The story
Peter Ludwig made his money in chocolate, and he spent it on the art of his own time. In 1976 he and his wife Irene gave the city of Cologne 350 modern works on the condition that a new museum be built for them, and the Museum Ludwig opened a decade later in a striped building of glass and zinc right beside the Gothic cathedral.
Its great strength is American Pop Art, the largest collection of it outside the United States, with Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg and Oldenburg. When Peter Ludwig died, Irene marked the museum's reopening in 2001 by giving 774 more works, many of them Picassos, which left Cologne holding one of the three largest Picasso collections in the world after Barcelona and Paris.
The couple also placed their Russian avant-garde here on long-term loan, some 600 works by Malevich, Rodchenko and their circle, the deepest such group outside Russia. A major photography collection sits in the same walls, so a visit can run from Chagall and Kandinsky to Warhol and the early camera.
