Generous Gift from the Marx Family
News from 09/08/2022
Professor Axel Marx and family donate important Beuys works from the Erich Marx Collection to the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz
The family of art collector Erich Marx, who died in 2020, has donated all of the works by artist Joseph Beuys in the Marx collection to the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz (Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation). Professor Axel Marx, son of the deceased, announced the gift back in September 2021 at a commemorative ceremony for Erich Marx held in Hamburger Bahnhof. The donation agreement has now been signed there as well. The Beuys works are currently still on display at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin (Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum for Contemporary Art – Berlin). In the future, they will mostly be shown in the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts (Museum of the 20th Century) at Kulturforum. The other works from the Marx Collection will remain in the Berlin museums as loans.
For the most part, Erich Marx (1921–2020) concentrated his collection on a small number of artists whose works especially fascinated him: Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly and Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Liechtenstein and a few others. As well as key works, he collected groups or cycles of works that make it possible to trace developments in the oeuvre of each artist. Marx stated early on that he wanted his collection to measure up to museum standards. To give his collection of contemporary art a home in Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof was redesigned to form the Museum für Gegenwart. For over twenty years, the collection was displayed there in the context of works from the Nationalgalerie (National Gallery), and later, works from the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection. In a few years, when the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts (Museum of the 20th Century) opens at Kulturforum, the collection will be presented there in a new context.