Arp Museum Opens With Architect Richard Meier's Newest Coup

The train journey on the embankment of the Rhine River from Koblenz to Cologne is scenic, but otherwise unremarkable, except for the stop at Bahnhof Rolandseck (Rolandseck Railway Station).

From the grotty outdoor platform, the commuter descends into another world. Even the walls of the lavatories on the way down to the main entrance hall of the three-story high classical-style railroad station are adorned with art.

Bahnhof Rolandseck was erected in 1856 to service the Bonn-Rolandseck line, but also turned into a high society juncture where European culture intersected with politics. Among its many patrons attending concerts or poetry readings on the top level of the station were Queen Victoria, "iron chancellor" Otto von Bismarck, Heinrich Heine, Franz Liszt and George Bernard Shaw.

It is now the only functioning railway station in Germany that is also a museum, which is named after the artists Hans Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. The Arp Museum faces the famous Seven Mountains on the other side of the Rhine. At the top of the forested escarpment above the train station is the new modernist edifice of white panels and glass facades in bold geometric forms that is the trademark of Pritzker-Prize-winning New York architect Richard Meier.

Subterranean journey

Meier's extension to the Arp Museum was officially opened on Friday, Sept. 28, at a ceremony attended by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Social Democratic party leader Kurt Beck, who is also the premier of Rhineland-Palatinate, the state where the picturesque town of Rolandseck is situated.

The Meier complex can be accessed at the entrance to the train station, which leads to a 120-meter (394-foot) subterranean passageway beneath the railroad tracks. An 18-meter-long florescent spiral by artists Barbara Trautmann, titled "Kaa," snakes through and illuminates a portion of the tunnel.

"The journey to the Meier building is a total adventure," said museum director Klaus Gallwitz, who led a tour at a press preview. At the end of the tunnel is a bank of glass elevators transporting visitors up a milky, cone-shaped chute that emerges from the underground and suddenly becomes infused with daylight. The elevators then open up to panoramic vistas of the Rhine.

Too much art for Rolandseck

Seven artists spanning four generations are showing their works at the premiere. The exhibitions include an entire floor dedicated to Anselm Kiefer, whose artistic journey into the dark side of German history is reflected in the enormous black-and-white acrylic mural impressions from composite woodcuts. On the lighter side, Yvonne Fehling's and Jennie Peiz's playful wood sculptures of interconnecting stools, chairs and benches that visitors can sit on are interspersed throughout the 2,900 square-meter building on three levels.

The top floor of the new museum is reserved for the permanent collection of the Arps' work. Hans (1886-1966) was an Alsatian avant-garde poet, painter and sculptor who became one of the founders of the anti-establishment Dada movement. Sophie (1889-1943), a Swiss national, was both a painter and sculptor and active both in the Dada and surrealist movements. Over 400 of the couple's works, valued at 10 million euros ($14 million), are owned by the state of Rhineland-Palatinate.

The problem was that the sculpted works, reliefs, paintings and drawings were so numerous that the train station was not big enough to house all the art.

Realizing a dream

So in the late 1980s, the art collector Johannes Wasmuth, who had spearheaded an effort to restore Bahnhof Rolandseck, which had been abandoned since the end of World War II, met with architect Meier to discuss his dream of building another museum on the site of the railway station. By then the regional state authorities had already guaranteed the financial future of the railway, and a foundation had been set up to collect, preserve and publicize the works of the Arps.

"The only place for a museum was at the top of the hill," said Meier at a press conference. "I walked on the site and thought, 'What a fantastic view. But how does the public get here?'"

Cutting a pathway to the top would have antagonized the town's residents and the trek uphill would have been more fitting for mountain climbers than museum visitors.

A regional consolation prize

More problematic was the financing for such a massive project, which only materialized because Bonn lost out to Berlin in becoming the capital of a reunified Germany in 1991. As part of a compensation package, the federal government put up 17.6 million euros and Rhineland-Palatinate picked up the rest of the 33-million-euro tab to restore the old railway station and build the new museum.

Meier, whose work is influenced by modernists, such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and the Bauhaus movement, is an old hand at designing museums in Europe. His first commission was the Frankfurt Museum of Decorative Arts in 1979 and his latest in Germany was the Burda Collection Museum in Baden-Baden, which was completed in 2004.

"I love museums," said Meier. "Museums are places where people come together and where viewers can have a one-on-one relationship to works of art."

Museum of replicas, critics say

However, the Arp Museum is not without its detractors. Critics say the permanent home for the collection in Rolandseck had no connection to the Arps' lives, since they resided primarily in France and Switzerland.

Even more controversial is an enlarged replica of a sculpture by Hans Arp before the museum entrance that was cast in bronze posthumously. Foundation officials have responded that their mission is to make the Arps' works more accessible and that this is only possible with replicas.

But even a critical editorial in Bonn's local newspaper, the General-Anzeiger, which coined the term "replica museum" for the Arp Museum, wrote: "Thanks to star architect Richard Meier, Rolandseck has been catapulted into the champion's league of culture."