Adolf Fischer in the room for Buddhist art in the newly opened Museum of East Asian Art in 1913, Museum of East Asian Art Cologne © RBA
Adolf Fischer beside a Chinese tomb guardian of the Tang dynasty (618-907), around 1913, Museum of East Asian Art Cologne © RBA

On the night between September 12 and 13, 2023, unknown persons broke into the Museum for East Asian Art Cologne (MOK) and stole nine Chinese porcelain objects. Security personnel on site remained uninjured and immediately notified the police. The museum director and further museum staff were able to examine the damage in situ on the same night. All of the stolen pieces (listed in a PDF linked below), dating from the 16th to 19th centuries, were produced in imperial context.

The staff members of the Museum for East Asian Art are shocked and deeply consternated by the burglary. More than a financial and material damage, the museum mourns a loss of intangible nature: the large majority of the stolen objects belonged to MOK’s initial collection holdings, which the museum founders Adolf and Frieda Fischer acquired for the institution in China between 1906 and 1911, documenting the acquisitions in detail in their purchase diary. Among the stolen objects, further, was a Ming-dynasty yellow-glazed dish, which only recently entered the museum collection as a gift donated by the Circle of Friends of the Museum for East Asian Art in 2015. The imperial porcelains, which saw a technical and stylistic heyday during the corresponding eras of their manufacture, were generally produced in series; today, individual pieces are often only rarely seen. The nine pieces stolen from the MOK possess an iconic quality, each one in its own way; their unique collection history is fundamentally coalesced with the museum’s identity. Art- and culture-historically, they are of inestimable value.

The crime incident is preceded this year by a burglary with failed attempt at theft in January, and an attempted burglary in June. Following the January event, security precautions at the MOK were massively heightened: architectonically, with regard to security systems, and in terms of security personnel. The break-in on September 13 was carried out with great effort and violence. The thereupon implemented security measures were decided in close consultation with the museum’s security advisor, local criminal police, and Department for Art and Culture of the City of Cologne. While the investigation is underway, the museum is collaborating with the authorities involved to assess how security measures at the MOK can be further expanded.

The German Federal Criminal Police Office is involved in the current investigation; its case has been registered at Interpol. The international dimension of the investigation corresponds to the cultural significance and financial value of the stolen property. The objects are very well documented and therefore clearly identifiable, and so it is hoped that they will eventually find their way back into the museum collection. The Museum for East Asian Art Cologne, which sees itself under new directorship as of July 2023, seeks to make meaningful and sustainable use of the unfortunate incident, for itself and for the museum world. Addressing the art theft publicly, whether in the form of a designated separate space on the museum website or a specially dedicated area in the exhibition halls, plays an important role in initially dealing with the loss, in order to draw attention to and raise awareness for the targeted, professionalized criminal activities that have become manifest throughout Europe in recent years through museum burglaries in many places. In the long run, the grave significance of systematic art theft as a currently widespread phenomenon must be made more visible: the current burglary at the Museum for East Asian Art serves as a wake-up call, not only in Cologne, but also countrywide and worldwide.

For strategical reasons concerning the investigation, further information on the burglary cannot be published at this time.

For insurance-related reasons, further information on the value of the stolen collection items cannot be provided at this time.

Shao-Lan Hertel

Scientific Director
Museum for East Asian Art Cologne
September 22, 2023

List of stolen objects (pdf)

Museum | History

History and mission of the museum

Adolf Fischer (1856–1914) and his wife Frieda (1874–1945) intended that the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne, which was founded in 1909 and opened in 1913, should present East Asian art of all genres and periods. They were of the strong conviction that there was ONE world art that transcended all geographical and cultural differences, an art in which European and East Asian works of the highest calibre in each region were in mutual correspondence.

History

Adolf Fischer argued, for example, that visitors to the Hansaring should have the opportunity to make their own comparisons by seeing Christian art in the Schnütgen Museum and then Buddhist art in the neighbouring Museum of East Asian Art, before moving on to the craft collections in what was then the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe (Museum of Art and Craft) to view the relevant products from East Asia. At the beginning of the twentieth century, this position, postulating the equivalence of Christian and Buddhist, European and East Asian art, was revolutionary, and cannot be taken for granted even today.

Weimar Republic, National Socialism, war damage

Adolf Fischer died a few months after the opening of the museum in October 1913. Cologne City Council set up a tomb of honour for him in Melaten cemetery, designed by the sculptor Georg Grasegger (1873-1927).

Under the terms of the Foundation Agreement, Frieda Fischer succeeded her husband and guided the museum through the difficult period of the First World War and Weimar Republic. In 1921 she married the jurist Professor Alfred Ludwig Wieruszowski (1857–1945), but in 1937, in contravention of all the financial and implied moral provisions of the original Foundation Agreement, she was driven out of office on account of his Jewish ancestry. The directorship of the museum passed to the director of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe; not until 1951 did the Museum of East Asian Art get a director of its own with the relevant specialist competence once more, in the person of Professor Werner Speiser. During the period of Nazi persecution Frieda Fischer-Wieruszowski and her husband were deprived of all civil rights. Frieda Fischer’s books, published in 1938 and 1942, about her travels with Adolf to Japan and China to purchase artworks evidently helped to prevent their deportation to a concentration camp. She died in Berlin a few months after her husband, totally impoverished. At her family’s request, her mortal remains were interred in 1952 by the side of Adolf Fischer at Melaten.

The museum building was destroyed in an air raid in 1944. Most of the holdings were stored in salt mines in southern Germany and survived the war. Those objects, most of them small, which had been deposited in a bunker in Cologne, were lost to thieves.

THEFT AT THE MUSEUM FOR EAST ASIAN ART COLOGNE
ON SEPTEMBER 13, 2023

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

On the night between September 12 and 13, 2023, unknown persons broke into the Museum for East Asian Art Cologne (MOK) and stole nine Chinese porcelain objects. Security personnel on site remained uninjured and immediately notified the police. The museum director and further museum staff were able to examine the damage in situ on the same night. All of the stolen pieces (listed in a PDF linked below), dating from the 16th to 19th centuries, were produced in imperial context.

The staff members of the Museum for East Asian Art are shocked and deeply consternated by the burglary. More than a financial and material damage, the museum mourns a loss of intangible nature: the large majority of the stolen objects belonged to MOK’s initial collection holdings, which the museum founders Adolf and Frieda Fischer acquired for the institution in China between 1906 and 1911, documenting the acquisitions in detail in their purchase diary. Among the stolen objects, further, was a Ming-dynasty yellow-glazed dish, which only recently entered the museum collection as a gift donated by the Circle of Friends of the Museum for East Asian Art in 2015. The imperial porcelains, which saw a technical and stylistic heyday during the corresponding eras of their manufacture, were generally produced in series; today, individual pieces are often only rarely seen. The nine pieces stolen from the MOK possess an iconic quality, each one in its own way; their unique collection history is fundamentally coalesced with the museum’s identity. Art- and culture-historically, they are of inestimable value.

The crime incident is preceded this year by a burglary with failed attempt at theft in January, and an attempted burglary in June. Following the January event, security precautions at the MOK were massively heightened: architectonically, with regard to security systems, and in terms of security personnel. The break-in on September 13 was carried out with great effort and violence. The thereupon implemented security measures were decided in close consultation with the museum’s security advisor, local criminal police, and Department for Art and Culture of the City of Cologne. While the investigation is underway, the museum is collaborating with the authorities involved to assess how security measures at the MOK can be further expanded.

The German Federal Criminal Police Office is involved in the current investigation; its case has been registered at Interpol. The international dimension of the investigation corresponds to the cultural significance and financial value of the stolen property. The objects are very well documented and therefore clearly identifiable, and so it is hoped that they will eventually find their way back into the museum collection. The Museum for East Asian Art Cologne, which sees itself under new directorship as of July 2023, seeks to make meaningful and sustainable use of the unfortunate incident, for itself and for the museum world. Addressing the art theft publicly, whether in the form of a designated separate space on the museum website or a specially dedicated area in the exhibition halls, plays an important role in initially dealing with the loss, in order to draw attention to and raise awareness for the targeted, professionalized criminal activities that have become manifest throughout Europe in recent years through museum burglaries in many places. In the long run, the grave significance of systematic art theft as a currently widespread phenomenon must be made more visible: the current burglary at the Museum for East Asian Art serves as a wake-up call, not only in Cologne, but also countrywide and worldwide.

For strategical reasons concerning the investigation, further information on the burglary cannot be published at this time.

For insurance-related reasons, further information on the value of the stolen collection items cannot be provided at this time.

Shao-Lan Hertel

Scientific Director
Museum for East Asian Art Cologne
September 22, 2023

List of stolen objects (pdf)

Museum

Opening times

Tuesday to Sunday
11am – 5pm
Every first Thursday in the month
11am – 10pm (except October 3, 2024)

The museum is closed due to the Cologne Marathon on 6 October 2024.

Closed Mondays; open on All Saints' Day
Museum is closed on December 24th, Christmas Day (25 Dec), New Year's Eve (31 Dec) and New Year's Day (1 Jan). Museum is opend on Easter Monday, Whit Monday, German Unity Day and December 26.

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Admission prices

€ 9,50 / € 5,50

Due to the construction of new exhibitions, the admission price is reduced until 29 November: € 7,50 / € 4,50

KölnTag on the first Thursday of the month (except public holidays): free admission to the Museum for all Cologne residents.

more

How to get here

Public transport: Tram routes 1 and 7 and bus route 142, alight at ‘Universitätsstrasse’
There is a car park at the museum
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Barrier-free

The museum is barrier-free. Disabled toilet available.
more




Museum für
Ostasiatische Kunst Köln
Universitätsstrasse 100
D 50674 Köln
Ticket office +49.221.221-28617
mok@museenkoeln.de
Legal notice

Opening times

Tuesday to Sunday
11am – 5pm
Every first Thursday in the month
11am – 10pm 

Closed Mondays; open on All Saints' Day
Museum is closed on December 24th, Christmas Day (25 Dec), New Year's Eve (31 Dec) and New Year's Day (1 Jan). Museum is opend on Easter Monday, Whit Monday, German Unity Day and December 26.
more

Admission prices

€ 7,50 /reduced € 4,50

from 20 June
€ 9,50 /reduced € 5,50

KölnTag on the first Thursday of the month (except public holidays): free admission to the Museum for all Cologne residents.
more

How to get here

Public transport: Tram routes 1 and 7 and bus route 142, alight at ‘Universitätsstrasse’
There is a car park at the museum
more

Barrier-free

The museum is barrier-free. Disabled toilet available.
more




Museum für
Ostasiatische Kunst Köln
Universitätsstrasse 100
D 50674 Köln
Ticket office +49.221.221-28617
mok@museenkoeln.de
Legal notice