The story
In 1949, the year Bonn became the capital of West Germany, the city bought two paintings by August Macke, Tightrope Walker and Turkish Café, both from 1914. Macke had made his home in Bonn and was killed in the first weeks of the First World War, aged 27. Those two purchases set the course of the Kunstmuseum Bonn, which now holds, with the museum in Münster, one of the two largest collections of his work.
You can follow him from the Self-Portrait with Hat of 1909 to a Bonn church scene, St Mary's with Houses and Chimney of 1911, and the bright Garden on Lake Thun from his stay in Switzerland in 1913. Around him hang the Rhenish Expressionists, his circle in the region, and a large collection of German art after 1945, with Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke. The building, by the Berlin architect Axel Schultes, opened in 1992 on the city's Museum Mile.
