The story
Münster's state museum tries to hold a thousand years of art in one place. It grew out of a Westphalian art society founded in 1831, opened in 1908, and reopened in 2014 in a bright new building of pale stone in the old city centre, a few steps from the cathedral.
Its deepest roots are local and medieval: Westphalian altarpieces, carved saints and stained glass from the region's churches, alongside paintings by the Cranach workshop. The modern rooms turn to the German avant-garde, above all August Macke, the Expressionist born in Westphalia and killed early in the First World War, shown with his colleagues from the Blaue Reiter and Brücke groups.
The collection reaches on to Gerhard Richter and living artists, and every ten years the museum spills outdoors for Skulptur Projekte, when new sculpture is set loose across the streets and parks of Münster.
