Friedemann-Bach-Platz 5
06108 Halle (Saale)
Germany
Kunstmuseum Moritzburg Halle (Saale)
THE ART MUSEUM
Kunstmuseum Moritzburg Halle (Saale) belongs to the federal state of Saxony-Anhalt. It was founded in 1885 as the city of Halle an der Saale’s museum of arts and crafts.
Half a century earlier, in 1834, an association of art-aware citizens had been established within the intellectual orbit of the University of Halle-Wittenberg: the Hallescher Kunstverein. It followed Dresden (1828), Frankfurt (1829), Brunswick and Hanover (1832), and was founded at the same time as that in Halberstadt, making it one of the earliest art associations in Central Germany – coming before Magdeburg and Kassel (1835), Leipzig and Darmstadt (1837), Wiesbaden (1847), Görlitz (1855) and Chemnitz (1860).
photo: Falk WenzelHigh-calibre art in an extraordinary architectural ensemble
The holdings started out as a small lot of paintings, graphics and 19th-century handicrafts, presented at the Measurement and Regulation Office on the square of Grosser Berlin. Today, they have developed into an almost encyclopaedic collection of some 250,000 paintings, drawings, watercolours, prints, photographs, sculptures and craft and design objects, along with coins, banknotes and medals.
In the first half of the 20th century, this was one of the pioneering museums of the contemporary fine and applied art of these times – art which nowadays has become established worldwide as Classical Modernism. At present, visitors can experience more than 500 items on some 3,000 sqm in a fascinating architectural atmosphere.
A museum with a unique history
It was only in 1904, when Halle an der Saale’s municipal art museum (Städtisches Museum für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe) was moved to the historical ensemble in the revitalised ruins of Moritzburg Castle, that the museum’s history began in the location after which it is named.
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