He was only 26 years old. Nevertheless, Wilhelm Morgner is considered one of the most important expressionists in Westphalia, who created well over 200 paintings and 2,000 drawings in a very short space of time. A large part of his work is owned by his native town of Soest, which established its own museum for the painter in 1962: the Museum Wilhelm Morgner.
If you look closely when visiting the permanent exhibition at the Museum Wilhelm Morgner, you will discover a few holes in one or two of the paintings. They are reminiscent of the National Socialist era, when the work of the Soest artist was considered "degenerate". Only acquired from the painter's estate in 1931, the city of Soest had to send Morgner's works declared as such to Berlin just a few years later. It is still unclear today why they were returned to their homeland in 1943. There, however, the large-format paintings were used to replace broken windows in the town hall.
Creative power in five years
Nevertheless, the majority of the works have been preserved and can once again be presented to the public on a permanent basis. At the Wilhelm Morgner Museum in the picturesque old town of Soest, visitors get a good overview of the enormous creative power of the young man who died in the First World War, who managed to produce well over 200 paintings and 2,000 drawings in just five years.
Initially still strongly influenced by naturalism, Morgner - influenced by Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and the "Blauer Reiter" group of artists - quickly developed into an important expressionist in Westphalia, who sometimes cautiously, sometimes provocatively dealt with reality. The working man and the landscape always remained his central themes alongside religious depictions, mostly crucifixion scenes. Later, it was mainly ornamental and astral compositions.
In the permanent exhibition, visitors can follow the artist's development, which ultimately leads to complete abstraction in his work, and can also see some critical self-portraits of the painter. In total, the collection of the city of Soest has over 60 paintings and more than 400 drawings and graphic works by Wilhelm Morgner. However, other important artists who have exhibited or worked in Soest are also presented in the museum - alongside changing exhibitions by the town and its partners. These include names such as Christian Rohlfs, Otto Modersohn and his wife Paula Modersohn-Becker as well as Emil Nolde, Johannes Molzahn, Josef Albers, Emil Schumacher and Günther Uecker.
With the reopening of the museum in 2016, a new exhibition area and space for supra-regional works was also created. In RAUM SCHROTH, the glazed atrium of the contemporary renovated 1960s building, the museum presents changing exhibitions of international representatives of concrete, constructivist and conceptual art from the Schroth Collection.
