Museum Folkwang

Museum Folkwang started as one man's bet that a grimy industrial city deserved the newest art in Europe. Karl Ernst Osthaus, a banker's heir, opened it in Hagen in 1902 and made it the first public collection in Germany to buy Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh and Matisse while they were still current and comparatively cheap. After Osthaus died the collection was bought by the city of Essen in 1922 and given the Folkwang name.

For a few decades it was among the great museums of modern art anywhere. Then in 1937 the Nazis stripped it, taking more than 1,400 works away as so-called degenerate art and selling them abroad, which made Folkwang one of the most heavily plundered museums in the country.

Much was rebought or replaced after the war, and today the collection sits in a cool glass building by David Chipperfield from 2010, still strongest in French and German painting from Caspar David Friedrich to the Expressionists.