The phenomenon of ultra-rich private collectors opening their own museums has been an increasingly important component of the art scene since the 2000s. The map of the Private Museum Research project shows that the largest number of such museums per country can be found in Germany [1], where the focus is mostly on modern and contemporary art. [2] This has led to a growing body of literature in German which either criticises this type of collection as merely 'cloning' existing museums, or celebrates them as important contributions to the predominantly state-funded museum landscape. [3]

Most contributions to this debate have been opinion pieces by members of the art world, and there have been very few academic studies. Stephanie Regenbrecht's book therefore intends to open up the field by "presenting options for advancing research ... in this subject area" (15) and takes one private museum - the Sammlung Falckenberg in Hamburg - as an example. The question she sets out to answer is what this specific collection has conveyed about its identity, in three ways: through its collection strategies, through the successive spaces in which the collection has been housed, and through the exhibitions which it has mounted. This focus, however, means that the social dynamics that drive this phenomenon have been sidelined.

The Falckenberg collection was started in the mid-1990s by lawyer and businessman Harald Falckenberg, who was then in his fifties. He was not continuing a family tradition, as is quite often the case with these museums, but started his collection from scratch. This determined the rapacious pace of his collecting and the attitude behind it: in a 2001 interview, Falckenberg jokingly alluded to himself as "Hannibal Collector" (49). At that time, he had already acquired one thousand works, and by 2015 he possessed 2100 objects.

As the first section of Regenbrecht's book, whose focus is collection strategies, explains, his choice of works was consonant with this image of 'Hannibal Collector': he demonstrated a predilection for loud, masculine and rebellious artists such as Josef Beuys, Martin Kippenberger, Jonathan Meese and Daniel Richter. Moreover, he had a preference for installations and non-traditional artistic media. [4] In other words, his selection was decidedly anti-bourgeois. (55) He initially identified himself with these "outsider and freak" artists (80) and stylized his public persona in accordance with their romantic notions. By posing in 2001 for a portrait with a work by Kippenberger with the inscription "I hate you" hanging around his neck (39), he constructed himself as part of the detested bourgeois while simultaneously embracing the artists' anti-establishment anger. However, over time, the narrative of the collection ceased to hinge on the subjective persona of the collector but, as Regenbrecht recounts, came to underline its connection with Hamburg and the artistic movement of the 'Neue Wilden' [5].

The successive locations in which the collection was presented, discussed in the second part of the book, reflect this development as well. In 1995, the so-called Pump Haus - a former farm building near Hamburg airport which had been converted into an industrial estate - was turned into a temporary depot where large-scale installations by artists could be housed. Occasionally, Falckenberg gave access to it, first only to personal friends, but before long to interested outsiders, also. The rough and dilapidated appearance of the spaces reinforced the subversive quality of the artworks. However, in the face of growing public attention and the scheduled demolishment of the Pump Haus, Falckenberg acquired the lease to a warehouse formerly belonging to the Phoenix AG rubber factory in Hamburg Harburg. This was converted into a state-of-the-art exhibition space by architect Roger Bundschuh and was opened to the public in 2001. In 2011, the building and collection were loaned on a long-term basis to the Hamburger Deichtorhallen, and thus became part of the municipal cultural organization.

This move to a purpose-designed space coincided with the change in the museum's narrative which the third part of the book argues is evidenced in temporary exhibitions of parts of the collection. Regenbrecht's discussion dives deep into the choice of artists and the texts produced for each of these exhibitions by various actors. As a result, the analytical focus of this part of the book shifts to the (stated) intentions of the artists and exhibition makers. Since these shows were staged in diverse venues - from Hamburg Harburg to museums in other parts of Germany and abroad - any attempt to construct a coherent image of the collection or explore the intention of the collector disappears beneath an overwhelming amount of detail on each exhibition, the artists and curators involved, and the many texts produced as a result.

A more overarching problem with this study is that Regenbrecht takes the artistic jargon too seriously and remains too close to the primary sources. It is therefore unclear whether she considers Falckenberg's identification with anti-bourgeois art as genuine or as a mere strategy; the typography of the book privileges what the collector himself stated by using a larger typeface printed in red when quoting him, which suggests that what the collector says is 'true', as does Regenbrecht's alignment of Falckenberg's views with the 'Künstlerpositionen' of the artists represented. It may be that her aim in doing this is to delineate the development of an art-historical interpretation of this period in order to contextualize the collection, but it is left to the reader to infer what that interpretation is.

As a result, Regenbrecht's discussion of the Falckenberg collection remains at the surface of the artistic discourse, as if, as Arthur Danto stated, the art world has its own logic [6]. On the level of the case study, this does make sense, since the book shows how Falckenberg staged his collection, by means of a clever appropriation of the anti-bourgeois artistic discourse, to distinguish himself from his fellow collectors, while (as the reader can infer from the materials discussed here) at the same time he craved recognition by the traditional museum world. The setup of the book, however, leads to chronological overlaps, and the elaborate prose impedes the development of any clear analytical framework applicable to other cases - and so, this study does not succeed in outlining an effective method for moving beyond the "recht ratlose Debatte" (15; truly perplexed debate) that, due to its lack of analytical distance from artistic theory, continues to hamper our understanding of the phenomenon of private collectors' museums in Germany.

Notes:

[1] https://privatemuseumresearch.org/, consulted 13 March 2026.

[2] Olav Velthuis et.al.: Beyond the Global Boom. Private Art Museums in the 21st Century, Amsterdam 2023, 12.

[3] See for example Kathryn Brown: Private Influence, Public Goods, and the Future of Art History, in: Journal for Art Market Studies 3 (2019) https://doi.org/10.23690/jams.v3i1.86 and Kristina J. Kolbe et al.: The Global Rise of Private Art Museums a Literature Review, in: Poetics (2022), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2022.101712.

[4] Stephanie Regenbrecht: Ich muss gestehen, dass ich eine Schwäche für Ensembles habe. Eine kurze Geschichte der Sammlung Falckenberg im Kontext ihrer Installationen, in: Dirk Luckow and Goesta Diercks (eds.): Counter Culture. 25 Years Sammlung Falckenberg. Objects and Installations, Cologne 2020, 128-136.

[5] Benjamin Dodenhoff and Ramona Heinlein (eds.): The Invention of the Neue Wilde. Painting and Subculture around 1980, Cologne 2019

[6] Arthur Danto: The Artworld, in: The Journal of Philosophy, 61/19 (1964), 580.

Arnold Witte