay, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva and others) is only seldom displayed in its entirety. The 2012 enlargement of the building by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron is explicitly meant to address this problem.