The story
Munich already had two Pinakotheks, one for old masters and one for the 19th century, when it opened a third in 2002 for everything after. The Pinakothek der Moderne is really four museums under one roof, and that is the thing to know before going in: modern art, works on paper, architecture and design all share the building, arranged around a soaring white rotunda by the architect Stephan Braunfels.
The art wing runs from Picasso, Klee and the German Expressionists through to the present. What people underestimate is the design collection, Die Neue Sammlung, among the largest anywhere, where you walk past everything from Bauhaus furniture to a row of racing cars, hundreds of industrial objects treated as seriously as the paintings upstairs.
The building sits in Munich's Kunstareal, the dense museum quarter, close enough to the older Pinakotheks that a visitor can cross five centuries of art by walking a couple of streets.
