The Lenbachhaus holds the most complete collection of work by the Blaue Reiter group — Kandinsky, Münter, Marc, Macke, Jawlensky, Werefkin — which gives it a specificity of purpose unusual among city art museums. The collection was donated to Munich by Gabriele Münter in 1957 and has been expanded through acquisition since; what exists now is a near-complete account of a single crucial moment in the development of abstract art, housed in the Villenarchitektur of Franz von Lenbach's former atelier. The building was renovated and extended by Foster + Partners in 2013 with a cube addition in oxidised brass; the interior sequence moves between the nineteenth-century villa rooms and the contemporary addition in a way that makes both more legible by comparison. The golden tones of the new gallery spaces — warm and diffuse in afternoon light — are in unexpected sympathy with Kandinsky's yellows.
Maxvorstadt, Munich, Germany