Kaiser Wilhelm Museum

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The Kaiser Wilhelm Museum is an imposing building located in the heart of Krefeld, which boldly displays the heterogeneity of styles that typified the late 19th century. This open three-winged edifice set around a (sculpture) court, formally alludes to the palace architecture of the Italian Renaissance. Mounted on a tall socle made of basalt lava is a two-storey edifice built of cut stone. A central risalite commands the eastern facade, in which three rounded arches form the museum entrance. Rising up over the balustrade on top of the central risalite is a bronze group sculpted by Hugo Lederer (1871-1940). It depicts the winged genius of art, who is being pro-tected by the applied arts in the form of two reclining male figures. This sculpture dating from 1898 was the first public commission that the Berlin sculptor received. The outer shell of the building is dominated by the rusticate masonry that outlines the corners and windows of the building. Blind ar-cades and elaborately framed niches enliven the large sections of cut stone, especially on the second storey. Since 1950 a large bronze relief, "Cattle Driving" (1913), by the Berlin sculptor Louis Tuaillon (1862-1919) stands against the tower on the south-west corner. The work was commissioned in 1913 by the Ministry of Culture in Berlin and the City of Krefeld.

The character of the exhibition galleries remained neverthe-less unchanged. Admittedly the reconstruction work in the 1960s dispensed with the wallpaper on the walls and the wooden skirting boards in the galleries, as were typical of 19th cen-tury museums. But the overall structure of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, with its small rooms on the first floor and large gal-leries on the second that are lit by muted daylight from the glass ceilings, remains characteristic to this day.
One notable feature of the rooms is the suite of murals by Johan Thorn Prikker (1868-1932), which run round the walls of a large gallery facing south that connects the 2nd storey of the south wing with that of the north wing. Prikker painted the cycle in 1923 using the secco technique (which involves a dry layer of casein), taking as his theme the Ages of Man: "childhood", "youth", "manhood" and "maturity". Normally this powerful series is kept behind a partition wall and only shown briefly on special occasions.
Due to extensive refurbishment, the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum is closed from 1st January 2010 for an anticipated three years.