Archive

The Archive of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf is a special archive for art. Its sources serve the artistic and scientific tasks of the academy. The archive of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf maintains and takes care of:

• Institution-related archival materials, especially related to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, such as certificates, files, minutes and transcriptions, publications and press articles
• Archival materials on the art collection, exhibitions of the academy, artists of the academy, about "rounds" etc.
• Person-related archival materials, especially about professors and students of the academy like files, letters, picture material, press reports, complete estates
• Artistic productions of members of the academy, works by professors of the academy and purchases of student works, complete artistic estates
• The still existing former teaching collections of the academy (plaster collection, collection of death masks, medals, drawings and graphics)
• Finding aids (directories, inventories, catalogs, name lists, estate finding books)

Collection of Works from Art Lessons

The Archive of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf also contains a collection of works from art lessons with about 3,500 creative works by children and adolescents.

The collection dates back to a donation by Professor Günter Blecks (1930-2015, professor of art didactics at the Kunstakademie from 1975-1995) from 1997. Part of this donation were numerous student works, which originally come from the collection of Professor Kurt Arnscheidt. Kurt Arnscheidt (1906–2001) taught art at the Düsseldorf Görres-Gymnasium and taught art pedagogy at the Kunstakademie from 1958 to 1971.

Since 1999, the collection has been continuously supplemented by the Chair for the Didactics of Fine Arts with further groups of works, so that it provides a comprehensive insight into the development of art pedagogy since the early 20th century to the present. A main focus is on works from the period after World War II.