Schön & Streng. Die Macht des Ornaments — Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal, 11 October 2026 – 14 February 2027

The Von der Heydt-Museum in Wuppertal has turned one of the oldest arguments in modern art into an exhibition: whether a pattern is merely decoration, or a subject in its own right. Schön & Streng. Die Macht des Ornaments — “Beautiful and Strict. The Power of Ornament” — follows the ornament through the art of the last hundred and twenty years, from Henri Matisse to artists working today, and argues that repetition, pattern and geometric order have never been a surface matter.

The museum’s own painting collection carries the first half of the argument. In the works the museum shows, colour, form and flat surface become the real subject of the picture: Matisse and August Macke are the names the museum puts at the head of that line. Among the contemporaries, the exhibition names Philip Taaffe, Katja Davar and Thomas Bayrle, and then turns the question outward — to Nevin Aladağ, Azra Akšamija and Susan Hefuna, whose use of inherited ornament from particular cultures makes a pattern readable as a statement about a society. Every ornament, as the museum puts it, has a history, and its meaning comes from that history.

The building is part of the story. The museum occupies the old Elberfeld town hall on the Turmhof, built between 1827 and 1842 to designs by Johann Peter Cremer, a pupil of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, on the site of a decayed Roman Catholic church — and before that, of a medieval castle whose memory survives only in the street names Burgstraße, Wall and Turmhof. When Elberfeld built itself a new town hall at the market in 1902, the old one became a museum; it opened on 25 October 1902.

Practical details

• Dates: 11 October 2026 – 14 February 2027
• Opening hours: Tuesday to Friday 11am–6pm, Thursday until 8pm, Saturday and Sunday 11am–6pm; closed Monday
• Admission: €12, reduced €10; students and apprentices €5, pupils aged 18 and over €2, children and young people up to 17 free. Free entry to the collection on the first Thursday of every month, 5–8pm
• Where: Von der Heydt-Museum, Turmhof 8, 42103 Wuppertal, Germany
• Information: von-der-heydt-museum.de — +49 202 563 6231
• Note: because of modernisation work on the first floor, the museum’s collection display Zeiten und Räume is only partly open

Cultural Heritage Online lists this exhibition because the ornament is the thread that ties the decorative arts of 1900 — Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, Modernisme — to the painting that came after them, and because it is being argued here inside a building that is itself a piece of nineteenth-century civic heritage.