Culture Index exists to catalog cultural institutions online, and highlight the best practices that inspire us.
Launching with a focus on museums and building from there, we are a resource for both research and discovery. Browse information about online communications, and discover ideas with examples of what’s possible for cultural institutions in the digital space.
As a community project facilitated by Base, we invite you to use and contribute to this growing resource.
Ikonen Museum
The unusual idea for establishing the Icon Museum in a city in the Ruhr region, then dominated by mining, arose during an exhibition of one hundred icons from private West German collections, which was shown at the Municipal Art Gallery in early 1955. At that time, the cult images of the Eastern Church were still virtually unknown, but the exhibition attracted an unexpectedly large number of visitors. When the initiator of the exhibition and then director of the Recklinghausen Art Gallery, Thomas Grochowiak (1914–2012), learned that the two most important German icon collectors, the Eastern European historian Prof. Dr. Martin Winkler (1893–1982) and the dermatologist Dr. Heinrich Wendt (1901–1956), were offering their collections for sale, he had a forward-looking idea: He wanted to acquire the icons for Recklinghausen and establish a museum for Eastern Church art. Just one and a half years after the exhibition, on July 21, 1956, the Icon Museum was opened in the former tower school, a building erected in 1795 opposite the provost church of St. Peter, in the heart of Recklinghausen's old town.
