Neue Pinakothek. The Neue Pinakothek is an art museum in Munich, Germany. Its focus is European Art of the 18th and 19th century and is one of the most important museums of art of the nineteenth century in the world. Together with the Alte Pinakothek and the Pinakothek der Moderne it is part of Munich's Kunstareal. The museum was founded by the former King Ludwig I of Bavaria in 1853. The original building constructed by Friedrich von Gärtner and August von Voit was destroyed during World War II. The ruin of the Neue Pinakothek was demolished in 1949. Designed by architect Alexander Freiherr von Branca the new postmodern building with features such as arched windows, keystones, bay windows and stairways, opened in 1981. It combines a concrete construction with a stone facade design. Ludwig began to collect contemporary art already as crown prince in 1809 and his collection has been steadily enlarged. When the museum was founded, the separation to the old masters in the Alte Pinakothek was fixed with the period shortly before the turn of the 19th century, which has become a prototype for many galleries. Owing to the personal preference of Ludwig I there was initially a strong focus on paintings of German Romanticism and the Munich School. Also dynastic considerations played a role as Greece had become a secundogeniture of Bavaria in 1832. In 1834 Carl Rottmann travelled to Greece to prepare for a commission from Ludwig for a cycle of great Greek landscapes which was installed in the Neue Pinakothek, where the paintings were given their own hall. The so-called Tschudi Contribution between 1905 and 1914 brought the Pinokathek an extraordinary collection of masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Hugo von Tschudi was dismissed by Kaiser Wilhelm as a penalty for his bringing Gauguin's The Birth of Christ into the National Gallery in Berlin. He went on to become the director of the Pinokathek. As general director of the State Collections, Tschudi acquired 44 paintings, nine sculptures and 22 drawings, mostly from emerging French artists. Since public funds could not be used to purchase these works, Tschudi's associates raised the money from private contributions after his death in 1911. The delimitation to the modern painters displayed in the Pinakothek der Moderne was later fixed by taking the restart of Henri Matisse and the Expressionists into account. Consequentially a painting of Matisse acquired by the Tschudi Contribution is now displayed in the Pinakothek der Moderne. In 1915, the Neue Pinakothek became the property of the Bavarian state. A self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh was confiscated in 1938 by the Nazi regime as degenerate art and sold one year later. The museum is under supervision of the Bavarian State Painting Collections which houses an expanded collection of more than 3.000 European paintings from classicism to art nouveau. About 400 paintings and 50 sculptures of these are exhibited in the New Pinakothek. International paintings of the second half of the 18th century:. Among others the gallery exhibits works of Francisco de Goya, Jacques-Louis David, Johann Friedrich August Tischbein and Anton Graff.