Museum Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart

You're standing at the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, the big art museum of the German state of Baden-Württemberg. What you're really looking at is two buildings working as one museum. The older part, the Alte Staatsgalerie, is a crisp classicist building from 1843. It once housed the Royal Art School too. It was badly damaged in the Second World War, rebuilt in the years right after, and reopened in 1958. Now look at its neighbour. That's the Neue Staatsgalerie, designed by architect James Stirling and opened on 9 March 1984. Notice how warm the stone looks? That's travertine and sandstone, shaped in classical forms. But running right through it you'll see steel structures in loud colours, and lots of glass. Formal and playful at the same time. Not everyone liked it, and the design caused quite a stir. Still, it's often called the very embodiment of postmodern architecture. Look at the layout as well. Stirling borrowed from Schinkel's Altes Museum: a series of galleries wrapped around three sides of a central rotunda. Except here nothing is neatly symmetrical. Things are tilted, and the entrance sits at an angle. This building is what turned a rather provincial gallery into one of Europe's leading museums. So what's inside? Art from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. The old building has German masters like Lucas Cranach the Elder and Hans Holbein the Elder, Italian and Dutch paintings, and work from Romanticism and Impressionism. Look out for a pair of marriage portraits by Frans Hals. The new building is all about modern art, with Picasso, Miró, Klee, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Dalí and Joseph Beuys. Barnett Newman's Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue II hangs here too. And there's a story worth knowing: in 2013 the museum returned a fifteenth-century Virgin and Child to the estate of Max Stern, a Jewish art dealer who had fled the Nazis. Thinking of going in? Check for temporary exhibitions and guided tours. There are even tours made especially for kids.