The Birth of the Modernist Art Museum: The Folkwang as Gesamtkunstwerk

The Folkwang Museum (1902) in Hagen, Germany, represented a radically new approach to museum design and display. Based on principles of a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, the museum overturned historicist museum principles. Following Nietzsche, the Folkwang’s founder and director, Karl Ernst Osthaus, advocated a spontaneous and individual relationship to artworks and praised art that yielded rich, synesthetic experiences. With the help of art critic Julius Meier-Graefe and designer Henry van de Velde, Osthaus defined an advanced formal language based in Parisian painterly aesthetics that he believed could provide the terms for coordinating the arts. In The Birth of the Modernist Art Museum: The Folkwang as Gesamtkunstwerk. Katherine Kuenzli shows that at the Folkwang, principles of simultaneity displaced linear narrative and historical and geographical classification. Through visually striking displays and ambitious educational programs, Osthaus and his colleagues also sought to expand the public for art. Unity remained elusive, however; Osthaus, Meier-Graefe, and van de Velde adopted competing ideological agendas that reveal the political heterogeneity of the Gesamtkunstwerk around 1900.