KLAUS BUSSMANN (1941–2019)

Klaus Bussmann, a German art historian, curator, and longtime director of Münster’s Westphalian State Museum of Art and Cultural History, or LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, has died at seventy-seven years old. Bussmann helmed the LWL from 1984 to 2004, when he retired. As cofounder of the Skulptur Projekte Münster decennial—an outdoor art exhibition begun in 1977—Bussmann was pivotal in transforming the largely reconstructed city into an international hub for contemporary sculpture, and for decades he helped challenge the community through provocative formats and commissions.

Born in 1941, Bussmann studied art history and sociology in Münster, Paris, Basel, and Berlin before taking a lectureship at the LWL from 1968 to 1977. In 1973, the American artist George Rickey installed a kinetic sculpture in Münster to the outrage of its citizens. Through talks and presentations, Bussmann answered the public’s outcry with an outreach program about experimental sculpture and public space, eventually organizing Skulptur Projekte Münster with curator Kaspar König. The two-part exhibition invited artists—most of them that year were from the US, and all were male—to make sculptures in situ and prioritized accessibility for its viewers. Many of the show’s future iterations have courted controversy. “Bussmann awoke the museum and the entire city by confronting the citizenship with contemporary art in a bold, provocative and persuasive manner,” said Hermann Arnhold, his successor at the LWL.