Arts and Crafts

Spanning the 15th to 20th centuries, this collection makes a unique contribution to the cultural history of Munich. With its main focuses in the Biedermeier period, Historicism, Art Nouveau and the 1920s, it features artists like Richard Riemerschmid (1868-1957), Bruno Paul (1874-1968), Ignatius Taschner (1871-1913), Georg Carl von Reichenbach (1872-1940) and Karl Roth (1900-1967).

Porcelain, ceramics, glass, silver, metals, coins and medals meet here to create richly faceted pictures of the environments people have built for themselves. And they do more than crystallize aspects of past cultures. All of them also reveal a desire to harness the applied arts to enhance life  – and not only in those contexts where art deliberately sets out to reform life, as was the case in the Lebensreform movement during the Art Nouveau period.