Lenbachhaus

Through the Nazi years, when the work was branded degenerate, the painter Gabriele Munter kept dozens of canvases by her former companion Wassily Kandinsky hidden in the cellar of her house in Bavaria. In 1957, on her 80th birthday, she gave them away, more than a thousand works, to a museum in Munich.

That museum is the Lenbachhaus, and her gift made it the home of the Blue Rider. Der Blaue Reiter was a circle of artists around Kandinsky and Franz Marc in Munich just before the First World War, pushing towards bright colour and abstraction. Munter's donation brought some 90 Kandinsky oils along with work by Marc, August Macke, Paul Klee and Alexej Jawlensky, and the museum now holds the richest collection of the group anywhere.

The setting is worth a look on its own. The building was the Italianate villa of Franz von Lenbach, a fashionable society portrait painter of the late 19th century, built in the 1880s and later opened as a city gallery. A newer wing sheathed in golden metal tubes, by the architect Norman Foster, now folds the old painter's house into a much larger museum.