The LWL Museum of Art and Culture is a cultural giant surrounded by cultural giants: In the middle of Münster's beautiful old town, in the immediate vicinity of Prinzipalmarkt with its characteristic gabled houses and arcades, the historic town hall as the site of the Peace of Westphalia and the famous St. Paul's Cathedral from the 13th century, it is home to the most important art collection in Westphalia.
The museum's collection comprises 350,000 objects and covers a total of 1,000 years of Western art and cultural history in 7500 square meters of exhibition space. Visitors get to know medieval sacred art in light-flooded rooms through images of saints, passion figures, liturgical vestments and panel paintings. They lose themselves completely in the art of the Renaissance and Baroque periods as they stroll through the spacious exhibition rooms and gaze at paintings, prints and sculptures by Westphalian and Dutch masters.
A highlight in this setting are the paintings by the Münster family of painters tom Ring, whose largest complex of works in the world can be found in the LWL Museum. After the iconoclasm of the Reformation in the 16th century - the confiscation, damage and destruction of depictions of Christ and other saints - they were busy redecorating churches and bourgeois parlors. Today, museum visitors can see the self-portraits of the painter's family in particular, which reflect the status consciousness of the early bourgeoisie and a generation of artists striving for autonomy.
However, the art of classical modernism and contemporary art is not neglected in the presentation of the museum, which has had its headquarters on Münster's Domplatz since 1908. The former "State Museum for the Province of Westphalia", which has been called the LWL Museum of Art and Culture since 2013, has works by the Rhenish Expressionist August Macke and the Westphalian Expressionists Wilhelm Morgner and Peter August Böckstiegel for fans of striking forms and strong colors. It pays tribute to groups such as Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, and introduces movements such as "New Objectivity" and painters such as Otto Dix and Georg Scholz. Art after 1945 is honored with works by Emil Schumacher and Blinky Palermo. Of course, Düsseldorf's Zero Art, with its creative zero hour, the influence of light and purist aesthetics, is not to be missed.
International open-air exhibition
Travelers on a cultural exploration tour through Münster should definitely keep an eye out for sculptures in public spaces after a visit to the museum. Remnants of the so-called Skulptur Projekte Münster can still be found almost everywhere in the city. The LWL Museum of Art and Culture has co-hosted the international open-air exhibition every ten years since 1977. For the show, artists from all over the world create specially conceived works in locations of their own choosing. Many of the works created are on permanent display and have established themselves as permanent attractions in the cityscape.
