Art and Museum Library of the City of Cologne, Art research library in Altstadt-Nord, Germany.
The Art and Museum Library of the City of Cologne is a research library in the Altstadt-Nord neighborhood, focused on modern art, architecture, photography, and design. Its holdings are spread across two reading halls in central Cologne.
The library was founded in 1957 through the merger of collections from the Wallraf-Richartz Museum and the Kunstgewerbemuseum. That joining of two separate holdings shaped the institution into one of the main art documentation centers in Germany.
The library holds exhibition catalogs, posters, and press clippings that trace how art scenes in Cologne and beyond have evolved over decades. Browsing through these materials gives a direct sense of how local artistic life looked at different points in time.
The library is open on weekdays, with extended evening hours on most days, and on some Saturdays each month. Seat availability in the reading halls can be limited, so it is worth planning your visit in advance if you need to work for a longer stretch.
The library is part of KuBi, a shared platform that links over 750,000 titles from several Cologne institutions in a single searchable database. This means a researcher here can reach materials held elsewhere in the city without leaving the reading hall.
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