"Times and Places" presents visitors’ favourites from the Von der Heydt Museum’s collection of paintings, with the addition of major works of sculpture. The paintings are arranged as a kind of guidebook to the defining regions and periods of past European art history: from the 16th and 17th centuries to the 1920s and 30s.
The presentation also permits a (preliminary) summary of the collection’s history, as the selected times and places reflect the judgements and taste of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the era in which the museum was founded and opened in 1902. It is consistent with the canon that determines the inventory of many German and European museums.
The collection of the Von der Heydt Museum owes much to the donations and endowments of patrons from the upper bourgeoisie, who were initially interested in the art of central Europe from the 17th to 19th centuries before discovering the avant-gardes of classical modernism: impressionism, expressionism, cubism etc. Opening the collection to new and international tendencies, and making its exhibitions altogether more diverse, is one of the most important goals the Von der Heydt Museum has set itself for the coming years.
Works by the German artist Lothar Baumgarten (1944–2018) from the Lothar Schirmer Collection are being dovetailed into the presentation for a few months, effecting a critical change of perspective and prompting new questions.
