The story
In 1912 Franz Marc, the Munich painter known for his blue and yellow animals, painted a small picture of a young blue horse in a brightly coloured landscape and dedicated it in one corner to Walterchen, little Walter, the son of his friend August Macke. That Little Blue Horse is one of the best-known paintings in the Moderne Galerie of the Saarland Museum in Saarbrücken. Macke hangs nearby with his Storm of 1911, painted in the year the two friends were drawn into the Blue Rider circle in Munich.
The museum director Rudolf Bornschein bought the Marc in 1956 for the city's local history museum, which merged with the Moderne Galerie in 1968. The gallery itself is a low modernist building by the architect Hanns Schönecker, built in stages between 1962 and 1976 around a sculpture garden, with German Impressionism and Expressionism at the heart of its collection.
Its newest wing has a story of its own. An extension begun in 2009 stalled two years later, half-built, amid a political row over its cost. The Berlin architects Kuehn Malvezzi and the artist Michael Riedel finished it in 2017. Riedel printed onto its stone façade the transcript of the Saarland parliament's final debate on the project, held in April 2015, with the word museum enlarged wherever it occurs.
