20 October 2006

Apres le deluge, moi (Munich roundup)

I enjoyed my three and a half days (too brief) in Munich though I didn't see it at its best (nor, I suppose, did it see me at my best) -- I was already worn out from Bayreuth and the record-breaking cold and incessant rain didn't help. I like to walk around in strange cities, but not so much in the rain and wind. My last afternoon there it finally cleared up. It's amazing how much more you can see when an umbrella isn't blocking your view. And by then I had figured out roughly where all the circular streets were going, and had adjusted to the difference between small-town Bayreuth, where it's easier to strike up a conversation because everyone has a ready subject in the Wagner festival, and big-city Munich, where the usual indifference, semi-friendly or not, prevails. I had also learned to avoid the outside of the sidewalks, which are given over to bicyclists, who are marginally more considerate than their American cousins but still hazardous to pedestrians.

My first full day in Munich I spent at the Alte Pinakothek, which has art from the middle ages through the eighteenth century. Though much smaller than I thought it would be (I was expecting something along the lines of the Metropolitan or the National Gallery) it's chockful of rich chocolatey Old Master goodness. They have two Grunewalds, which I believe is one more than in the entire United States. They have a plenitude of Rubens; my favorite was the martyrdom of St. Lawrence, in which he gives the saint Judas's traditional red hair, the better to show off fabulous orange, yellow, and reddish lights and highlights from the fire under the grill (Lawrence is the one who was barbecued to his glorious death). Even the subtleties of 21st century color printing can't quite reproduce the light he captured. I teeter-totter between buying inadequate copies of such works or just relying on memory. Another favorite of mine, Memling's Seven Joys of the Virgin, was only available in tiny forms that shrank the crowded delightful canvas down into illegibility. Most of the stuff I like in museums is not what is featured in their gift shops in poster, postcard, or mug form: instead we get yet more versions of whatever Impressionists they happen to own (the Impressionists are the Boheme of the museum world: yes, I suppose it's all lovely, but enough already). In fact I bought a lot of postcards but not much else in Munich; I thought there would be World Cup merchandise all over, but if there was it was hidden from me with tasteful discretion. And at the airport I was unable to find a suitable addition to my collection of Inappropriate Shotglasses: Hummel, you let me down.

My second day there I spent at the Neue Pinakothek, which takes up where the Alte leaves off and goes up to the post-Impressionists. For this museum I used the audio guide, which turned out to be surprisingly informative. (I especially love it when museums get in little digs about their superiority: "Although X painted several versions of the sunflowers/Madonna and Child/mountain scene, the version in [our city] is generally considered [I love that they don't say by whom] to be the original/from the master's own hand/better than the others.") This museum featured more local heroes than the Alte, what with all the German classicists and the Nazarenes. Hans von Marees, who came later in the century, painted shadowy symbolist canvases that were new and very appealing to me.

My third day I decided to forego the contemporary art museum, third in the triumvirate, since there is a certain international flavor to all modern art museums, with their Twomblys and their Keifers and their Warhols, and go for the Munich-specific Residenz, which was the royal residence of the rulers of Bavaria from medieval times down to, as they note with no further explanation, 1918. Walking through the Residenz is like walking through a survey of the major European artistic styles from the classics-venerating, grotteschi-decorated Renaissance to austere but sumptuous neo-classicism. There is an outdoor grotto dating from Shakespeare's time with mermaids and sea creatures formed of pebbles and sea shells, and a royal suite of rooms charmingly decorated with scenes from contemporary (18th century contemporary) German poets, leading to a throne room whose walls are covered with gold leaf (I took a close look and you can see the sheets delicately overlapping each other -- I wish the sun had been out when I was in that room).

By the time I left the Residenz the sun had finally come out and I noticed it glinting on golden highlights throughout the city: jewelry in the shop windows, clocks in the towers, crosses on the churches. I never even made it to the English Garden but the city was still beautifully green with trees and red and pink with geraniums and begonias. It's a remarkably clean city -- it may smell like an ashtray, but it doesn't look like one; I don't know where all the butts and wrappers were going, but they weren't being tossed in the street as in American cities. I walked around the formal garden behind the Residenz and in the round temple of Diana in the middle of the former royal gardens I came across another klezmer band, as I had on my first full day in Bayreuth. The walls inside the temple are decorated with dolphins made out of shells (as in the grotto inside the Residenz) shooting water into the small, shell-shaped fonts beneath them. Several old couples were dancing to the klezmer band, including two old women wearing bright red sweatshirts with Austria! in yellow script across the front. Little children and big dogs were running in and out of Diana's Temple. The leader of the band, a small violinist with permanently bugging eyes and thin short hair, tossed his scarf over his shoulders and kept the band playing until the sun started to get low in the sky, and then he packed up and went home.

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