Museum Ludwig

Listen for a moment. Behind you, the bells of Cologne Cathedral may be ringing. In front of you, trains rumble over the Hohenzollern Bridge toward the Rhine. And between those two sounds sits a low, bright building of red brick and grey zinc. Its roof rises and falls in a row of sharp ridges, like the teeth of a saw. This is Museum Ludwig, one of Europe's great houses of twentieth-century art. It sits only a few steps from a Gothic cathedral.

That contrast is the first thing worth thinking about. The cathedral took centuries to finish. It stands for faith, tradition and the long patience of a medieval city. The museum stands for something very different. It holds the restless art of the last hundred years or so: broken shapes, bold colour, soup cans and comic strips. Cologne chose to put the two side by side. The old city and the modern city face each other across a single square.

The museum carries the name of two collectors, Peter and Irene Ludwig. They came from the world of business, from a family chocolate company. They were also passionate buyers of art. In the 1970s they offered the city of Cologne a large gift of modern works. The museum was founded in 1976 on the strength of that donation. Over the following decades the Ludwigs kept giving, and the collection kept growing.

The Ludwigs were not the first generous collectors here, though. Just after the Second World War, a Cologne lawyer named Josef Haubrich gave the city his collection of German Expressionist art. Expressionism was a movement of strong, often harsh colour, painted to show emotion rather than surface reality. Under the Nazi regime, much of this art had been labelled degenerate and removed from museums. Haubrich's gift helped bring it back into public view in a city that lay largely in ruins.

Now look again at the building itself. It opened in 1986, designed by the architects Peter Busmann and Godfrid Haberer. Notice how it does not try to compete with the cathedral in height. Instead it stays low and spreads out, stepping down toward the river. Those zinc ridges on the roof are not only decoration. Many of them face the sky in a way that lets soft natural light fall into the galleries below. Inside, the paintings often hang under daylight.

Here is a detail that most visitors walk straight past. Under the square in front of the museum, there is a concert hall. The Cologne Philharmonie sits beneath your feet, built as part of the same complex. Sound travels through the ground more easily than you might expect. So during concerts and rehearsals, staff sometimes close off part of the square. Rolling suitcases, skateboards and even heavy footsteps could be heard by the musicians and the audience below.

The square has a name: Heinrich-Böll-Platz. It honours one of Cologne's best-known writers, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Israeli artist Dani Karavan shaped this open space. His work includes a tall column of stone and iron, set down by the river side of the square. It belongs to a larger installation called Ma'alot. So even before you enter, you are already standing inside a work of art. Many people never realise it.

Inside, one of the collection's great strengths is Pop Art. This is the American and British movement of the 1950s and 1960s that took its images from advertising, comics and supermarkets. The Ludwigs bought this art early, when many critics in Europe still dismissed it. Because of that early interest, the museum holds one of the largest Pop Art collections outside the United States. Expect bright colour, big scale, and familiar everyday objects turned into something strange.

The second surprise for many visitors is Pablo Picasso. The museum holds a very large group of his works, among the most important Picasso collections anywhere in the world. They cover many phases of his long career, from early paintings to late ceramics. Walking through them, you can follow how one artist kept changing his style, decade after decade. It is rare to see so much of his range gathered in one place, especially outside Spain and France.

There is a third treasure that people often do not expect. The Ludwigs also collected the Russian avant-garde. This was a group of artists working in the years around the Russian Revolution. They experimented with pure geometry, with squares, lines and blocks of flat colour. Their ideas influenced design, posters and architecture far beyond Russia. Seeing these works in Cologne is a reminder that modern art was never only a story of Paris and New York.

The museum also has a strong collection of photography. Cologne has long been an important city for the photographic world, and the museum reflects that history. Look out for exhibitions that show how photographers recorded the twentieth century, from portraits to city streets. Photography rooms can feel quieter than the painting galleries. Here the scale is often smaller, and you are invited to lean in close. Take your time with these images. They reward a slow look.

For its first years, this building was shared. The Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, with its older European paintings, lived under the same roof. Around the turn of the millennium, that museum moved into a new home nearby. Museum Ludwig then took over the whole building. That is why the galleries today can give modern art so much room. Exhibitions change regularly, so the rooms you see today may look quite different the next time you come back.

When you step outside again, pause on the square for a moment. Look up at the twin spires of the cathedral, then back at the zinc saw-teeth of the museum roof. Listen to the trains on the bridge and the voices drifting up from the riverbank. Somewhere below your feet, an orchestra may be tuning. Old stone, modern art and live music all meet in this one small corner of Cologne. Walk gently across the square as you leave.