Works of homelessness and forlornness Kolumba Museum, Cologne
MúzeumCafé 4.
When in 1852 devout Catholics established the Christlichen Kunstvereins für das Erzbistum Köln (the Christian Art Association of the Cologne archdiocese) a public museum had already been open in the city for years. The later-founded Wallraf-Richartz Museum, which received further donations, with its collection dating from the Middle Ages to the 19th century, points well beyond the boundaries of Cologne, like the Ludwig Museum of 20th-century and Contemporary Art, established in 1976. By March 1945 when the American army occupied Cologne, the city, like several other major German cities, had been literally razed to the ground. The cultural and social impact of this unprecedented systematic destruction is closely reflected in the present situation of the city’s museums, for example with the Kolumba Kunstmuseum des Erzbistums, which opened last year at 4 Kolumbastrasse in a dramatic building designed by Peter Zumthor. Visitors to Cologne today immediately confront the traces which Churchill’s adviser, Solly Zuckermann, who arrived in the city in the summer of 1945, experienced and wanted to write an article about with the title ‘On the Natural History of Destruction’. Cologne’s streets exactly follow the lines of its former thoroughfares, yet nearly all the buildings bear trace of a rather inferior, ephemeral modern architecture reflecting post-war deprivation and poverty. In this context the building incorporating the Ludwig Museum and the Philharmonic Hall was constructed to the design of Peter Busmann and Gotfied Haberer between the cathedral and the railway station in 1986. The technologically-correct enormous museum building, which employs roof lighting, gives an alarmingly mediocre impression after barely 20 years, especially when compared with the Wallraf-Richartz Museum (designed by Oswald Mathias Ungers and built in 2001) and the building of the Kolumba Museum which opened in 2007.
According to Peter Zumthor, the architectural and art historical idea behind the Kolumba Museum was to put the ruins of the St Kolumba church burnt out in 1945 and the Roman finds from underneath into a common frame. In 1950 the architect Gottfried Böhm constructed a small chapel incorporating the Madonna in den Trümmern statue in the collapsed church of the lesser known 3rd-century saint and martyr Kolumba, who has played an important role in the city’s identity. Zumthor’s new building also includes a chapel in line with the ancient Roman excavations, the remaining walls and the collection itself. In the Kolumba Museum Andy Warhol’s Cross and an Ecce Homo, a 16th-century painted wooden Christ statue, appear next to one another in a single emotional space. The rusty metal statue The Drowned and the Saved by Richard Serra is displayed in one part of the ruin-courtyard, while a conceptual work suggesting the Holocaust by Rebecca Horn is exhibited in another room.