The history of 20th-century music and art holds out few paragons more important than Kraftwerk, the electronic pop group founded in Germany in the 1970s by Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter. Creative repurposing of rigid technologies, forging new sounds that would insinuate themselves into countless forms of music, positing useful ways of thinking about human/non-human divides—all of these were part of the total work of art that was Kraftwerk, which started as a radical postwar German enterprise and grew into an international pop-culture phenomenon.
While Kraftwerk continues to tour and play innovatory multimedia shows under Hütter’s direction, Schneider died in 2020 at the age of 73. Now, some of his various tools of art are being put up for auction.
Organized by Julien’s Auctions and scheduled for November 19 at the Musicians Hall of Fame & Museum in Nashville (and open for online bidding now), the Florian Schneider Collection Auction features musical equipment including synthesizers, vocoders, and flutes as well as other offerings like a 1964 Volkswagen van and a road bike ridden by Schneider in the video for the Kraftwerk song “Tour de France.”
Highlights include an EMS Synthi AKS suitcase synthesizer (estimated to sell for $15,000–$20,000) said to be the first synth acquired by Kraftwerk in the early ’70s—and also used on their 1974 album Autobahn. A ’60s-era flute (est. $8,000–$10,000) represents Schneider’s time with the proto-Kraftwerk band The Organisation and the formative years of Kraftwerk itself, when he would process the flute’s sounds electronically in search of new timbres and tones. Then there’s the VW van (est. $15,000–$20,000), which was part of a fire department’s fleet—as evidenced by a telephone on the dashboard and a rear-facing seat in the back.
Florian Schneider’s 1964 Volkswagen van.
Ben Broomfield
While Kraftwerk’s influence in music is legion, the group has garnered attention in the art world as well—including a memorable retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art curated by Klaus Biesenbach in 2012 that involved eight nights of concerts (one for each of the group’s main albums) as well as an exhibition of related materials at MoMA PS1. “They did not invent the robots for no reason,” Biesenbach said at the time. “They are artists who take themselves away to replace themselves.”
He continued: “The art of Kraftwerk is about the tension between the human condition and technology. It’s about how human life is changed by machines.”
