A European Capital of Culture in 2025, Chemnitz invites you to discover its overlooked treasures.
In its heyday, Chemnitz was referred to as the “Manchester of Germany” for its textiles, mining and engineering industries. With the prosperity they brought came a flourish in architecture, arts and culture. Wealthy industrialists built ostentatious homes, resulting in one of the largest concentrations in Europe of Art Nouveau and ‘Gründerzeit’* architecture, and a tradition of patronage emerged, resulting in one of the finest municipal art collections in Germany. *‘founders’ period’, referring to a late 19th century entrepreneurial boom
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s ‘Chemnitz Factories’ (1926) shows why the city was once known as “the Manchester of Germany”.
Like many German cities, much of Chemnitz’s glorious past was obliterated in WWII, when about 80 per cent of the city was destroyed. Between 1948, when Chemnitz was in the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, and 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, the city was held up as a model of socialist urban planning in a style known as East German Modernism, the Stadthalle culture and congress centre being the best example. There are also four fountains along the Strasse der Nationen with titles like Youth, Friendship between the Peoples and Children Playing to express typical socialist themes.
The Kassberg district of Chemnitz has one of the biggest concentrations of Art Nouveau architecture in Europe.
During the GDR time, Chemnitz was renamed Karl-Max-Stadt (although he never visited) in honour of the Communist philosopher. Today he is remembered by the city’s most famous landmark, a seven metre-high, 40-ton bronze bust. One of the largest in the world, it was cast in Leningrad (now St Petersburg), sits on a plinth of granite from Ukraine and is accompanied by a slab of text which reads ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ in German, English, French and Russian.
Karl Marx monument
The city operates a group of museums under the banner Chemnitz Art Collections, which together comprise one of the biggest public art collections in Germany. They include the Gunzenhauser Museum, the Art Collections on Theatre Square and the Henry van de Velde Museum.
The Gunzenhauser Museum houses a collection donated to the city by the Munich gallery owner Dr Alfred Gunzenhauser, who specifically chose a museum in the former East Germany. Comprising over 3,000 works by 270 artists, its focus is on art from around 1900, including German Expressionism, New Objectivity and Abstraction. The collection is presented in a former savings bank building built in 1928-1930 in the New Objectivity style, a uniquely German movement, and remodelled in 2007 for its new use as a museum.
Gunzenhauser Museum
The museum’s reputation is based mainly on two bodies of work: nearly 400 works by the German painter and printmaker Otto Dix (1891-1969), one of the largest collections of his work in the world, and one of the most important collections by the Russian Expressionist Alexey von Jawlensky (1864-1941).
There is also a large collection of 1920s and 1930s European Realism from Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Poland and the UK and a roomful of work by the self-taught German artist Uwe Lausen (1941-1970), while the Pop Art section includes works by Andy Warhol (Goethe, 1982) and David Hockney (drawings and lithographs from his California period).
The Pop Art section in the Gunzenhauser Museum
Works are shown in changing combinations such German Expressionism or art of the inter-war years and there is a series of special exhibitions by theme or artist.
On the city’s most beautiful square, Art Collections on the Theaterplatz is the premier art museum, with painting, sculpture, graphic art and applied arts focusing on Expressionism, textiles and contemporary art.
The first floor is dedicated to Romanticism (Edgar Degas, Auguste Rodin, Aristide Maillol), Modernism and Expressionism (particularly by artists of the Brücke, or Bridge, movement), the second floor to the post-war period to the present and the third to the Gallery of Modern Art, with stellar names such as Oskar Kokoschka, Edward Munch, Wilhelm Lehnbruch and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. There are also numerous works by artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, Max Slevogt, Lovis Corinth and Georg Baselitz.
The walls of the Art Collections on the Theaterplatz are painted according to a colour scheme matching the artworks in individual rooms.
An entire gallery is dedicated to the Chemnitz-born Expressionist painter Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, who was instrumental in establishing the museum, including the introduction of a colour scheme whereby the walls are painted according to the artworks in individual rooms.
The Gallery of Modern Art in the Art Collections on the Theaterplatz
Poignantly, one wall is covered in dozens of black and white photographs of works which have been lost or were confiscated as ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis – the only remaining traces of paintings and sculptures by the likes of Edvard Munch, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Ernst Barlach, Emil Nolde, Lovis Corinth, Oskar Kokoschka, Max Pechstein, Max Liebermann and many more.
Sitting atop the Kapellenberg hill, Villa Esche was designed in 1902 by the Belgian architect and designer Henry van de Velde (1863-1957), one of the most sought after artists in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, as a family residence for the Chemnitz textile entrepreneur Herbert Esche, who also commissioned Edvard Munch to paint a family portrait.
Villa Esche
Van de Velde’s first architectural commission in Germany and the first of a number of buildings by him in Chemnitz, the villa is considered a modern masterpiece and a prime example of his desire to harmonise function and aesthetics. Including a park-like garden, this ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, or total work of art, in the Art Nouveau style is one of Chemnitz’s architectural jewels.
Villa Esche
After becoming vacant and falling into disrepair, the villa was extensively restored in the early 2000s and now houses the first Henry van de Velde Museum in Germany. It comprises the dining room and the music parlour on the ground floor, including the original furniture of the Esche family, and a permanent exhibition on the upper floor with exhibits from the holdings of the Chemnitz Art Collections.
The New Saxonian Gallery is located in the Tietz cultural centre, where 25 trunks from a 250-million-year-old petrified forest stand in the atrium. The gallery specialises in contemporary art with a focus on the development of art in Saxony after 1945, in particular the 1970s and 1980s in Chemnitz. The collection of about 12,000 works includes sculptures, paintings, prints, furniture, applied art, industrial design and poster art. The gallery presents a series of thematic group exhibitions and monographic shows (the very first ones featured Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff) as well as the print biennial 100 Saxon Prints.
New Saxonian Gallery
Known locally as the “beanpole”, French artist Daniel Buren’s ‘7 colours for a chimney’ may be the world’s tallest artwork at 302 metres. Part of a former power station, it is illuminated at night.
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