The Museum as an Aesthetic Wonder World

With his museum, Lothar-Günther Buchheim aimed at setting up a kind of breakwater against the surge of egalitarianism in museums. He wanted a museum with a signal effect!

That is why the Buchheim Museum today is an experience that appeals to all the senses and is a place of wonders; A chamber of art and curiosities made up of the astonishing, the bizarre or simply the beautiful.

The museum unites various collections under one roof: At the center is the famous Expressionist collection with paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints. The "side collections" include arts and crafts from all over the world, Bavarian folk art, cult objects from Africa and other non-European countries. Finally, the museum presents  works by the artist Lothar-Günther Buchheim himself. Changing exhibitions, also featuring contemporary artists, add to the museum's liveliness.

Günter Behnisch has created a multi-structured and varied architecture for Buchheim's collections that reflects the extraordinary diversity of the artworks. The elongated structure, partly built into the hillside, ends in a footbridge suspended twelve meters above the lake.

The Buchheim Museum is located north of Bernried in Höhenrieder Park, directly on the shore of Lake Starnberg. A walk through the park is a unique enjoyment of nature and art. Old groves of trees, enchanted ponds, pagodas, sculptures and other works of art line the path from the visitor parking lot to the museum building. In good weather, you can see as far as the Alps.

The Buchheim Museum is run by the Buchheim Foundation. It is part of the network 'MuSeenLandschaft Expressionismus' (pdf flyer / website).

The living museum

The museum is also the center of permanent activities and educational programms.

Special exhibitions featuring works by classical modern artists or other groups of works continually introduce new areas of the exceptionally rich and diverse collections.

Concerts, readings, plays, film screenings, lectures and the opportunity for children and adults to try out individual techniques for themselves in the Laboratory of the Imagination help to deepen the individual experience with the collections.

BUCHHEIM ABOUT HIS MUSEUM

"I don't like to be called a collector, I'm more of a compiler and re-breaker, actually an art demonstrator with a missionary tick: I want to clarify ideas and concepts on the basis of my pictures and collection pieces - for example, that art does not arise in a vacuum, but always comes from art.

Since I have been collecting art, I have always been most interested in those on paper - the woodcuts, lithographs, etchings of the expressionists in particular: I found the duplicating element as appealing as the special expression immanent in graphic art.

My museum should be more than a common museum. Much more, in fact. A 'Research Center for German Expressionism' should be part of it, as well as constantly changing exhibitions with the general theme of Expressionism and from my 'side collections', which belong in the context of a broader concept of Expressionism. I wish to present African art and art of the South Seas from my journeys and make comprehensible the experience of discovery that some of the 'Brücke' painters had when they first stepped over the threshold of an ethnographic museum. To teach the museum visitors to see actively again and to provide them with visual experiences - this is more important to me than instruction. I wish for the visitors to enjoy theses festivities for the eye."

Lothar-Günther Buchheim