Museum Georg Schäfer


The Museum Georg Schäfer is a German art museum in Schweinfurt, Bavaria, Germany. Based on the private art collection of German industrialist Georg Schäfer, the museum primarily collects 19th-century paintings by artists from German-speaking countries.

History

Having already inherited a nucleus of 19th-century German and Austrian paintings from his father, in the 1950s Georg Schäfer began actively collecting paintings by old masters and forgotten "lesser" masters which, at that time, were being overlooked by the more conservative regional art centres of Munich, Berlin, Dresden and Vienna.
As early as 1959, architect Erich Schelling drew up plans for a museum to house the collection. A later design by Mies van der Rohe was rejected when the Schweinfurt city council declined to assume the cost of maintaining the museum. The plans were later adapted for the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
The city of Schweinfurt and the Schäfer family finally came to an agreement on housing the collection in a museum in 1988, but those plans were delayed due to a financial crisis in the FAG Kugelfischer company, which led Schäfer's heirs to mortgage the art collection. By the end of 1997 the family had regained control of much of the collection and established a foundation to protect it. City officials meanwhile secured resources for the museum, and in February 1997 won the commission to design the museum.
The museum is situated next to the city hall at the southern entry to downtown Schweinfurt and was opened to the public on 23 September 2000.

Collection