Staatsgalerie Stuttgart

The old Staatsgalerie opened in 1843 as a royal Württemberg collection. What made it internationally famous came much later, in 1984, when the British architect James Stirling added the Neue Staatsgalerie next door and it became one of the buildings that defined postmodern architecture, a sandstone drum of galleries wrapped by a public ramp, with bright pink and blue steel rails and a few stones left theatrically fallen from the wall.

Behind that playful shell sits a serious collection, especially strong in 20th-century art, with Picasso, Beckmann and Kandinsky. It also keeps the costumes and figures from Oskar Schlemmer's Triadisches Ballett, the geometric Bauhaus dance made in Stuttgart in the 1920s.