Collection Paintings

The museum’s painting collection begins with the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist movements, as impressively exemplified in paintings by Auguste Herbin, Théo van Rysselberghe and Paul Signac, amongst others. The shift towards modernity is marked by outstanding works by key representatives of German Impressionism: Lovis Corinth, Max Liebermann, Max Slevogt and Wilhelm Trübner. Highlights of Expressionism are displayed in paintings by Karl Hofer, Alexej von Jawlensky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Max Pechstein, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmitt-Rottluff. Supplemented by sculptures and an extensive body of works on paper by these artists and others, the Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen’s collection offers a wide-ranging panorama of Expressionist art. Furthermore, the broad spectrum of painting that grew from pre-war European modernism is reflected in masterpieces by Max Ernst, Hannah Höch, René Magritte, Lászlo Moholy-Nagy and Victor Vasarely.

After 1945, the artistic quest for new forms of expression in the face of a world lying in ruins brought on an intense exploration of the vocabulary of abstraction, as can be seen in the work of Karel Appel, Hans Hartung, Emil Schumacher or Pierre Soulages. In addition, the museum’s painting collection is also shaped by works of international and German painters of the 1960s and 1970s, including an early canvas by Gerhard Richter and works by Pop artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, as well as numerous regionally based artists.