L’art contemporain à la bibliothèque du Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte à Munich

The library of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (ZI) in Munich is now a good place to study twentieth- and twenty-first century art, thanks to an extension of its range of acquisitions. We owe this development in particular to the patronage of His Royal Highness, Duke Franz of Bavaria, who was at the origin of the initiatives grouped under the name Studienzentrum zur Moderne. These activities partly overlap with our traditional area of specialization – French art – for example in the case of a new collection of zines and alternative comic strips. The recent inauguration of a new space came at a propitious moment to show the increased importance of contemporary art at the ZI: a reading room with open-access shelves where artists’ monographs and photographic literature are displayed. The ZI Library contains more than 580,000 volumes, of which nearly 500,000 are systematically on open access, and one-fifth are monographs on artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This type of publications seems to dominate the publishing industry. Given the presentation of this type of work, modern and contemporary art thus offer a good subject for exploring possible improvements of current library spaces.