Museum Kunstpalast

The Museum Kunstpalast stands in Düsseldorf’s Ehrenhof, a grand civic space built in the early 20th century. Its main building was designed by Wilhelm Kreis in Art Deco style for the 1926 GeSoLei exhibition. The museum grew from the 1710 Academy of Art collection, enriched over centuries by donors such as Jan Wellem and Lambert Krahe. In 1998 the Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast was created to oversee its development. Since 2020 the NRW Forum has been part of the same complex, adding contemporary culture to the programme. The building was remodelled by Oswald Mathias Ungers and reopened in 2001. The museum holds fine art from Classical antiquity to today, including more than 70,000 works on paper. Its glass collection is among Europe’s largest, named for Helmut Hentrich. The graphic holdings include 14,000 Italian baroque sheets and works from Persia and Japan dating back to the 3rd century BC. The ZERO foundation, founded with artists Heinz Mack, Günther Uecker and Otto Piene, maintains an archive here. Recent restitution cases have returned works such as Franz Marc’s The Foxes to the heirs of the original Jewish owner. Visitors find galleries arranged chronologically from Gothic to contemporary art. Special rooms display the ZERO movement’s monochrome canvases and metal reliefs. The Helmut Hentrich Glass Museum presents vessels and sculptures spanning two millennia. Temporary exhibitions have featured Caravaggio, El Greco and Zurbarán in recent years. The Archive for Artistical Photography of the Rhenanian Artscene holds prints and negatives for study. Outside, the Ehrenhof’s fountains and terraces frame views of the Rhine promenade.