The Neue Staatsgalerie opened beside Stuttgart's older State Gallery as James Stirling's purpose-built home for the museum's twentieth-century modern art holdings. The building immediately became a touchstone of postmodern museum architecture: it quoted Schinkel's Altes Museum through its rotunda and processional galleries while disrupting classical symmetry with ramps, angled approaches, bright materials, and an urban route through the museum complex. Its galleries held modern works by artists such as Picasso, Oskar Schlemmer, Joan Miro, Joseph Beuys, Paul Klee, and others, but the building itself became nearly as influential as the collection it housed. The project changed the Staatsgalerie's international profile and made Stuttgart a key stop in debates about museum architecture after modernism.
It helped define postmodern museum design and raised the Staatsgalerie's global architectural stature.
