The largest Jawlensky holding
Hundreds of paintings; nowhere else shows the development of his faces in full.
Museumwiesbaden โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท JensKunstfreund โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Bernd Schwabe in Hannover โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Reinhard Dietrich โ CC BY-SA 4.0
Yes if expressionist art interests you โ the Jawlensky holding here is unique in the world with no substitute. And with children, the natural history wing alone justifies the trip. Forty minutes by train is a reasonable distance for half a day.
Wiesbaden is a nineteenth-century thermal spa town, with its historic bathhouses, the Kurhaus and its grounds, and the baroque Biebrich palace on the Rhine. The city largely escaped war destruction, so its historic centre is more complete than Frankfurt's.
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One of the three Hessian state museums, holding an art wing and a natural history wing under one roof โ an unusual combination that makes the visit broader than the name suggests. The art wing holds the largest collection anywhere of work by Alexej von Jawlensky, the Russian painter who belonged to German expressionism and spent his last years in Wiesbaden. Hundreds of paintings, the best known being the series of faces he made while ill with arthritis, until they became almost abstract. Nowhere else can you see that development complete. The natural history wing was entirely redesigned and presents its collections by concept โ form, colour, movement โ rather than by biological classification, which makes it legible to children and interesting to adults at the same time. The building itself is early twentieth century, with high halls and natural overhead light. It is not in Frankfurt: Wiesbaden lies about forty kilometres west, reached by direct train in around forty minutes.
Hundreds of paintings; nowhere else shows the development of his faces in full.
Form, colour and movement instead of taxonomy โ legible to children, interesting to adults.
An early twentieth-century building with natural light from above.
Friedrich-Ebert-Allee, Wiesbaden, about 40 km west of Frankfurt