Die beste Bildung

I wrote this entry on my way from Nuremberg to Berlin (i.e. in the afternoon of 29 June), but because the wireless internet connection at my hostel wasn’t working, I was unable to post the following 5 entries until now. Note that none of the photos in this entry are mine.

After visiting the three Pinakotheks, I thought I had seen all the great art museums in Munich (Haus der Kunst was closed during my time in Munich, and I am not counting the Glyptothek because neither ancient western civilization nor the Renaissance fascinates me very much). But no – there was still one more to visit, that being the colourful Museum Brandhorst adjacent to the Pinakothek der Moderne, which opened in May this year and houses a good private collection of 20^th century art. Sarah G. and Keith, who had both been to the museum before I did, had a lot of praise for it. So when Professor Jennings sent out an email saying that he would be visiting Brandhorst last Wednesday and mentioned that the Princeton-in-Munich program would be paying for admission, I was eager to join.

Since our final test was not far away and our class had to read 23 pages of Die Verwandlung for Thursday’s precept, nobody else came. But I honestly didn’t mind. I enjoyed listening to Jennings’ narration while visiting the Martin-Gropius Bau in Berlin with him (blog entry here), so I was glad to be doing something similar again. And this time, since I had the professor to myself, I could theoretically ask as many questions as I wanted to.

The museum was bigger than I expected it to be (Keith described it as very small, but then he visited on the €1 admission day, on which it was exceptionally crowded), but still not big enough to store the amount of art that it had. Art, after all, cannot be displayed like items in a supermarket. The viewer needs space to observe it from different angles without obstruction, to walk around and ponder, to explore how art alters its surroundings, in order for the art to have its full effect. In Jennings more metaphorical words, art needs room to breathe. So one of the rooms which had a Joseph Beuys juxtaposed with a bunch of minimalist works, and another one which was overstuffed with Andy Warhol, didn’t please me so much.

Nevertheless, there were a lot of good things about the museum. Right at the entrance, for example, was a sculpture by John Chamberlain which consisted of parts taken from destroyed cars in a junkyard. I was not that much of a fan, but I must admit that it showed how the most unlikely objects can be of great aesthetic value.

Four works were of particular interest to me. The first one was by Sigmar Polke, a member of the Dusseldorf Three, who are arguably the most famous post-WWII German artists. Titled Die Drei Lügen der Malerei (The three lies of the art studio), it consisted of a band of colourful handprints, a segmented tree without leaves, and a grey mountain with a missing horizontal strip in the middle. The fact that the artist considered traditional beliefs in art to be lies says a lot about the passion for innovation and desire for breakthrough in post-war art, and I think that this work more than any other expresses the shift in attitudes very well.

Left: Exterior of the museum; Right: Sigmar Polke’s Die Drei Lügen der Malerei

The second one was Lepanto, a set of 12 paintings by the American artist Cy Twombly. Almost the entire top floor of the museum was occupied by Twombly’s works, some of which got rather repetitive. There was, for example, a tennis-court sized room dedicated to paintings of roses – same contours and patterns for each painting, just different colours. Lepanto, however, was enormously fascinating. It showed the victory of the Holy League as it fought the Turkish fleet in a sea battle at the Gulf of Patras in 1571, which was a decisive point in the Christian struggle against the Ottoman Empire. Military triumph was an extremely popular in pre-modern art such as what is seen in the Alte Pinakothek, but modern day artists generally prefer to express anti-war sentiment and reveal the ugliness of military conflict through their work (Picasso’s Guernica, for example, expresses grief at the great suffering caused by the Spanish Civil War). Taboo as though it may be to glorify war, the choice of theme here was oddly refreshing. There were magnificent depictions of grand fleets sailing in the gulf, and roaring fire annihilating the enemy, but somehow these were set on a tranquil light blue background reminiscent of a pond in a Claude Monet painting, allowing for a lot of freedom in interpretation.

Part of Cy Twombly’s Lepanto

The third one was a Damien Hirst, one of the most famous and controversial modern-day artists. I was absolutely baffled when I read about one of his works, which was an entire zebra preserved with formaldehyde in a rectangular container, going for a world-record shattering price at an auction. This one in Brandhorst was a medicine cabinet, around five metres wide, with a mirror frame and back, as well as narrowly spaced transparent partitions. Laid on the partitions were medical pills of all origins, purposes, colours, shapes and sizes, and as absurd as this sounds, it looked fantastic. One would not be able to fully understand it, however, without knowing the title: In this terrible moment we are victims clinging hopelessly to an environment that refuses to recognize the soul. It can in fact be taken as social commentary – the cabinet of pills, a very artificial means of healing inevitably intertwined with mass production, dependence on substance, and consumerism, is indeed a reflection of the contemporary world. The inability of each pill, despite its unique properties, to distinguish itself from the rest, is compared to the desire of the modern individual to preserve his own identity and stand out in society, a desire unfulfilled due to proliferating tendency for generalization. One can only appreciate the diversity of these pills – as well as the diversity of our world – by avoiding crude generalizations and giving detail the attention it deserves. After viewing this work, I decided that I would never look at a Damien Hirst in the same dismissive manner again.

Damien Hirst’s In this terrible moment we are victims clinging hopelessly
to an environment that refuses to recognize the soul

The final one was a documentary by Anri Sala. Back in the Cold War Days, his mother was a youth leader in a communist movement, and the artist discovered a few tapes which showed her giving an interview – and speaking in the bureaucratic, aggressive and almost undecipherable way many communists did at the time. The tape did not have any sound, so the artist took it to a school for the dumb and deaf, where he had the students read her lips in the video in order to make out what she said. To see how the mother, now a typical member of upper-class capitalist society, at first adamantly deny her involvement in communism, later on in great embarrassment admitting her past, and trying (largely in vain) to justify her actions reminded me of how difficult yet necessary it is for people to come to terms with their own histories. I am currently reading Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser, which addresses a similar topic, and I will try to post some thoughts when I’m done.

I know some of my readers come to this blog just for the sake of my descriptions of food, so I’ll end by saying that after visiting the exhibits, Jennings and I went to the museum café, where we met Sarah. She had been so impressed by the cake at this museum on her visit that she decided to come back just to eat. I ordered a Kirchetorte (cherry cake), and though I am not very fond of cherries, I am salivating as I now recall its taste. And the Apfelschorle, produced by Perger, was the best I have drunk in Germany so far. I will definitely be looking for more Perger products as I travel to Berlin, Bremen and Hamburg.