Permanent

Mobility

Cars. Bicycles. Motorbikes

The first room of Die Neue Sammlung we enter from the Rotunda is dedicated to transport and mobility. Strikingly, it is a two-story structure with large windows creating a link to the Kunstareal art district, the museum quarter in central Munich. Since the collection focuses on the 20th and 21st centuries, the first room of this permanent exhibition revolves around one of the most important changes in the last century: the individual mobility brought about by technical progress, and which nowadays is still regarded as an important criterion for personal freedom.

In the 19th century growing passenger transport was on trains, ships and airships.
This began to spread in the 20th century to smaller means of transport: the motorised two-wheeler and the motorised carriage, the automobile. The cars, motorcycles and bicycles on display show that in addition to meeting technical requirements such as air displacement – in other words aerodynamics – and weight reduction, their aesthetics became increasingly important. This explains, for example, why sculptors were chosen to develop car bodies.