COLOGNE.- The Museum Ludwig mourns the loss of its former director Marc Scheps (1932–2026). He died on March 4 in Tel Aviv at the age of 94.

Marc Scheps was director of the Museum Ludwig from 1991 to 1997.

In 1979, he had already presented the Ludwig Collection under the title “Art of the Sixties: Europe and USA, from the Collection of the Ludwig Museum Cologne” at the Tel Aviv Museum, where he was director at the time. Peter and Irene Ludwig attended the opening, and a friendship based on a passion for art developed. In 1991, he was appointed director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. This was a big step for Scheps, a Jewish art historian born in Basel. He shared Peter Ludwig's “world art” philosophy and significantly developed the museum with an international and global perspective. Numerous works by artists from Latin America, China, and Africa were exhibited and acquired for the collection.

Together with the current director of the Museum Ludwig, Yilmaz Dziewior, and Barbara Thiemann, Scheps curated the exhibition “Art Worlds in Dialogue: From Gaugin to the Global Present,” which opened in 2000. At that time, Scheps was already director of the Peter and Irene Ludwig Foundation.

“It was a great collaboration with Marc Scheps, which had a profound impact on me and set the course for the museum's current orientation with the expansion of the collection to include non-European positions, for which I am now responsible,” said Yilmaz Dziewior, director of the Museum Ludwig. “Marc Scheps' legacy will live on in Cologne. Our thoughts are with his family at this time!”