Bavarian State Painting Collections, Art museum in Munich, Germany
The Bavarian State Painting Collections is an art institution with locations across Munich housing European paintings from medieval times to the present day. The holdings comprise over 25,000 artworks displayed in different buildings throughout the city.
The collections grew from royal holdings made accessible to the public beginning in 1777. The institution was formally established in 1799 as Centralgemäldegaleriedirektion to provide organized management and presentation of these artworks.
The collections feature works by European masters such as Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci, and Albrecht Dürer displayed across multiple venues throughout the city. This arrangement allows visitors to encounter artworks from different periods and traditions in various settings.
Visitors can use the online catalog available since 2017 to access information about over 25,000 works from various exhibition venues across Bavaria. The multiple locations may require separate visits to explore all sections thoroughly.
In 2021 the collections refused to let Germany's national tribunal for art lost in the Nazi era review the claim on Picasso's Madame Soler, brought by the family of Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy; chairman Hans-Jürgen Papier called this inexplicable. In 2019 a painting Bavaria had sold to the family of Hitler's photographer Heinrich Hoffmann went back to the heirs of Gottlieb and Mathilde Kraus, eight decades after the Gestapo seized it.
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