Cataloguing and Digital Publication of the Collection of Ornament Prints
Generous funding from the Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation has enabled the museum in 2024 to launch a scholarly cataloguing project. It focuses on a part of its graphic arts collection, which due to its fragility is rarely displayed publicly, and aims at making the objects accessible to a wider audience via publication in its online collection.
Since its foundation as “Kunstgewerbe-Museum” of the city of Cologne in 1888, the MAKK has owned an extensive collection of works on paper. The collection of European ornament prints from the 16th to 19th centuries, which now comprises approximately 25,000 sheets, represents a significant part of this graphic arts cabinet. Only recently, by means of an exhibition and a catalogue, has public attention been drawn to a section of this collection, which had previously awaited systematic, scholarly cataloguing and publication.
Funding programmes by the federal government and the city of Cologne in 2020/2021 enabled the museum to digitize a selection of 4,000 ornament prints. The current two-year scientific cataloguing project is dedicated to the more than 1,300 sheets by artists from German-speaking countries contained therein.
The processed works will be published successively in the MAKK's online collection [link to the project object group page on Museum Digital]. While the physical originals are preserved and only need to be taken out in exceptional cases, a significant part of the collection is made digitally and permanently accessible. This allows it to be viewed and used at a regional, national, and international level, beyond the originally intended, limited target audience of local artisans.
Project funding:
Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation (https://www.ernst-von-siemens-kunststiftung.de/)
Project duration: October 2024 – September 2026
The preparatory digitization of the ornament prints was made possible by funding from the federal government's programme ‘Neustart. Sofortprogramm für Corona-bedingte Investitionen in Kultureinrichtungen’ and the cultural development planning of the city of Cologne.
