This museum explores how history smells across a millennium

What does history smell like? According to a new exhibition in Düsseldorf, the past is not just something you look at — it’s something you inhale. At the Kunstpalast museum in western Germany, visitors are being invited to wander through 37 galleries and quite literally follow their noses through more than a millennium of cultural memory.

German exhibition pairs 1,000 years of fragrance with art

Titled The Secret Power of Scents, the show presents 81 curated fragrances that accompany paintings, religious objects and contemporary artworks, each designed to evoke the mood, emotional register or daily reality of a particular era. The result is an immersive time capsule in scent form — one that asks audiences not just to observe, but to experience.

“This exhibition is an experiment, and an invitation to discover the history of scents with your nose,” said Felix Krämer, the museum’s director general. Unlike a standard gallery experience, the visitor path is layered with diffusers, scent steles and atomisers that release aromas tied closely to the themes on display, whether sacred, intimate or unsettling.

The journey begins in the Middle Ages with religious artefacts, where the perfume of myrrh drifts through a dimly lit room of devotional wood carvings. The resin, traded since antiquity, was used across Christianity, Judaism and Islam as a symbol of purification, prayer and spiritual transcendence. Here, the aroma offers cultural context before a single wall text is read.

But scents can also communicate shock and fear more immediately than language. A gallery exploring the First World War includes a harsh diffusion of sulphur, gunpowder and metallic “blood” notes that has already prompted some visitors to recoil. Curator Robert Müller-Grünow — a leading expert in scent technology — describes it as deliberate emotional truth-telling. “Anyone who has ever lived through conventional war will recognise that smell,” he said. “You can smell brutality in the air.”

The mood shifts sharply in a section devoted to love and seduction. Rubens’ Venus and Adonis (1610) hangs beside a fragrance dominated by roses and civet — an animalic extract once considered irresistibly erotic in European high society. Modern noses, however, have been less enthusiastic: more than a few visitors have wrinkled them in surprise.

Not all scents provoke discomfort. In the gallery recreating the Roaring Twenties, the air carries a warm, smoky optimism — a blend of tobacco, vanilla and leather recalling early iconic perfumes such as Tabac Blond, associated with women’s new social freedoms and modern femininity. The walls feature Gert Wollheim’s Farewell from Düsseldorf (1924), painted at a time when cropped hair, cigarettes and confidence became symbols of liberation.

The exhibition concludes with contemporary art and commercial scent culture, placing works by Andy Warhol and Yves Klein alongside odours designed to mirror modern brand identity. Airline diffusers, luxury retail fragrances and engineered olfactory “signatures” speak to the increasingly strategic role of smell in marketing and emotional perception. One highlight is the molecule Iso E Super, a soft, woody note often used in modern perfumery for its strangely human, “skin-like” warmth — a fragrance the curator describes as “velvety, approachable and disarmingly intimate”.

For visitors, the format has been transformative. “I’ve been to the collection here before, but now it feels completely new,” said attendee Kirsten Gnoth. “The scents anchor the artworks to their time — you don’t just see history, you feel it.”

By placing smell at the centre of interpretation rather than at the margins, the Kunstpalast challenges a long-standing assumption that museums are primarily visual spaces. Instead, it suggests the nose may be one of the most powerful portals to memory — a sensory shortcut to the worlds that came before us.

The Secret Power of Scents runs through 8 March.

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