Society of Friends of Young Art

About this place

The Gesellschaft der Freunde junger Kunst is a small art institution founded in 1946 — the year immediately after the Second World War ended, and that timing is the key to understanding it. It was created to show the modern art the Nazi regime had branded degenerate, banned, and seized from German museums for years. Its purpose was to reconnect Germany with contemporary European art after twelve years of enforced cultural isolation. The society began with small exhibitions of German artists who had been banned from working or had emigrated, then broadened to show young artists at the start of their careers — which it has gone on doing ever since. Today it is a modestly sized exhibition space run by a membership society, with a changing programme of contemporary artists, often from the region. The place is very small and the visit takes half an hour, but its story matters more than its floor area — it is a living example of how Germans tried to rebuild their cultural life from nothing.