From the beginning, Karl Ernst Osthaus also focused his museum’s collection activities on crafts and the minor arts. His earliest purchases probably date from his first voyage to Tunisia in 1897, where he acquired an enthusiasm for Middle Eastern crafts and minor arts. In the period that followed, Osthaus bought above all craft objects from Germany, Europe and non-European countries.

The range of objects in the museum’s individual departments formed more a collection of didactic models rather than being oriented on an ethnological or art historical classification system. In 1909, Osthaus’s collecting activities and the presentation in the Museum Folkwang led to an epoch-making idea of a German Museum for Art in Trade and Industry, an institution affiliated with the German Work Federation. Today, the Museum Folkwang’s ethnological and craft collection contains objects from Europe, Africa, Central America, Asia and the South Pacific, including antiquities from Greece and Egypt, Iran and Iraq, a tile collection, a textiles collection and a selection of glass objects from antiquity to modern times. Acquisitions continued to be made for the department up into the 1980’s.

Contact
Curator: Dr. Mario Andreas von Lüttichau
T +49 201 88 45 101
mario.vonluttichau@museum-folkwang.essen.de
mario.vonluettichau@museum-folkwang.essen.de

To group of works