Germany Guide
Bremen
The Kunsthalle
Address: Am Wall
Opening time: Tues 10am–9pm, Wed– Sun 10am–5pm
Price: €5
Website: www.kunsthalle-bremen.de
Bremen hoards its art treasures in the Kunsthalle at the eastern end of Am Wall. Temporary exhibitions claim most space downstairs, although changing displays from a collection of over 220,000 prints, from Dürer to Degas via big guns like Tiepolo, Goya, Picasso and Beardsley, are not to be missed. Upstairs, Cranach titillates under the pretence of mythology with one of German art's first erotic nudes, Nymphquelle. There's also a joint effort by Rubens and Jan Bruegel, Noli Me Tangere, a highlight among the Dutch and Italian works. The Kunsthalle's pride is a gallery of French and German Impressionism. Delacroix prepares the ground with the largest collection outside France and lives up to Baudelaire's accolade to him as the last great artist of the Renaissance and the first of the modern. Thereafter are most of the big guns of French Impressionism – Renoir, Manet and two early Monets – followed by Cézanne and Van Gogh, whose Poppy Field throbs with natural vitality. Pick of their German counterparts are Lovis Corinth and Max Liebermann, who get a room of their own, Max Beckmann and insightful works by Paula Modersohn-Becker, who outshines everyone else among the otherwise whimsical Worpswede group.