Bremen art museums show the remarkable journey from Germany’s Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque treasures to Impressionism and modern sculpture, making the city one of northern Germany’s most rewarding cultural destinations.

Travellers visiting Bremen can look forward to a feast of art, especially from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Large and small arts institutions enrich Bremen’s cultural life and play a prominent part among the city’s visitor attractions. Time and again, the city’s artistic present and future are tied in with buildings and locations closely associated with the city’s past and identity.

Civic pride and
artistic freedom

Bremen’s wealth and refinement were expressed in the buildings of the Weser Renaissance and the city has always valued painting, sculpture and the applied arts as it valued commerce.

In the Grimm fairytale Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten (‘The Bremen Town Musicians’), a donkey, a dog, a cat and a rooster run away from mistreatment on their farms with the aim of going to Bremen – known as a place of freedom – to become town musicians.

In the tale, they didn’t make it to Bremen, but find a comfortable enough retirement through a clever solution.

It is fitting today that the sculpture Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten today stands at the northern corner of Altes Rathaus, the city’s centre of freedom, in a city of artistic freedom.

Civic and private initiatives have played leading roles in establishing the profile of Bremen as a city of the arts in which Impressionism, Expressionism and other avant-garde styles are strongly represented.

Böttcherstrasse museums and arts precinct

Bremen’s commitment to art and culture is exemplified in the old coopers’ quarter, the Böttcherstrasse, today home to early 20th century architecture.

The Böttcherstrasse project brought together restoration and Expressionist 1920s building design in an arts and business precinct. The businessman Ludwig Roselius set up his decaffeinated coffee enterprise in the street and became its patron.

The period artistic touches of the street attract even from those who do not visit the art museums. Roselius is celebrated in a bust sculpted by Bernhard Hoetger. Hoetger’s 1936 portal relief Lichtbringer (‘Bringer of Light’) sets the tone for the street and he designed one of the museums. Oddly, it is supposed to have idealised Hitler, but the artistically conservative Führer regarded Böttcherstrasse as ‘degenerate’ art.

On the Neorenaissance Haus des Glockenspiels, the former Bremen-Amerika Bank at Böttcherstrasse 4, an eight-minute porcelain carillon accompanies the appearances of panels of Atlantic seafarers and aviators several times a day.

Böttcherstrasse has two museums, one featuring the works of the Expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker. Its neighbour Museum im Roselius-Haus blends medieval architecture with collections of art and artefacts from the Renaissance and Baroque eras, offering a reminder of Bremen’s long history of seaborne trade and mercantile wealth and patronage.

The Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum was set up to exhibit the works of the pioneering Expressionist painter who at her peak lived and worked in nearby Worpswede. But developed much of her skill in Bremen before contact with famous painters in Paris. Modersohn-Becker was one of the first female artists to gain international renown and the first to have a museum dedicated to her works.

Her intense, modern vision contrasts with the academic art of her era. It is estimated Modersohn-Becker painted more than 700 works and produced 1,000 drawings and prints, many of these self-portraits. She also painted landscapes, a common subject in the Worpswede artist colony where she worked.

Roselius established the Bremen museum of her work 20 years after her tragic post-childbirth death at the age of 31. Many paintings elsewhere in German museums were purged by the Nazis.

Ludwig Roselius Museum shows northern European art and crafts of various periods, furnishing and interior decoration. Roselius had the medieval building, reshaped in Renaissance style in 1588, further modified and expanded into a museum that opened in 1927. Works displayed include late medieval sculpture by Tilman Riemenschneider and medieval altarpieces.

One room shows paintings by Lucas Cranach the elder, including portraits of Martin Luther and his wife Katharina von Bora. Other exhibits represent Bremen’s maritime and Hanseatic trading history. A room of silver treasures from Riga contains objects spanning five centuries.

The Haus des Glockenspiels carillon adds to the artistic atmosphere of the precinct. The 30 bells, crafted from Meissen porcelain, are suspended between the gables of two restored warehouse buildings and chime three times a day. Carved wooden panels of historic Atlantic seafarers and aviators, representing Bremen’s role in Transatlantic travel, have been designed to rotate. Bremen’s history of travel and art heritage combine.

Kunsthalle Bremen

Kunsthalle Bremen is one of Germany’s foremost collections, in which the emphasis is on French and German 19th century painting. It started as a civic-minded an arts initiative founded in 1823 by the Kunstverein community arts union.

But European paintings spanning six centuries are on display. These include works by Albrecht Dürer, Eugène Delacroix, Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh and Lovis Corinth. German Romanticism, Impressionism and early modern art are all well represented, while the museum continues to mount contemporary exhibitions that link the past with the present.

The building, set on the edge of the parklands of the Wallanlagen, blends 19th century architecture with modern extensions.

Gerhard-Marcks-Haus

The sculptor Gerhard Marcks is best known today for his Stadtmusikanten. But he is a giant of 20th-century German art and Gerhard-Marcks-Haus is a modestly sized museum that showcases a permanent exhibition of his sculpture (his collected works, about 350 pieces), ceramics, and almost 13,000 of his prints and drawings.

Marcks’ approach was identified with applied arts and he was associated with the Berlin Secession and the Bauhaus movement. Some of his work suffered the fate of being displayed by the Nazis as degenerate art, but he survived this period to be a senior figure in the post-World War II arts scene.

A variety of modern and contemporary sculptors’ pieces and regular exhibitions of modern sculpture fill the museum’s program.

Weserburg Museum für Moderne Kunst & GAK

More old warehouse buildings, on the spit of the Weser island Teerhofinsel opposite the old town, form a dramatic location for the modern and contemporary art of the Weserburg Museum für Moderne Kunst.

The museum shows rotating exhibitions of post-World War II and cutting-edge art involving paintings from private collections.

Temporary exhibitions of contemporary art are the business of the GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, which has staged works engaged with politics, culture and society in an adjacent building for more than 40 years.

Wilhelm Wagenfeld Haus & Focke-Museum

Wilhelm Wagenfeld Haus presents 20th and 21st century design culture, especially of household items such as glassware and tableware, created by Wagenfeld. Wagenfeld’s work belongs to the philosophy of functional everyday objects that were also affordable.

The Focke-Museum is chiefly a museum of Bremen’s history, but also displays treasures of decorative art, craft and design and testifies to their role in daily life, especially among the wealthy trading classes.

Dom-Museum

Sacred works of art, chiefly sculptures and reliefs from medieval times, are among the treasures displayed in the vaults below Bremen’s Dom St Petri cathedral.

The Dom-Museum also preserves precious secco vault paintings and their rich medieval colours. Clerical heraldic devices, sacramental objects and vestments are also among the items in the collection.

Another Cranach painting depicts Christ as the Man of Sorrows and is the most important piece in a collection of canvases. Items such as these take the visitor into the thought world of the Gothic age.

Visiting Bremen’s arts museums

Bremen’s cathedral and its Dom-Museum is free to enter, but closes briefly from Monday to Saturday for noon prayers. To reach it or Böttcherstrasse, take tram 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 or 8 to Domsheide.

For Kunsthalle, Gerhard-Marcks-Haus or Wilhelm Wagenfeld Haus, take tram 2-3 to Theater am Goetheplatz. For the Teerhofinsel museums, take tram 1, 2 or 3 to Am Brill.

Holders of tickets for the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Ludwig Roselius Museum, Focke-Museum, Gerhard-Marcks-Haus, Kunsthalle Bremen and Weserburg Museum are eligible for discounts on entry to other museums the same day or the day after. The Bremen museums website provides glimpses of the treasures.