The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Why Munich’s art credentials are even better than its beer
As a new exhibition opens at Tate Modern, Nick Trend celebrates the Bavarian city where Kandinsky and his circle made their mark
Beer swilling, glass-clinking, lederhosen and dirndls. Few cities have been saddled with such a one-dimensional image – at least from a tourism point of view – as Munich. True, the arrival of Harry Kane has injected a reminder of its footballing heritage and – for petrol heads – the BMW museum on the ring road remains a site of pilgrimage. But the October beer festival is what gets all the attention.
It’s a shame. Thanks to its long history at the crossroads of Europe, Munich’s cultural credentials go far broader and deeper than this. Not only does it have a world-class collection of medieval, Renaissance and Baroque art amassed by a succession of rulers, but it was also a critical epicentre of modern art – as a new exhibition at Tate Modern in London shows.
In the years before the First World War, the leafy Bohemian quarter of Schwabing was the intellectual and creative crucible of German Expressionism and some of Europe’s earliest experiments in abstract painting. A small côterie of artists – including Gabriele Münter, Franz Marc, August Macke, Paul Klee and the Russian emigrés Wassily Kandinsky, Marianne von Werefkin and Alexej von Jawlensky – formed the Blue Rider movement. (It is an odd name I know, Kandinsky’s explanation being that it combined his own love of riding, Marc’s love of horses and their shared affinity with the colour blue.)
The group held two seminal exhibitions, in 1911 and 1912, which were characterised by haunting, dreamlike imagery and rich, other-worldly colours. They tended to use naive folk art as a frame of reference rather than the academic tradition. Most significantly, perhaps, both Klee and Kandinsky also experimented with abstraction – they were among the first artists for hundreds of years to shun representative art.
Like their contemporaries in London, the Bloomsbury Group, they also liked to get out of the city and have fun in the countryside. Their favourite haunt was the Bavarian lake district in the foothills of the Alps. Münter built a house in one of the prettiest towns – Murnau, on the edge of the Staffelsee. Her lover, Kandinsky, moved in and, until the First World War intervened, they would host their friends from Munich, painting, swimming and intellectualising under the Alpine sun.
It turned out to be a brief, ill-fated moment. Both Macke and Marc were killed in the First World War while Kandinsky and Münter fled the country. But much of the remarkable art they produced is still in Munich and – much less well-known to British tourists – in a series of atmospheric museums in the most scenic part of the Bavarian lake district. Here is how to explore the city and its artistic hinterland.
The Lenbachhaus Museum
This wonderful late 19th-century villa was built by the painter Franz von Lenbach. It became a museum and, in 2009, an extension by Norman Foster was added to house what is now the most important of all the Blue Rider collections, including many works by Kandinsky and Klee as well as Münter’s own donation (lenbachhaus.de).
Schwabing District
Once the epitome of Bohemian shabby chic, this leafy suburb of Munich was heavily damaged during the war and then gentrified in recent years. But you can still sense something of the atmosphere of a century and more ago. The English Gardens, meanwhile, remain Munich’s most beautiful public park.
Pinakothek der Moderne contains a wide-ranging overview of modern art, focusing on paintings and sculpture from 1900 to the present day, including some of the most important works by the Blue Rider painters (pinakothekder-moderne.de).
Murnau and the Bavarian lake district
Murnau is a small town just an hour from Munich by train, idyllically set by the Staffelsee lake, with the Bavarian Alps beyond. In the early 20th century it was developed as a chi-chi summer resort for the city’s middle classes and it soon became a favourite with artists too. Münter and Kandinsky came here to paint in the summer of 1908, staying at the Griesbräu hotel (griesbraeu.de) – you can still book room 12, from where Kandinsky painted the view down the main street (now in the Lenbachhaus).
The Münter House
Gabriele Münter built this little house on the edge of the town in 1909, and she and Kandinsky spent much of their time here, decorating the walls and furniture and working on the garden and potager. There was no formal artists’ studio, but they would paint out of doors in good weather or capture the views from the windows. This was the main social hub for the Blue Rider group outside
Munich and is now a museum with a collection of paintings by Münter and a few other treasures such as Kandinsky’s Russian samovar – he was something of a devoted tea-drinker (muenter-stiftung.de).
Schlossmuseum
The local museum, adapted from a former medieval castle, has three galleries devoted to the work of Münter, Kandinsky, Von Jawlensky and Marc (discover-bavaria.com).
Kochel am See
Marc was a founder member of the Blue Rider group, but his career was cut short when he was killed at Verdun in 1916. He had summer houses first at nearby Sindelsdorf and then in the village of Kochel am See, about 10 miles from Murnau, where he is buried. His original home is privately owned but this splendid villa overlooking the Kochelsee has been converted into the Franz Marc Museum which is devoted to his works and those of the other Blue Rider painters including Klee, Macke, Münter and Kandinsky (franzmarc-museum.de).