The story
Between 1929 and 1931 the painter Lyonel Feininger, then a master at the Bauhaus in nearby Dessau, kept a studio in one of the towers of the Moritzburg in Halle. The city had commissioned him to paint Halle itself, and he produced 11 canvases of its Market Church, its cathedral and the Red Tower, all bought for the art museum inside the castle.
The castle is far older than its pictures. The archbishops of Magdeburg laid its foundation stone in 1484 for a fortified residence, and much of it burned out during the Thirty Years' War. An art museum moved in in 1904, and by the early 1930s it held one of the strongest collections of modern art in Germany. In the summer of 1937 the Nazi campaign against so-called degenerate art took more than 140 works from it, the Feiningers among them.
The museum has been buying pieces back ever since. The Cathedral in Halle returned in 1996 and Red Tower I in 2009. In 2008 the Spanish architects Nieto Sobejano laid a new aluminium roof over the ruined north and west wings, creating galleries inside the old walls. Visitors find German Expressionism there, painters of the Brücke and the Blue Rider such as Franz Marc, and Gustav Klimt's portrait of Marie Henneberg, wife of the Viennese photographer Hugo Henneberg, painted around 1902.
