History

In 1899 Ernst Ludwig, Grand Duke of Hesse, founded the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony, summoning a small group of artists to the Mathildenhöhe hill above the city. His ambition was summed up in the motto he chose for the venture — “Mein Hessenland blühe und in ihm die Kunst” (“My Hessian land shall flourish and in it, art”). The colony was conceived not as an academy but as a working community whose members would design buildings, interiors and everyday objects together, joining art and industry. Among those called to Darmstadt were Joseph Maria Olbrich, who became the colony’s central architect, and Peter Behrens.

The colony presented its work through four major exhibitions. The first, in 1901, was titled “A Document of German Art” and opened on 15 May; for it the artists built and furnished their own houses on the hill as a complete demonstration of the new style. Further exhibitions followed in 1904 and in 1908, the latter a Hesse regional exhibition that turned attention toward affordable residences. The final exhibition, in 1914, featured rental residences designed by Albin Müller.

Olbrich, who had co-founded the Vienna Secession in 1897 and designed its landmark exhibition building, brought that experience to Darmstadt before his early death in 1908 at the age of forty. The work of the colony — and of Behrens, whose career would later run toward industrial design and modern architecture — places the Mathildenhöhe among the early sites where Jugendstil began to shade into a recognisably modern design culture, a quality recognised in its 2021 World Heritage inscription as a testimony to early modern architecture and landscape design.