America’s best-known history painting was made in Germany. Not the subject, obviously, but the canvas itself: Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze painted Washington Crossing the Delaware in a studio in Düsseldorf, using American tourists and art students who happened to be in town as his models.
Leutze was born in Schwäbisch Gmünd in 1816 and taken to Philadelphia as a boy. He came back. And in 1850, watching the German revolutions collapse around him, he decided that what his old country needed was a picture of somebody actually pulling it off.
The first version caught fire in his studio, was restored, and ended up in the Kunsthalle in Bremen. It hung there until September 5, 1942, when a bombing raid destroyed it. The one in New York today is the second attempt, painted right afterward and shipped across.
That’s the thing about our art. It never got collected into one national gallery the way the French did it. It sits scattered across a dozen cities, and a fair bit of it isn’t in Germany at all anymore.
Dürer Lived in Nuremberg, His Paintings Live in Munich
Albrecht Dürer (1471 to 1528) is the one name from the German Renaissance that traveled. He bought a house in Nuremberg in 1509 and worked there for the last two decades of his life, and that house is still standing—which for a German city center is a small miracle all by itself.
Go there and you’ll see his kitchen, his workshop, and the light he painted in. What you won’t see is a single original painting.
Blame 1627. The Bavarian elector Maximilian I wanted Dürer’s Vier Apostel (Four Apostles) for his Munich collection, and the free imperial city of Nuremberg tried hard to fob him off with beautifully painted copies instead. Didn’t work. Nuremberg lost the panels and kept the copies—which is why the Dürer Hall in his house shows you superb old copies to this day. Four hundred years on and we’re still a little sour about it. ;-)
So, plan accordingly. The famous frontal self-portrait from 1500, the one where Dürer paints himself looking uncomfortably like Christ, is in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Real Dürer paintings and prints do exist in Nuremberg, but at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum—a few streets from the house. Take them in that order and the house makes sense. Take them backward and it feels like a gift shop.
His contemporaries scattered further still. Lucas Cranach the Elder ran what amounted to a paint factory in Wittenberg and produced the portraits that fixed what Martin Luther looks like in everyone’s head. Hans Holbein the Younger left for the Tudor court in England. And Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheimer Altar, arguably the most harrowing thing any German ever painted, sits in Colmar, France since 1648.
Caspar David Friedrich and Fifty Years of Silence
If you know one German painting without knowing that you know it, it’s the man in the green coat standing on a rock with his back to you, looking out over fog. That’s Caspar David Friedrich, born in Greifswald on the Baltic in 1774, son of a soap and candle maker.
Here’s the part the posters leave out. After he died in 1840 he was more or less forgotten for half a century, until a generation of early modernists rediscovered him around 1900. The most reproduced image in German painting spent fifty years being nobody’s favorite.
You cannot see the major works in one place, so decide before you book. Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (Wanderer above the Sea of Fog) is at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg. Der Mönch am Meer (The Monk by the Sea) and Abtei im Eichwald (Abbey in the Oakwood) hang together at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, which is exactly how Friedrich wanted them shown when he first exhibited them in 1810. Zwei Männer in Betrachtung des Mondes (Two Men Contemplating the Moon) is at the Albertinum in Dresden, the city where he spent his working life.
Give that Berlin room an hour, not fifteen minutes. These pictures are quiet, and they punish rushing.
The Blue Rider and a Basement in Murnau
In 1911, a Munich artists’ association rejected a painting by one of its own members, Wassily Kandinsky, on the grounds that it went too far. Kandinsky walked out. Franz Marc walked out with him. Within weeks they had mounted their own show under a new name, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider).
A lot of it didn’t happen in Munich at all. In 1909 the painter Gabriele Münter bought a house in Murnau am Staffelsee, an hour south in the Alpine foothills, where she and Kandinsky worked for long stretches. It’s open to visitors now, put back the way it looked before the First World War.
Then the regime came for the pictures, and Münter did something remarkable. She moved the collection down to Murnau and walled it into her cellar. Officials searched the house more than once and found nothing. In 1957, on her eightieth birthday, she handed the whole thing to the city of Munich, which is the only reason the Lenbachhaus holds the finest collection of Blue Rider painting anywhere.
Munich first, then. The Museum Folkwang in Essen has Kandinsky, Marc, and August Macke as well, and it earns a trip on its own merits—but if the Blue Rider is what you came for, don’t start in the Ruhr.
The Bauhaus Was an Art School First
Say “Bauhaus” and most people picture a building. Fair enough, and I handle that side of it on my page about German architecture. But Walter Gropius founded the thing in Weimar in 1919 as a school, and the people teaching in it were painters.
Paul Klee taught there, and Kandinsky after his Blue Rider years, along with Lyonel Feininger, Oskar Schlemmer, Josef Albers, and Johannes Itten. The color theory that ended up in every art school on earth was hammered out in a few drafty studios in Thuringia, and later in Dessau, where the school moved in 1925.
It lasted fourteen years. Local politics pushed it out of Weimar, then out of Dessau, and in 1933 it shut itself down in Berlin rather than carry on under the new government. The staff emigrated: Albers to North Carolina and then Yale, Gropius to Harvard, Mies van der Rohe to Chicago. If you studied design in the United States, you were taught by people who were taught by refugees from this school.
The Purge of 1937
On July 18, 1937, the regime opened the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition) in Munich: approved painting, nudes and landscapes and mythology, everything Hitler believed art ought to be. The next day, a few minutes away in the arcades of the Hofgarten, it opened a second show meant as the counterexample.
Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) held around 650 works pulled out of thirty-two German museums, hung crooked, crammed together, and labeled with insults. Admission was free. Across the whole campaign more than 20,000 works were stripped from state collections, sold abroad, or destroyed. It is one of the ugliest things ever done to a country’s own culture, and we did it to ourselves.
More than two million people went to see it in Munich. That was several times what the official exhibition drew next door, and it was not remotely what anyone in charge had planned for.
One picture in that show tells you how muddled the whole business was. Franz Marc’s Der Turm der blauen Pferde (The Tower of Blue Horses) had hung in the national collection since 1919, and Marc had been killed at Verdun in 1916 in a German uniform. When veterans’ organizations protested that a fallen soldier was being publicly slandered, the painting came quietly off the wall. It passed into Hermann Göring’s hands and vanished in 1945. Three separate witnesses said they saw it in Berlin after the war, and it has never turned up.
The categories never held anyway. Emil Nolde was a party member and an antisemite, and the state confiscated more of his work than almost anyone else’s. Being on the right side politically saved nothing, because the men drawing up the lists were not applying a principle. They were applying a taste. There is more on that period on my page about the Third Reich.
German Art after 1945
Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld, flew for the Luftwaffe, crashed, and spent the rest of his life building an identity around that crash and around materials nobody had taken seriously before: felt, fat, copper, dead hares. He taught at the Düsseldorf art academy from 1961 and told anyone who would listen that every human being is an artist. The largest collection of his work by a wide margin sits at Schloss Moyland near Cleves, a moated castle on the Lower Rhine—which is a gloriously odd place to keep six thousand pieces of it.
Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden, left for the West in 1961 a few months before the Wall went up, and settled in Cologne. In 2007 he gave the cathedral a new window for the south transept: roughly 11,500 hand-blown glass squares in seventy-two colors, most of them placed at random, worked up from a painting of his from 1974. He took no fee. One cardinal skipped the dedication because he had wanted saints and martyrs and got pixels.
Go stand under it late in the afternoon. It throws color right across the stone floor of a Gothic church, and the argument settles itself.
For the rest of that postwar generation—Georg Baselitz and his upside-down figures, Sigmar Polke, Jörg Immendorff, Anselm Kiefer with his ash and straw and lead—the best single address is the MKM Museum Küppersmühle in Duisburg, a converted grain silo in the inner harbor. Not where most visitors think to look, which is rather the point of the Ruhr.
One last thing, because it closes a circle. The Museum Folkwang in Essen lost a large part of its modern holdings in 1937, among them a Kandinsky watercolor from his Bauhaus years that the state seized and sold off. The museum tracked it down and bought it back. Gone for more than eighty-five years, and hanging in Essen again. :-)
My overview of German culture covers the neighboring ground, and German history explains a good deal of why the map of our museums looks the way it does.