Lenbachhaus

Munich's Lenbachhaus, home to the world's largest Blue Rider collection alongside 19th-century, modern and contemporary art.

Lenbachhaus is Munich’s great colour argument. Housed in the former residence of painter Franz von Lenbach, the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus is best known for its extraordinary Blue Rider holdings, the kind of collection that can make even the most museum-fatigued traveller stand a little closer.

Lenbachhaus has the world’s largest collection of art by Der Blaue Reiter, built around Gabriele Münter’s 1957 donation of more than a thousand works: Kandinsky oils, watercolours, drawings, sketchbooks and works by artists such as Franz Marc, August Macke, Paul Klee, Alexej Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin. Around them sit modern and contemporary pieces, tours and workshops.

That depth gives the museum its charge. The Blue Rider story is not presented as a decorative footnote to Munich; it becomes a full, radiant chapter in modernism, set alongside Art Nouveau, New Objectivity, 19th-century art and international contemporary work.

For Luxa Terra, Lenbachhaus is a city-break essential because it rewards attention without exhausting it. Go for Kandinsky and Marc, stay for the sense of Munich as a place where abstraction did not arrive politely. It arrived in colour, with hooves.