Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar
Burgplatz 4
About
This structure was begun under the guidance of Goethe in 1789 and completed in 1803. The previous castle burned down in 1774; only a tower survived. In one of the wings is a series of galleries dedicated not only to Schiller and Goethe, but also to two other famous names associated with Weimar: Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), the German critic and philosopher who was a pioneer of the Sturm und Drang ("Storm and Stress") literary movement, and Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813), the poet and critic who wrote the satirical romance The Republic of Fools. The museum has a shop, which is open April to October Tuesday to Sunday 9am to 6pm. The ground floor displays works by Lucas Cranach the Elder. On some of the upper floors, you can see exhibits from Walter Gropius's Bauhaus school, which started in Weimar. The primary aim of this movement was to unify arts and crafts within the context of architecture. Its appeal came from the changing sensibilities of the Industrial Age, as well as from the need for inexpensive construction techniques in an era of rising costs and exploding demand for housing. Followers around the globe may have been impressed, but not the good people of Weimar. They "tolerated" Gropius's school until 1925, and then bombarded it in the press until it finally moved to Dessau. There it stayed until the Nazis closed it in 1933, claiming it was a center of "Communist intellectualism."
