How one German museum is facing up to its colonial art

The Kunsthalle Bremen is the first museum in Germany and second in Europe after the Tate Britain, to review its collection through a postcolonial lens. Visitors can view a wide range of works in the collection on display from August 5 to November 19.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Hanseatic port city of Bremen was a global hub of commercial activity and international trade. It was also a point of departure for Germany's colonial expansion and exploitation, as well as the port from which millions of immigrants left for the New World in the 19th century.

The Kunsthalle collection includes magnificent woodcarvings from Japan, most of them from the Edo period (1603-1868). Towards the end of that era, in 1853, the US navy forced Japan to open to international trade. In 1905, Heinrich Wiegand, the director of the German shipping company Norddeutscher Lloyd, financed a trip to Japan through which most of the museum's masterpieces were acquired.

The Norddeutscher Lloyd ship took German artists such as Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein to islands in the Pacific Ocean shortly before the start of World War I. In addition to artistic passengers, the ship also transported woodcarvings from Japan and art from South America, among other valuable items. Works from these countries are on display in the exhibition.

German-Danish artist Emil Nolde was one of many modernist painters inspired by sculptures from Africa and the Pacific. However, such works were often done with little understanding of the cultural context of the pieces and without crediting the original artists.

This popular painting from the early 20th century is a reminder of the 19th-century trade relations between merchants in Bremen, the Netherlands and Great Britain, which had a considerable number of colonies. The social interactions between these groups were centered around colonial goods, some of which were depicted by artists like Modersohn-Becker.

Renowned for his works depicting Tahitian women, Paul Gauguin spent many years at the end of the 19th century traveling to French colonies. The art inspired by these trips is known as primitivist. It is an ambiguous concept in postcolonial theory: Even though the art celebrated "unspoiled" humanity, it is also a denigrating label maintaining that these cultures hadn't reached Western standards.

Sculptures like this one from Nigeria show how European colonial powers were depicted by artists in the colonies. Works borrowed from the Hamburg Museum of Ethnology, like this one, are on display as part of "The Blind Spot" exhibition and provide insight into this particular time in history.

Scottish artist Hew Locke focuses on globalization and colonialism in his work. His latest, "Cui Bono," was inspired by the historic ships of Hanseatic merchants. According to Locke, "The search for wealth, violent conflict and the desire for security are factors that have affected the global movements of people for centuries."