ART COLOGNE: the trade show
Today's ART COLOGNE is a fair for classical modernism, post-war art and contemporary art that bring us back to the ' Art Market Cologne ' 67 '. The inventors of this show were the Cologne gallery Hein Stünke and Rudolf Zwirner and their idea was born out of necessity, because even though the development of art and the public interest in art were broken at the end of the immediate postwar period in a phase of enormous dynamism. At that time, the French art with Paris as the capital, dominated the art market, which was replaced soon by the American Arts and New York as a new global art metropolis.
Germany had lost the war, his capital and his former art centers. New center of the German art world was now the Rhineland , which is the industrial engine of Germany and became the hub of the Western European economic and Bonn hosted the new capital. To the date, North Rhine -Westphalia has remained with the neighboring countries of Europe Benelux region with the highest industrial, capital and collectors density, which was a very good basis for the art market at the beginning of the 1960s. With her fair Stünke and Zwirner wanted a new arts center at least ' on time ' establish long term they wanted the new national art production, so the young German artists, promote and place internationally the interest in this new collector audience.
The history of the ART COLOGNE was not only characteristic for significant developments in the history of international art trade but also in the international art history.