Art has many facets in Leipzig. The city owns one of the oldest, biggest and most precious bourgeois art collections in Germany. It was started as early as 1848 with about a hundred masterpieces of contemporary art of that era. The purpose built construction which housed the collection in 1858 was sadly destroyed during the war. Then followed a long odyssey for the collection. In 2004 the Museum of Fine Arts obtained a new home in a new construction on Sachsenplatz. Today it owns almost 5000 paintings and sculptures from the late Middle Ages to the present including a collection of the Leipzig school founded after 1945 with painters like Bernhard Heisig, Werner Tübke and Wolfgang Mattheuer as well as important pieces by their successors of the New Leipzig school (e.g. Neo Rauch und Daniel Richter).
The commitment of the Sparkasse Leipzig concentrates exclusively on regional art after WWII. Its substantial collection has found a home in the annex of the renovated Sparkasse building from 1914. The Leipzig Cotton Mill has become another location for art. More than 80 artists of the New Leipzig School work on the former factory premises and there are dozens of internationally respected galleries.
