Grohmann Museum


The Grohmann Museum, at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, houses an art collection dedicated to the evolution of human work. The museum opened on October 27, 2007 and is located at 1000 N. Broadway, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States.
It is next to the German-English Academy Building.

Overview

The museum has three floors of galleries where a core collection and feature exhibitions are displayed. The museum also has a rooftop sculpture garden, a vending cafe, and a museum store.
It is named in honor of Eckhart Grohmann, an MSOE regent, Milwaukee businessman, and avid art collector, who donated the "Man at Work" collection to MSOE in 2001 and subsequently the funds to purchase, renovate, and operate the museum that bears his name. The museum contains the collection of only one person, Grohmann.
German artist Hans Dieter Tylle created stained glass, a mosaic atrium floor, a ceiling mural, and a rooftop mural for the museum.

The collection

The Grohmann Museum Collection contains over 1400 European and American paintings, sculptures and works on paper that depict various forms of work. Captured on canvas and paper or cast in bronze, the works reflect a variety of artistic styles and subjects that document the evolution of organized work, from manpower and horsepower to water, steam and electric power. The collection spans over 400 years of history.
Earlier paintings depict men and women working on the farm or at home. Later images show tradespeople engaged in their work, such as blacksmiths, chemists, cobblers, cork makers, glass blowers, or taxidermists. The most recent works are images of machines and men embodying the paradoxes of industrialism of the mid-18th century to post-World War II. These works, often commissioned by the factory's owner, are exterior views of steel mills and foundries surrounded by trains and tracks or dark factory interiors where glowing molten metal is juxtaposed with factory workers and managers.
Most of the works in the Grohmann Museum collection are by German and Dutch artists, although others were created by American, Austrian, Belgian, Bohemian, Danish, Dutch, English, Hungarian, Flemish, French and Spanish artists
Artists include Flemish painter Marten van Valckenborch ; Dutch artists Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Josefsz van Goyen ; German painters Carl Spitzweg, Ludwig Knaus, Max Liebermann and Erich Mercker ; American painters J. G. Brown and F. A. Bridgman ; and French painter Julien Dupré.

Exhibitions

The inaugural special exhibition Physicians, Quacks, and Alchemists, showed 17th century medical paintings and ran from October 27, 2007 to April 14, 2008, followed by: