Graphic Art and Posters
The museum collects all purpose-oriented image forms - from prints to contemporary graphic design.
The most popular of these is the poster: ideally both an artistically and aesthetically designed image and an information medium. The focus of the collection is not on product marketing, but on artists' and exhibition posters. The MAKK owns examples from the Art Nouveau period onwards by artists and graphic designers such as Ethel Reed, Alphons Maria Mucha, Thomas Theodor Heine, Lucian Bernhard, Johanna Schütz-Wolff, Werner Labbé, Josef Faßbender, Heinz Edelmann, Willy Fleckhaus, Uwe Loesch and Almir Mavignier da Silva, by German and Swiss agencies as well as numerous contemporary artists from Joseph Beuys to HAP Grieshaber, Martin Kippenberger and Robert Rauschenberg to Peter Zimmermann. In the work of some artists, such as Lawrence Weiner, the poster crosses the border into an autonomous pictorial form.
Since the 16th century, ornamental engravings have played a major role in the training and professional practice of many artists, architects and craftspeople and in the dissemination of stylistic forms, providing exemplary artistic designs for the fine and applied arts, from goldsmithing to architecture. Artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Albrecht Altdorfer and Annibale Carracci made their contributions to ornamental engraving, as did the minor masters Heinrich Aldegrever and Bartel Beham. The number of famous ornamental engravers represented in the collection is large: from Hans Collaert, Paul Decker the Elder, Stefano della Bella, Jacques Ducerceau, Paul Vredeman de Vries, Jacob Floris or Wenzel Hollar to Jean Lepautre, Daniel Marot or Jean Bérain, the royal court ornamentalist of Louis XIV. The inventive sculptor and ornamental engraver Jean Bernard Toro, whose designs played a decisive role in the spread of the Rococo artistic style, is represented with 90 models - the largest number in the German-speaking world.
