Neue Pinakothek

When King Ludwig I of Bavaria opened the Neue Pinakothek in Munich in 1853, he meant it as something new: a public museum given over to the art of his own century, the living painters, hung apart from the old masters next door. It was among the first museums anywhere devoted to contemporary art.

The original building was destroyed in the Second World War, and the collection reopened in 1981 in a modern replacement. It gathers European painting of the 18th and 19th centuries, from English portraits and German Romantics to Manet, and its most photographed picture is one of van Gogh's 'Sunflowers', the vase of 12 blooms he painted in Arles in 1888.

There is a catch for a visitor today. The Neue Pinakothek building is closed for a long renovation, expected to last into the end of the decade, and its highlights, the Sunflowers among them, are hanging for now on the ground floor of the older Alte Pinakothek nearby. The collection is very much on view, just not yet in its own home.