Museum Neues Weimar
About This Site
The house that answers the question this town usually skips: what was happening in Weimar between Goethe and the Bauhaus. The answer is on the walls, and most of the painters on them are names you will not know.
A building made to be a museum, 1869
The former Grand Ducal Museum went up in 1869 as one of the first buildings in Germany designed from the start to hold a collection rather than adapted into the job — a neo-Renaissance house from the decades when Carl Alexander was spending to make Weimar a cultural centre of Germany. Most museums in this town are houses somebody lived in; this one was never anything else.
The painters nobody outside Weimar names, since 1860
What hangs here is early modernism as it happened locally: at one end the Weimar School, the artists who taught at or studied in the art school Carl Alexander founded in 1860 and who kept painting the edges of this small town as they stopped being countryside; at the other end Henry van de Velde. Friedrich Nietzsche, who spent his last years in this town, appears in the presentation as the intellectual precursor of what followed. The rooms are named for what hangs in them: a Prellergalerie with Friedrich Preller's Odyssey after Homer, a Saal Weimarer Malerschule with Christian Rohlfs's covered Ilm bridge at Buchfahrt, a Saal Harry Graf Kessler with Théo van Rysselberghe's bathing women, and downstairs a Saal Gesamtkunstwerk holding van de Velde's dining room for the Wolff family.
"Wege zum Bauhaus", 1919–2019
The permanent presentation has carried that title since 2019, and it is an argument rather than a label: the Bauhaus did not arrive in Weimar out of nowhere in 1919, and this building — with the school behind it and the paintings inside it — is the evidence. The house also played its own part in that story, as one of the three venues of the first Bauhaus exhibition in 1923.
Questions visitors ask
- What is Museum Neues Weimar?
- The former Grand Ducal Museum, built in 1869 as one of the first buildings in Germany designed from the start to hold a collection. It shows what was happening in Weimar's art scene between Goethe and the Bauhaus.
- What's in the collection?
- Early modernism as it happened locally: the Weimar School of painting — artists who taught at or studied in the art school Carl Alexander founded in 1860 — at one end, and Henry van de Velde at the other, with Friedrich Nietzsche presented as the intellectual precursor of it all.
- Which rooms are named for what?
- A Prellergalerie with Friedrich Preller's Odyssey after Homer, a Saal Weimarer Malerschule with Christian Rohlfs's covered Ilm bridge at Buchfahrt, a Saal Harry Graf Kessler with Théo van Rysselberghe's bathing women, and downstairs a Saal Gesamtkunstwerk with van de Velde's dining room for the Wolff family.
- What is "Wege zum Bauhaus"?
- The permanent presentation's title since 2019, and an argument, not a label: that the Bauhaus did not arrive in Weimar out of nowhere in 1919. The building itself was also one of the three venues of the first Bauhaus exhibition in 1923.
- Can I visit, and what does it cost?
- Wednesday to Monday, 10:00–16:00, closed Tuesdays. €8 adults, €6 reduced, €3 for pupils aged 16–20; a ModerneCard is €17, a BauhausCard €30.
Connected Historical Figures
painter • engraver
The 1869 building was put up complete with the Preller-Galerie he created, and it still carries his name.
architect • designer • founder of the Weimar arts and crafts school
The collection runs from the Weimar School of painting up to van de Velde — he is where the museum's account of early modernism arrives.
philosopher • philologist
The presentation treats him as the intellectual precursor of the modernism it exhibits; he spent his last years in Weimar, at the Villa Silberblick.
writer • resistance member • screenwriter
The museum's address is Jorge-Semprún-Platz: the square outside it is named for the writer, who was deported to Buchenwald and returned to the subject for the rest of his life.
art patron • museum director • publisher • diplomat
He did not run this museum — his was the hall on the Goetheplatz — but the avant-garde he promoted, from Monet to Beckmann, is part of what hangs here.
Visit Information
Adults €8.00 · reduced €6.00 · students aged 16–20 €3.00 · ModerneCard €17.00 · BauhausCard €30.00
Wed–Mon 10:00–16:00; closed Tuesdays (checked 29 August 2026).
Jorge-Semprún-Platz 5, 99423 Weimar
50.9862, 11.3265
Events held here
Events
Two days a year — International Women's Day and the Buß- und Bettag
The house that takes the students' staircase performances on the November day.
A long run, into the new year
The house showing it — the museum of early modernism, which makes it the right room for the Bauhaus as an argument rather than as furniture.
In Weimar's history
Historical periods
Built in 1869 by Carl Alexander as part of his enlargement of Weimar into a cultural centre, and holding the painters of the art school he founded in 1860.
Goethe died in 1832, and Weimar had to work out what a town does after its golden age. It decided to keep going, and the answer took eighty-six years — the era the Klassik Stiftung Weimar calls the Silver Age. Music replaced literature as the thing Weimar was for, two royal patrons paid for it, and the schools they founded outlived the monarchy that funded them.
Its permanent presentation, "Wege zum Bauhaus", traces what led to the school of 1919; in 1923 the building was one of the three venues of the first Bauhaus exhibition.
The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar in 1919 and voted out by 1925 — time enough to change what a design school is, and not enough for the town that made it to keep it.
In Weimar's history
A grand duke started an art school out of his own pocket; fifty-nine years later it was half of the Bauhaus.
The museum holds the Weimar School — the painters who taught at or studied in this school.
The weeks in which the Bauhaus put itself in front of the public for the first time, in three buildings and one house it had to build first.
The third city venue: the building that houses the Museum Neues Weimar today.