The story
Cologne's museum of applied arts owns both the Red and Blue Chair designed in 1918 by the Dutchman Gerrit Rietveld and a 1920 composition by his countryman Piet Mondrian. Setting design beside painting like this is the idea behind its main gallery, Art and Design in Dialogue, where household design by Dieter Rams, furniture by Charles and Ray Eames and a Memphis shelf by Ettore Sottsass share the rooms with the art of their time.
The building has its own story. Rudolf Schwarz, a leading German postwar architect, built the plain red-brick block with Josef Bernard between 1953 and 1957 for the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne's historic picture gallery. It stands on the site of a medieval Franciscan friary, whose square courtyard still shapes the plan, with the friars' Gothic church, the Minoritenkirche, beside it. The applied arts museum only moved in in 1989, after the paintings had gone to a new home by the cathedral. Its own building on the Hansaring, opened in 1900, had been destroyed in the Second World War, though nearly all the collection was saved.
That collection, begun by Cologne citizens in 1888, now counts more than 100,000 objects from the Middle Ages to today. Among them are a wooden sculpture by Tilman Riemenschneider, the late-Gothic carver, and a cabinet made in 1777 and 1778 by David Roentgen, the celebrated cabinetmaker of Neuwied. A new permanent gallery of jewellery, opened in late 2024, covers some 8,000 years of adornment.
