THE FORBERG COLLECTION

The Forberg Collection was placed with the Albertina in 2007 by Mathias and Eva Forberg on permanent loan. The 50 paintings, sculptures and works on paper comprising the collection complement the Albertina’s own set of exhibits, particularly in the area of German Expressionism and Classical Modernism. A selection of outstanding objects from the collection is on display in the Albertina’s permanent viewing collection.

Collecting, to Mathias Forberg, represents not just a personal, private, occupation with the work of art, but rather, the private art collection is also intended to become a part of the cultural life of the general public. Making the Forberg Collection available to the Albertina on a permanent loan basis, therefore, also reflects the desire of Mathias and Eva

Wassily Kandinsky
Landscape Study (Dünaberg), 1910

Forberg to afford a large number of people the opportunity of an encounter with their collection of pictures.

The original nucleus of today’s Forberg Collection was formed by the art works assembled and published in a comprehensive catalogue of the Düsseldorf Art Association as far back as 1970, by Matthias Forberg’s father, Kurt Forberg. The elder Forberg, a banker by profession, was a personality interested in many areas of art. Himself the son of an artist, the painter Carl Ernst Forberg (1844-1915), who once held a professorship at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, his particular commitment was to the visual arts.
Kurt Forberg, displaying a great deal of knowledge and connoisseurship, had assembled a comprehensive art collection, borne by his enthusiasm for the Modernist style, from the 1950s onward.

After his death, the collection was divided, by virtue of inheritance, several times over and, in part, distributed to the far corners of the world, through sales. It is thanks to the active enthusiasm for the visual arts shared by Mathias and Eva Forberg, and their interest in the composition of the original collection, that the torso of that collection has once again been reconstituted into an extraordinary art collection in its own right.

THE CONTENTS OF THE FORBERG COLLECTION

"Classical Modernism" reached an especial apex in the areas of painting and sculpting during the 20th century, with the revolutionary achievements of the Cubists and Expressionists, and also the artists of the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism.

The Forberg Collection unites, at an extraordinarily high level of quality, works by the most important artists of this era. It comprises works on paper, art prints, sculptures and paintings by, among others, Picasso, Lyonel Feininger and Fernand Léger, works b the artists of the “Blue Rider ("Blauer Reiter") art group, such as Alexei Yavlensky and Wassily Kandinsky or August Macke, who was associated with them, by the “Bridge” ("Brücke") painters Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Mueller and Max Pechstein, and by the Bauhaus artists Laszló Moholy-Nagy and Oskar Schlemmer. Paul Klee, who created many of his most eminent works in diminutive formats, is considered by Mathias Forberg to be one of the “giants” of the 20th century.