The story
Two bronze bison by the animal sculptor August Gaul guard the entrance, and the building behind them belongs to a university. The Kunsthalle zu Kiel opened in 1909 beside the Kiel Fjord, a limestone hall by the architect Georg Lohr, made possible by a gift from Lotte Hegewisch, a Kiel benefactor, to the city's Christian-Albrechts University. It still shares the house with the university's collection of ancient sculpture and plaster casts, and it shows the pictures of the Schleswig-Holstein art society.
Air raids in the Second World War badly damaged the building and destroyed much of the original collection. From 1986 the Kunsthalle acquired Russian and Polish paintings from the collection of Georg Schäfer, an industrialist in Schweinfurt. Russian realists of the later 19th century, the painters known as the Wanderers, are now one of the collection's main themes, alongside German Expressionists such as Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
One of the Russian pictures is Italian Morning by Karl Bryullov, painted in Rome in 1823, a young woman washing at a fountain, which was once presented to the wife of Tsar Nicholas I. Research into the collection's history also identified a painting by Vasily Polenov, a Russian landscape painter, as displaced by the war, and in 2017 the Kunsthalle returned it to the state museum in Taganrog.
