The story
The Arp Museum begins in a railway station. Bahnhof Rolandseck, a graceful 1850s station on the Rhine south of Bonn, was once a fashionable stop where musicians and writers broke their journeys, then fell quiet as rail travel changed. Rescued from demolition, it became a home for art.
The museum is devoted above all to Hans Arp, the German-French sculptor and poet who helped invent Dada in Zurich during the First World War, and to his wife and collaborator Sophie Taeuber-Arp, a pioneer of geometric abstraction. Arp's smooth, rounded bronzes, shapes that look as if they are still growing, are the core of the collection.
In 2007 the American architect Richard Meier added a stark white wing set up the hillside behind the old station, reached by a tunnel and a lift bored through the rock, so the visit runs from a Victorian platform into pure modern light.
