Gemäldegalerie Dachau

The Dachau Picture Gallery

It was thanks to the initiative and collecting activities of Dachau artists and the museum association that Dachau opened its first picture gallery in Dachau Castle in 1908, looking back on a tradition of over a hundred years. Since 1985, the collection has been housed in the heart of the old town. The management was taken over by the Dachau Galleries and Museums Association in 1988. As part of the renovation in 2005, the picture gallery was given a modern special exhibition area on the second floor and a roof terrace high above the old town.

The permanent exhibition on the first floor focuses on the Dachau artists' colony, which had its heyday around 1900. Around 200 paintings and a few selected sculptures document the emergence and development of landscape painting in Dachau from its beginnings until well into the 20th century.

The tour begins with the discovery of the market town of Dachau, located just outside Munich, and its atmospheric mossy landscape by painters around the middle of the 19th century. In the following decades, more and more artists came to Dachau, contributing to the development of an artists' colony.

A small group of them, Adolf Hölzel, Ludwig Dill and Arthur Langhammer, made Dachau nationally known with an exhibition in Berlin in 1898. Their artistic ideas led to abstract painting and laid the foundations for the emergence of modern art in the 20th century. The outbreak of the First World War brought this development to an abrupt end. However, the thematic reorientation of the artists that followed also left its mark in Dachau.
In addition to paintings from the museum's own collection, the permanent exhibition also includes paintings from the museum association and the town of Dachau, as well as valuable loans from major Munich collections. Among the paintings on display are works by Eduard Schleich the Elder, Christian Morgenstern, Carl Spitzweg, Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth, Leopold von Kalckreuth, Fritz von Uhde and others, in addition to those by more regionally known painters.

Special exhibitions regularly focus on individual aspects of Dachau open-air painting and other European artists' colonies.