The story
Henri Nannen spent his working life in magazines. He founded the weekly Stern in 1948 and was its editor-in-chief for more than 30 years, and all the while he was buying pictures. "I collected what delighted me, what really got under my skin," he said. In 1986 he and his wife Eske gave that collection a museum in Emden, the East Frisian port where he was born, and he paid for the building out of his own fortune.
What he bought was mostly German Expressionism, painters of the Brücke and the Blue Rider groups. Among the highlights is Franz Marc's The Blue Foals, painted in 1913, a year before the First World War in which Marc was killed. The collection also holds work by Emil Nolde, August Macke, Paula Modersohn-Becker and Oskar Kokoschka.
In 2000 the Munich dealer Otto van de Loo gave his own collection, which carried the museum past 1945, and the house grew over four building phases. It remains one of the few privately owned museums in Germany, with more than 1,500 works.
