Albertinum

A grand nineteenth-century museum on the Elbe, the Albertinum sits on Dresden's Brühl's Terrace and houses the city's collection of modern art, from Romanticism to the present, together with an important gathering of sculpture. It complements the Old Masters displayed nearby in the Zwinger.

The building was originally an arsenal, converted in the 1880s under the Saxon king Albert, after whom it is named, into a home for the royal collections. Its imposing Renaissance-revival facade faces the river terrace, long celebrated as the balcony of Europe for its sweeping views over the Elbe. Inside, a covered courtyard reworked in a recent renovation provides a luminous central hall.

The picture gallery, the Galerie Neue Meister, traces painting from Caspar David Friedrich and the German Romantics through Impressionism to Expressionism and beyond, with works by Friedrich, Otto Dix, and artists of the Dresden group Die Brücke. The sculpture collection ranges from antiquity to modern masters such as Rodin and Degas. The result is a broad survey of the modern era under one roof.

A devastating Elbe flood in 2002 inundated the depots and prompted a thorough rebuilding, during which an ingenious storage ark was suspended above the courtyard to keep the collections safe from future high water. The museum reopened transformed. Set at the eastern end of the historic core, beside the Frauenkirche and the Brühlsche Terrasse, it is easily combined with a riverside walk. Admission is charged, and the Albertinum offers a natural sequel to the Old Master galleries, carrying Dresden's artistic story forward into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into contemporary practice. Concerts, readings and family programmes make regular use of the light-filled central courtyard, keeping the museum lively beyond its galleries.