Käthe Kollwitz Museum

The Käthe Kollwitz Museum on Cologne's Neumarkt houses the world's most extensive collection of the artist's work and maintains close ties to her family. The museum was founded in 1985 on the 40th anniversary of Kollwitz's death, with the Kreissparkasse Köln serving as its sponsor. The collection began as early as 1976 with the acquisition of the first lithographs, and in 1983 a large group of drawings from the family's holdings was added. Today the collection comprises around 300 drawings, more than 500 prints, all of her posters, and the entire body of sculptural work available to museums. Since 1989, the museum has been located on the upper floor of a shopping arcade on the Neumarkt. After a three-year renovation that kept it closed until fall 2025, the museum reopened in the commemorative year marking the 80th anniversary of the artist's death.

At the museum, you can gain a comprehensive overview of Kollwitz's work. The print collection includes all of her major series, among them the etching cycles "A Weavers' Revolt" and "Peasant War," the woodcut series "War" and "The Proletariat," and the late lithograph series "Death." There are also singular works such as the experimental self-portrait "en face" and her last lithograph, "Seed Corn Must Not Be Ground." A special focus is placed on the sculptural works, of which all 15 bronzes available to museums can be seen in rare early casts. The offering is rounded out by an extensive collection of preliminary drawings for memorials and print series, as well as nearly complete holdings of the posters and book illustrations that Kollwitz created in the 1920s in support of social justice and peace.

In addition to the permanent collection, the museum mostly presents monographic special exhibitions devoted to artists whose work has a historical or thematic connection to Kollwitz. Since 2006, it has also shown photography exhibitions in parallel with photokina and the Festival of the Internationale Photoszene Köln. The museum maintains a specialist library for the scholarly study of her work and has published important catalogues raisonnés of her prints and sculpture in recent years. Admission proceeds also go, as a gesture of solidarity, toward supporting the Käthe-Kollwitz-Haus in Moritzburg, so your visit directly helps maintain that memorial site.