Pinakothek der Moderne

Lonely Planet review

Germany's largest modern art museum, the Pinakothek der Moderne opened in 2002 in an extravagant building by Stephan Braunfels that's a perfect setting for artists that dominated the art world throughout the last century. The spectacular four-storey interior centres on a vast eyelike dome which spreads soft natural light throughout blanched white galleries. Many walls are curved, gently leading the viewer from one discovery to the next, and right angles are disrupted by diagonals.

The museum unites four significant collections under a single roof. The State Gallery of Modern Art has some exemplary modern classics by Picasso, Klee, Magritte, Kandinsky and many lesser-known works that will be fresh to many visitors. More recent big shots include Georg Baselitz, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly and the late enfant terrible Joseph Beuys. His signature piece is the large-scale installation The End of the 20th Century (1983), a pile of prone basalt columns scattered throughout a blank chamber.

The New Collection in the basement lasers in on applied design from the industrial revolution via Art Nouveau and Bauhaus to today. VW Beetles, Eames chairs and early Apple Macs stand alongside more obscure items such as AEG's electric kettles from 1909.

The State Graphics Collection boasts a collection of 400,000 pieces of art on paper, including drawings, prints and engravings by such craftsmen as Leonardo da Vinci and Paul Cézanne. Because of the light-sensitive nature of these works, only a tiny fraction of the collection is shown at any given time.

Finally, there's the Architecture Museum with oodles of drawings, blueprints, photographs and models by such top practitioners as baroque architect Balthasar Neumann, Bauhaus maven Le Corbusier and 1920s expressionist Erich Mendelsohn.