museum global

Since the late 1990s, interest has grown steadily in a globalized historical perspective of modernism—which for a long time meant the avant-garde artistic tendencies that developed during the 20th century in Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and later New York. But thriving beyond the borders of Europe and North America as well were centers of art production that formulated independent positions that went beyond “Western modernism” or engaged in confrontation with it. With a point of departure in the permanent collections of the Federal State of North Rhine Westphalia, founded in 1961, the research and exhibition project museum global reorients our hitherto Western focus toward an “ex-centric” modernism in order to narrate the microhistories of selected artistic manifestations that were articulated in the years between 1910 and 1960 in Japan, Georgia, Brazil, Mexico, India, Nigeria, and Lebanon. Contributing to these developments were multidimensional artistic exchanges, travel encounters, correspondence, publications, and participation in exhibitions.

Serving as a prologue to this wide-ranging exhibition project is the presentation Paul Klee: A Collection Travelling Around the World, which opened on October 13, 2018. An ensemble of 88 works by Paul Klee, who was defamed by the National Socialists as “degenerate,” forms the foundation of the Kunstsammlung. Central to the show are the culturally and politically motivated travels of the Klee collection to nearly 40 places around the world between 1966 and 1985.

Explored in an epilogue, the final exhibition gallery of museum global, is the way in which, around 1960, the canon of Western modernism was expanded via contemporary positions through new exhibition formats such as Documenta, as well as through the intensive collecting strategies of museums.