The Museum Folkwang – in the old North German epic poem Edda, the term Folkvanger (People’s Hall) was given to the palace of the goddess Freya – was founded by Karl Ernst Osthaus (1874-1921) in 1902 in the Westphalian industrial city of Hagen. This former student of art history, literature and philosophy had inherited enough money to finance the project. From its origins as an art collection with natural history and crafts sections, it soon developed into a pioneering museum of modern art in Germany. The museum was the first public collection in Germany to acquire and show works by forerunners of Modernism – Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh and Matisse. Following the death of its founder in 1921, the Osthaus collection was acquired for the City of Essen by the newly created Folkwang-Museumsverein, a progressive initiative of Essen art enthusiasts, and in 1922 it merged with the existing municipal art museum, open since 1906.

Osthaus’s support for what was, at that time, the Avant-garde of art, and that of his friend Ernst Gosebruch, director of the Essen art collection and later director of the Museum Folkwang in Essen, was an expression of a reform movement touching all facets of life, which sought to give the “western industrial region” a new aesthetic appearance by linking art and life.

A site for collecting and conveying modern and contemporary art, within a few decades the museum had gained an international reputation, one reason for the malicious campaign against it during the Third Reich. A considerable loss of irreplaceable paintings and the destruction of the two museum buildings in the rain of bombs during the Second World War so ravaged the Museum Folkwang that only ruins remained in 1945. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, the museum directors of the day, Heinz Köhn and Paul Vogt, succeeded in filling the most painful gaps by buying back some works and acquiring others oriented on those lost. With the collection’s extension into contemporary art, by the 1970’s it had become bigger than ever before.

The Museum Folkwang is today one of Germany’s best-known art museums with an excellent collection of 19th century and classical modern paintings and sculpture, post-1945 art, and photography, which has had its own department since 1979.
The museum sees it as an opportunity to continue to develop along these lines and to revive the tradition of a range of media and a combination of fine and applied arts for which the Museum Folkwang was so famous before 1933 and which earned it the title of the “loveliest museum in the world”.

In August 2006, Prof. Dr. h.c.mult. Berthold Beitz, chairman of the board of trustees of the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung, announced that the foundation would, as sole patron, finance the construction of a new museum building. An international architectural competition organized by the City of Essen was won by David Chipperfeld Architects in March 2007. The new museum was built by Neubau Museum Folkwang Essen GmbH, a Wolff group company, and opened in January 2010, when Essen and the Ruhr Area became Europe’s Capital of Culture.