Guided Tour Goethe Museum Düsseldorf

Pictures courtesy of Goethe Museum / Anton-und-Katharina-Kippenberg-Stiftung

 

The Goethe Museum is a cultural-historical museum devoted to the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). It is funded by the Anton and Katharina Kippenberg Foundation and the City of Düsseldorf.

The collection is based on what was at the time the largest private collection on Goethe and his time, acquired by the publisher Anton Kippenberg (1874-1950). Manuscripts of drafts and final copies of works and letters are supplemented by first editions, coins, medals and ceramics, and are accompanied by cityscapes, landscapes, portraits and busts.

All items in the Collection serve to portray vividly the spirit of the Age of Goethe: The many city- and landscapes that show what places and areas looked like when Goethe stayed there and engaged with them, and also the numerous portraits and busts of contemporaries with whom Goethe exchanged ideas. The most often discussed testimonials of this intellectual world, however, are the many letters, work manuscripts, music scores and books, which for that reason are the Museum's most valuable possessions. 

Goethe distinguished between three groups of colors:

• physiological colors (arising in the eye itself, e.g. contrast phenomena)
• physical colors (arising from colorless media such as prisms, turbidity, polarization)
• chemical colors (colors of objects, e.g. pigments)

You can experience the arising of physiological colors using the picture of the Girl in Reversed Colors and the RGB Spinning Disc.Physical colors are exhibited by the prismatic experiments, the projection of Complementary Spectra, the mirror box on turbidity. Further, optical polarization is exhibited by the historical Entoptic Apparatus and the modern exhibits The Part and the Whole and Tribute to Haidinger.Examples of chemical colors, such as Goethe's color circles and Runge's Color Sphere, can be found in the showcases.

And now follow Goethe, who said to Eckermann about his Theory of Colors that: "It should, as you know, not merely be read and studied, it should be done“.