Haus der Kunst

The Haus der Kunst is a museum for modern and contemporary art in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. Located at Prinzregentenstraße 1 at the southern edge of the Englischer Garten, Munich's largest park, it was built between 1933 and 1937 as the Haus der Deutschen Kunst at the behest of Adolf Hitler. Today, while it houses no permanent collection of its own, it functions as a major venue for temporary and traveling exhibitions of international contemporary art. The institution is owned by the Free State of Bavaria and operated by the Stiftung Haus der Kunst, and since February 2020 its artistic director has been Andrea Lissoni.

The building's origins lie in the destruction of Munich's Glaspalast in 1931, which prompted local artists' associations to commission a new exhibition hall from architect Adolf Abel. After Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933, he rejected this project and personally commissioned Paul Ludwig Troost to design a far more monumental structure. The foundation stone was laid by Hitler in October 1933, and the building opened in 1937 as the first major architectural project of the Nazi regime. Its inaugural Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung was staged on 18 July 1937 as the Day of German Art, featuring a parade of 6,000 participants, though the carefully selected Nazi art failed to attract expected audiences. After 1945, the building served as an officers' mess for US Army occupation forces, marked by visible swastika-motif mosaics in the ceiling panels of its front portico. From 1946, its rooms were partitioned for trade shows and temporary exhibitions, including a 1946 Picasso exhibition. The original entrance steps were removed in 1972 for a road tunnel. In 2002, the National Collection of Modern and Contemporary Arts moved to the Pinakothek der Moderne, leaving Haus der Kunst without a permanent collection. A planned €60 million renovation by David Chipperfield, commissioned in 2013 and presented in 2016, aims to create space for cinema, performance, and musical events and to reopen blocked skylights. Following Okwui Enwezor's departure for health reasons in 2018, an expert commission led by Bice Curiger oversaw programming until Andrea Lissoni's appointment in 2019.

The Haus der Kunst does not maintain a permanent collection. Instead, its programming focuses on temporary and traveling exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. Since 1949, it has annually hosted the Grosse Kunstausstellung München. Its exhibition program has encompassed major surveys and retrospectives of internationally renowned artists, with particular emphasis on global narratives and underrepresented perspectives in contemporary art. In 2011, the museum established a partnership with the private Goetz Collection to co-curate exhibitions of video art, and by 2013 it became one of three Bavarian institutions to benefit from Ingvild Goetz's donation of her video art collection, comprising nearly 5,000 works, on permanent loan to the state.

As an institution without a permanent collection, the Haus der Kunst's notable holdings consist primarily in its exhibition history rather than owned objects. Significant temporary exhibitions have included: Tutankhamun; Gilbert and George (2007); Andreas Gursky (2007); Anish Kapoor (2007); Ai Weiwei (2009); Ellsworth Kelly (2011); Georg Baselitz (2014); Louise Bourgeois (2015); and Frank Bowling (2017). The 2012 joint venture with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, was the first major museum survey of land art worldwide. Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965 (2016) attempted a global narrative of art in the two decades after World War II. A 2019 retrospective of Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui became the museum's best-attended show in ten years.

The building is a 175-meter-long, 50-meter-wide structure in reduced neoclassical style, constructed with a steel frame clad in stone plates to resemble masonry. Its doubly axially symmetrical design features 21-bay colonnaded porticos of colossal, unfluted columns on both longitudinal facades, terminated by corner piers. The main entrance on the Prinzregentenstraße facade was originally approached by a full-width staircase, reduced in 1971 to a central section. The base is clad in Nagelfluh conglomerate, the exterior facades in limestone from the Danube valley near Kelheim, and the stairs and exterior floors in granite. The interior is symmetrically arranged around a central Ehrenhalle (honor hall), with large elongated exhibition halls on either side and smaller surrounding rooms, totaling 5,040 square meters of exhibition space. Floors are of Solnhofen limestone plates; door frames and baseboards of Jura marble; and in the central hall, floors, stairs, and cladding of Saalburg marble with Tegernsee marble for doors and baseboards. The building originally featured modern amenities including multiple elevators, heating and air conditioning, and an air-raid shelter, the latter converted to exhibition use in 2011. The Golden Bar in the former artists' festival room at the east end of the northern gallery contains wall paintings by Karl Heinz Dallinger on gold-leaf backgrounds, uncovered by 2004, depicting maps and exotic motifs related to alcoholic beverages. Since 1983, the basement of the west wing has housed the nightclub P1, a famous Munich high-society venue whose rent contributes to museum revenue.

The Haus der Kunst is located at Prinzregentenstraße 1 in Munich, at the southern entrance to the Englischer Garten in the Lehel district. It is owned by the Free State of Bavaria, the largest shareholder, and operated by the Stiftung Haus der Kunst, whose members include the Free State of Bavaria, the Künstlerverbund im Haus der Kunst, and the Gesellschaft der Freunde Haus der Kunst München e. V. The museum receives millions of euros annually from the Bavarian state. Since 1983, the nightclub P1 has occupied part of the building, providing rental income. The museum is accessible via its central south facade entrance on Prinzregentenstraße, with additional entrances on the north side to the Nordgalerie and at the narrow sides to the wings. The planned Chipperfield renovation, estimated at approximately €60 million, includes opening blocked skylights to admit daylight and creating facilities for cinema, performance, and musical events, though as of spring 2021 implementation had not yet begun.