On the road

Sacred, Radical, Phe­no­menal: Der­neburg

Once the impregnable domain of celebrated painter Georg Baselitz, Derneburg Castle in Lower Saxony is now evolving into one of Europe’s largest private museums of contemporary art.

by Katharina Matzig in June 2026

“Beware of the dog.” A locked gate, impene­trable hedges, four towering defensive turrets: for decades, Der­neburg Castle, situated east of Hil­desheim, looked as though it were guarding a dark secret. Yet no robber baron ruled here, but rather a grand master painter – usually wearing a cap, often with a cigar in hand. Only those he wished to receive were admitted: gal­le­rists, coll­ectors, and fellow artists. For around 32 years, until 2006, Georg Baselitz lived and worked at the castle with his family, fiercely pro­tective of his privacy. The resi­dents of Der­neburg and the neigh­bouring vil­lages of Holle, Luttrum, Heersum and Sottrum were, unfort­u­nately, kept out.

Things are dif­ferent today. While dogs are not per­mitted at the Kunst­museum Schloss Der­neburg, visitors are warmly wel­comed.

The once-secluded artist’s stronghold has been trans­formed into a public home for art – alt­hough access is curr­ently limited to weekends, and the castle itself can only be visited as part of a guided tour. The his­toric structure of the north wing, which until the end of 2024 housed exhi­bition spaces, a café and a tea salon, proved unable to support its new use and now requires careful res­to­ration in keeping with its listed status. Rest­ricting visitor numbers while work is underway is a com­promise – but pre­ferable to closing the museum altog­ether, and entirely in keeping with the aspi­ration of the castle’s current owners, Andrew and Christine Hall, and their Hall Art Foun­dation, whose aim is to make art acces­sible to the public.

At present, 5,000 square metres of exhi­bition space are in use, with a further 4,000 square metres planned. Tog­ether with the Hall Art Foun­dation in Reading, Vermont, which opened in 2017, the museum in Der­neburg is set to become one of Europe’s largest private museums of con­tem­porary art once the res­to­ration has been com­pleted, spread across the castle and its ancillary buil­dings. After a great deal of hesi­tation, planning per­mission for the first phase of a restaurant project has finally been granted, according to managing director Alex­ander Haviland. “As for the pro­posed hotel or guest­house, the future is less certain. At present, we cannot say what form it will take or when work might begin.” Yet, as Martin Ganzkow remarks with a shake of the head while guiding a group of six visitors through the parkland and bringing its history vividly to life, all the essential ingre­dients are already in place: a com­pelling spatial vision, suf­fi­cient funding and a strong com­mitment to design. If only heritage pro­tection regu­la­tions did not make things so com­pli­cated…

So, the future looks pro­mising, but the history of this place is no less fasci­nating. The estate owes its exis­tence to an act of ato­nement for murder. After a mar­grave of Win­zenburg had a count killed in 1130, his son founded a convent as penance, which was occupied by Augus­tinian nuns from 1213 onwards. When the sisters appar­ently became too inde­pendent for the abbot’s liking, the Cis­ter­cians took over. Ora et labora: the monks trans­formed the complex into an agri­cul­tural estate. At its peak, around 100 brothers and an equal number of farmers worked the land. They opened a sand­stone quarry, kept live­stock, created fish ponds, built a mill, brewed beer and prayed – until Napoleon brought monastic life to an end and con­verted the complex into a military bar­racks.

In 1814, the neglected estate was granted to Ernst Graf zu Münster in reco­gnition of his diplo­matic achie­ve­ments at the Con­gress of Vienna. At first, however, it was hardly sui­table as a pres­ti­gious resi­dence. It was his son, who had grown up in London, who com­mis­sioned the Hano­verian court architect Georg Ludwig Friedrich Laves to transform the former monastery into a castle in the English Gothic Tudor style between 1846 and 1848. The redesign included an extensive land­scape garden com­plete with a Doric temple and an Egyptian-style pyramid more than ten metres high. The Baroque abbey church became a knights’ hall, where the count already dis­played art­works on the lofty walls, while four slender towers were added as deco­rative accents. During the Second World War, the aris­to­cratic resi­dence served as a military hos­pital, later as a refugee camp and even­tually as a reti­rement home.

Then, in 1975, a man arrived who would leave an inde­lible mark on the estate’s history: Georg Baselitz. Born Hans-Georg Bruno Kern in 1938 in the Saxon village of Deutsch­baselitz, expelled from the East Berlin Academy of Art in 1957 for “socio-poli­tical imma­turity” and having fled to West Germany a year later, he purchased the castle for 300,000 Deutsche Marks. Berlin had become too cramped, too crowded and too noisy for him. In 1963, the public pro­se­cu­tor’s office had con­fis­cated his debut work, declaring The Big Night Down the Drain obscene. Five years later, he began turning his motifs upside down – a radical shift in per­spective that would become his trademark. While many of his peers saw his move to the rural back­waters of Lower Saxony as the end of his career, Baselitz believed the opposite. He was right. Space and solitude proved fertile ground for his work. Today, he is regarded as one of the most important post-war artists.

The fact that the muni­ci­pality of Holle held events in the nearby com­munity centre and that the Laves Cul­tural Trail had been attracting visitors since 1988 – what Baselitz dis­missed as “cheap tourism” – was very much to his dislike. Not in his backyard, and cer­tainly not around his castle. Inside, he worked in studios housed in the knights’ hall and the former castle kitchen. The sketches he scrawled on the walls there have since become relics pro­tected behind glass. Nearby stands his larger-than-life self-por­trait with a cap, alongside the monu­mental yellow bronze head of his wife, Elke. Baselitz carved his sculp­tures from single tree trunks with a buzz saw. When the timber grew too large to fit through the castle’s narrow cor­ridors, he com­mis­sioned the Basel-based archi­tects Wil­fried and Katharina Steib to build a new studio in the park in 1995. Since 2023, it has housed the exhi­bition Baselitz in the Studio.

Yet even here, it is impos­sible to get par­ti­cu­larly close to the elusive figure of Baselitz. Most per­sonal traces of the artist and his family have been removed; tools and paints, books and fur­niture have all left the building. Der­neburg today is about art, not about per­so­nality cult. The studio itself, clad externally in expressive hori­zontal timber boarding and gracefully wea­thered, is a luminous white space within – win­dowless on three sides and lit from above. “I think I’m a citizen. I have a wife, two children, and lead a respec­table life,” Baselitz once said. “But when I paint, I am outside society.” It was not coquetry, but a working prin­ciple. Iso­lation was not an accessory to his art; it was a pre­re­quisite. Had Picasso moved into the castle, pre­sumes Martin Ganzkow, the castle guide, there would no doubt have been plenty of cele­bra­tions and drinking. Baselitz, on the other hand, was best left undis­turbed.

He lived at Der­neburg for about three decades. Winters were cold, there always seemed to be building work underway some­where, and there were endless flights of stairs. By his late sixties, he decided to leave. His plan to establish a museum of his own failed because the federal and state aut­ho­rities either could not or would not support it. Andrew Hall, however, both could and would. The Anglo-Ame­rican hedge fund manager first acquired Baselitz’s coll­ection – some 260 art­works – after he and his wife Christine had often been guests of the family. When Baselitz even­tually asked him, “Andy, why don’t you just buy the castle?”, Hall did exactly that. In 2006, he acquired the entire estate, pyramid and Sleeping Beauty hedges included. Think big, size matters. Baselitz relo­cated to Lake Ammersee, to a resi­dence designed by Herzog & de Meuron, of which no pro­fes­sional pho­to­graphs seem to exist. It was no doubt peaceful there as well. Less draughty, one suspects.

Since 2007, the­r­efore, one of Europe’s largest private museums of con­tem­porary art has been taking shape in Der­neburg, year by year and room by room. The coll­ection now com­prises several thousand works, with num­erous new acqui­si­tions added each year.

Since 2020, the gardens have been main­tained as a bio­di­versity park with wild­flowers. “Many people find art inti­mi­dating, espe­cially con­tem­porary art,” says Andrew Hall. “We make it easy for them.” Visitors come for the cloister and the park, remark on how beau­tiful the place is, and then end up looking at “all this stuff” after all. “That’s how you win them over,” Hall explains.

The nuns and their cells, the monks and their fish ponds, the counts and their gardens, the painter and his studios, the coll­ector and his gal­leries: the spi­ritual, the worldly and the artistic have all found new life in Der­neburg. One wonders what Georg Baselitz would have to say about this. The artist, who died in Salzburg on 30 April 2026 at the age of 88, once remarked: “I don’t want to build a monument to myself. But I’m pleased if someone else does it for me.”

Today, a sculpture of Baselitz wel­comes visitors to the park alongside one of his wife. They are in good company, placed among works by Antony Gormley, Erwin Wurm, Ulrich Rückriem, Julian Schnabel, Richard Long and Tracey Emin. The exhi­bition Con­fe­rence brings tog­ether works by Baselitz and his fellow artists and friends Jörg Immendorff, Markus Lüpertz and A. R. Penck. Since mid-June, works by Daniel Buren, Michael Craig-Martin, Marcia Hafif, Carmen Herrera, Robert Indiana, KAWS, Imi Knoebel, Dóra Maurer and Kenneth Noland have been on display in the castle. Baselitz’s former fortress in what was once a border region of Lower Saxony is ste­adily becoming a place of pil­grimage for art lovers. And no, nobody has yet encoun­tered a grumbling castle ghost wearing a cap and smoking a cigar.

The Kunst­museum Schloss Der­neburg is open from March to October on Saturdays and Sundays from 11 am to 5 pm. The art exhi­bi­tions inside the castle can curr­ently only be visited as part of a guided tour, while the sculpture park, the new studio and the exhi­bition in the former sheep barn are acces­sible inde­pendently.

www.sdmuseum.de

Text: Katharina Matzig

While stu­dying in Braun­schweig, a trip to Der­neburg would have been a short hop for Katharina Matzig. Tra­velling from Munich involved a con­siderably longer journey, but every one of the almost 600 kilo­metres proved wort­hwhile – for the land­scape, the archi­tecture, the history and the art. Sadly, there was no time left to explore the Laves Cul­tural Trail. But that is another story.

Pho­to­graphy: Antony Gormley, SLEEPING FIELD, 2015–2016 [Exhi­bition view, Kunst­museum Schloss Der­neburg]. © Artist, Photo: Heinrich Hecht (Cover photo), Nicole Eisenman, Inhaling Object Symbol Guy, 2024 [Exhi­bition view, Kunst­museum Schloss Der­neburg]. Hall Coll­ection. Hall Art Foun­dation. © Artist, Photo: Fran­ziska Len­ferink (1), Kunst­museum Schloss Der­neburg. © Hall Art Foun­dation, Photo: Fran­ziska Len­ferink (2), Antony Gomley, BLOCK II, 2017 [Exhi­bition view, Kunst­museum Schloss Der­neburg]. Hall Art Foun­dation. © Artist, Photo: Fran­ziska Len­ferink (3), Skulp­tu­renpark, Exhi­bition view, Kunst­museum Schloss Der­neburg. © Hall Art Foun­dation, Photo: Fran­ziska Len­ferink (4–6), Nicole Eisenman, Schloss Lyfe, Exhi­bition view, Kunst­museum Schloss Der­neburg. © Hall Art Foun­dation, Photo: Roman März (7), Georg Baselitz, Exhi­bition view, Kunst­museum Schloss Der­neburg. © Hall Art Foun­dation, Foto: Roman März (8–10), Kon­ferenz: Baselitz, Immendorff, Lüpertz, Penck, Exhi­bition view, Kunst­museum Schloss Der­neburg. © Hall Art Foun­dation, Photo: Roman März (11), Jeppe Hein, ALL AROUND YOU I, 2017 [Exhi­bition view, Kunst­museum Schloss Der­neburg]. Hall Coll­ection. © Artist, Photo: Fran­ziska Len­ferink (12), Erwin Wurm, Big Step, 2023 [Exhi­bition view, Kunst­museum Schloss Der­neburg]. Hall Coll­ection. Hall Art Foun­dation. © Artist, Photo: Fran­ziska Len­ferink (13), Julian Schnabel, Joe, 1983 [Exhi­bition view, Kunst­museum Schloss Der­neburg]. Hall Art Foun­dation. © Artist, Photo: Fran­ziska Len­ferink (14), Dan Graham, Ana­mo­rphic Sur­faces / 2‑way mirror / per­fo­rated steel, 2007–2008 [Exhi­bition view, Kunst­museum Schloss Der­neburg]. Hall Coll­ection. Hall Art Foun­dation. © Artist, Photo: Fran­ziska Len­ferink (15)