Three days of intense pleasure
Mark Glazebrook on the joys of revisiting Munich's distinguished art collections
unich is boom town,' said my informative taxi driver on the journey from the airport; and when he spoke of 'all ze uzzer countries' it was clear that he meant the other countries beyond the Bavarian border, yet inside Germany. To think of Munich as a capital city in the past tense scarcely seems fitting, especially since it retains all the cultural advantages of a great capital — not excluding mad King Ludwig II's ruinously extravagant castles, and his passion for Wagner, which are at long last earning some hard cash for the Bavarian tourist industry. On the day that I left I raised a tankard of my taxi-driver's preferred local brew to the memory of King Ludwig I (1824-48). He commissioned three public art galleries to be built, including the Alte and Neue Pinakothek which had supplied me with three days of intense pleasure.
One surprise was the recently acquired, discriminating collection of English 18thand 19th-century paintings, including Richard Wilson's exceptionally fine view of Syon House from across the Thames; and if the Manet of Monet painting in his boat does not capture the quintessential atmosphere of French Impressionism, which may be instructively compared here with the not-to-be underrated 'German Impressionism' of Max Liebermann, then what does?
The immediate cause of this long weekend in Munich was that Sean Scully, who is to become the professor of painting at Munich's Academy of Art, was giving a talk. He gave it in a large lecture hall packed with friends of the Haus der Kunst — an historic venue, as will emerge — in which there is now a superb travelling show of his work. The underlying motive for the trip was that I have long had it in the back of my mind to revisit key locations of my student days. In 1959 we students of Oskar Kokoschka's School of Vision, in Salzburg, were directed to Munich's cultural institutions. 'Be cultured,' I remember Kokoschka saying in his inimitably persuasive, deep voice.
In particular we were directed to a painting in the Alte Pinakothek, a masterpiece by Altdorfer of 1529 which gives not so much a bird's-eye view as a cosmonaut's view of the ancient `Battle near Issus' with the curvature of the earth discernible in the background. The painting is also known as 'Alexanderslacht'. Primarily it celebrates Alexander the Great's conquest of Persia but Kokoschka had seen something else in it when Munich lay in ruins after 1945. Kokoschka had divined or perhaps projected a look of defiance, a refusal to bow down and perish, in the tiny figure of Darius. 'It is not easy,' he wrote, 'even after intensive searching, to find that gem, hardly as big as a pin, which is the face of Darius in the tumult of 10,000 men in full flight. And it is harder still to catch a glimpse of the expression of defeat on the averted face of the King of Kings fleeing in his war chariot . . . He knows that he is defeated; and yet, in spite of that, life affirms itself, monotonously and stubbornly, like the single beats in the Beethoven fugue.'
Kokoschka had been in the thick of some of the most explosive exchanges between culture and politics in the wartorn 20th century — more so perhaps than any major contemporary artist. For a start he had once competed with Adolf Hitler for the same art scholarship. (It has often been remarked that it is a pity that Kokoschka won and Hitler lost, but Hitler's paintings were of a lowish standard, and had spots knocked off them later by that celebrated and courageous amateur, Winston Churchill.) Kokoschka was born into the AustroHungarian empire in a small town on the Danube in 1886 but became a British citizen in 1947. As a young man he had shocked and thrilled pre-1914 Vienna with his soul-searching 'psychological portraits' of the intelligentsia and with his plays, such as Murder Hope of Women, which were later thought of as precursors of expressionist theatre — although expressionism was a word he disliked. In the first world war, following a notoriously tempestuous affair with the beautiful Alma Mahler, widow of the composer, Kokoschka acquired a horse, joined an Austrian cavalry regiment, took part in one of the last equestrian charges in history and was seriously wounded. In the early 1920s he was a professor at the Dresden Academy but this did not prevent his inclusion by the Nazis in their infamous exhibition of 'Degenerate Art'. It was held in Munich's Deutsches Haus der Kunst (German House of Art) in 1937, the year that the hysterical hate campaign against him in the German press reached its climax. Four hundred and seventeen of his works were removed from German public collections following the Nazi confiscation order of 5 July, but before fleeing to England via Prague, he promptly dashed off a vigorous self-por trait with the ironical title `Portrait of a "Degenerate Artist" '.
Munich was quick to try to make amends for the Nazi insults by mounting a large show of his work in the same building, now renamed plain Haus der Kunst, in 1950. Despite his firm central European roots. Kokoschka was a cosmopolitan and too great a man, with too profound a sense of history, ever to think or bear grudges, along narrow nationalistic lines.
A high point of my stay in Munich was the Marino Marini exhibition Der Spur der Farbe (The Trace of Colour) in the Neue Pinakothek — not that I hadn't enjoyed the Vuillard show there and the Murillo and Beckman shows in the Alte Pinakothek, the latter rating as one of the more successful examples of the recent international fashion for showing modern masters next to Old Masters.
In the 1950s, a list of important European figurative sculptors would include Henry Moore in England, Giacometti in Paris, and Manzu and Marini in Milan. (As it happens, Manzu taught at the Kokoschka School and Marini made a portrait head of Kokoschka in 1977; one of the revelations of this show is his genius at the strange art of portrait sculpture, which has conjured up memorable images of artists, musicians and writers such as Carlo Carra, Chagall, Germaine Richier, Stravinsky and Henry Miller.) It takes a brilliantly selected and displayed exhibition such as this one, which has been extended until mid-September, to affirm the true stature of Marini. Before sculpting, his method was to make a mass of drawings and paintings. Clearly he was attracted by the remnants of colour on ancient sculptures but sometimes in his own work the colour has a vibrant life of its own, as if in counterpoint to the form.
Marini seems to have digested the whole history of equestrian art before making his own distinctive, lively contribution. His sculptural acts of homage to Pomona, the minor Italian goddess of fruit and gardens, manages to make neo-classical sculpture viewed shortly afterwards look mannered and excessively finished; in a word, dead.
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