Long before paintings by Renoir or van Gogh entered the Folkwang, Karl Ernst Osthaus was collecting ceramics, textiles and metalwork from North Africa and West Asia. This sequence changes the familiar founding narrative: the museum did not begin with European modernism alone. Its early vision was broader – and bound up with ideas about what art from other parts of the world should contribute to the present.
The exhibition ‘Nach Damaskus … Karl Ernst Osthaus und die islamischen Künste’ (To Damascus … Karl Ernst Osthaus and the Islamic Arts) opens in Essen on 6 November, presenting around 340 objects. They come from regions now part of Iran, Syria, Turkey, Egypt and Spain, and date from the 4th to the 19th century. Alongside architectural ceramics and ceramic vessels, the exhibition includes glass, metalwork and textiles. An enamelled glass beaker from Syria or Egypt stands just over 18 centimetres tall; a Spanish ceramic vase, by contrast, measures more than a metre. This range alone raises the question of what the historical umbrella term ‘Islamic art’ brings together – and what it separates.
Beginning with the Decorative Arts
Osthaus began acquiring Islamic art in 1898/99. His travels to the Maghreb and the Ottoman Empire initially also had a scientific and ethnographic dimension; these encounters broadened his view of art and architecture. When the museum opened in Hagen in 1902, the Islamic art collection was already part of its programme. Only later were works such as Renoir’s ‘Lise with a Parasol’ and other examples of French modernism added.
This was more than an unusual preference on a collector’s part. Osthaus connected fine art with the applied arts – objects whose design and craftsmanship played a role in everyday life. According to the museum, the objects were intended not only to stimulate contemporary art but also to provide models and standards for the region’s decorative arts: ceramics and textile production, for instance, or silversmithing. Encounters with works from other periods and regions thus also formed a programme of reform for his own time.
For financial reasons, the holdings were initially displayed alongside paintings and sculptures in the Hagen museum. Bringing together different art forms and periods soon became a hallmark of the institution. This was an early form of ‘world art’: rather than organising art exclusively along the lines of national schools or a European history of artistic development, it placed objects from different regions in relation to one another. Yet the idea is not automatically free of hierarchies. When works are intended to serve as models for domestic production, their cultures of origin can easily appear as suppliers of forms, while modern European art is seen as the place where further development occurs.
What Classification Reveals
The current exhibition does not simply continue this history as a success story. It makes collecting, research and display themselves its subject. Alongside objects from the present collection, loans return that once formed part of the Folkwang’s wider context, including a section of the so-called Damascus Room from Dresden and a copy of the Persian epic ‘Šāhnāma’ from the Berlin State Library. A painting by Henri Matisse, designs and photographs are intended to show how closely the collection was connected with the institution’s other artistic and architectural interests.
The renewed scrutiny of these holdings is also a matter of the available sources. The museum reports that the collection has undergone comprehensive research and conservation for the first time in recent years; around 2,000 pages of historical material were examined for a provenance research pilot project. This does not mean that a complete history can already be reconstructed for every object. It is therefore particularly important to distinguish between what is known about an object today and the gaps in its documented history.
The terminology also requires care. ‘Islamic art’ is an art-historical umbrella category, not an indication that all the works had religious functions or belonged to a single, unified culture. The exhibition uses the term ‘Islamic arts’ in its title, while also drawing attention to perspectives and gaps in the history of the collection. The contemporary artist Dana Awartani complements the historical display with a textile installation.
In 1922, the Folkwang collection moved from Hagen to Essen, where the city and the Folkwang-Museumsverein jointly secured its future. This other founding story does not, then, end with Osthaus’s early acquisitions. It extends to the question of how a museum organises and researches its holdings, and displays them together with their history. The fact that these objects belonged to the Folkwang long before the canonical names of modernism is no footnote. It is a reason to tell the story of the museum’s beginnings anew.
Original reviewed by the editors · 3 November 2026
