TUESDAY, JULY 2
The air was fresh as we walked through Luitpold park to the nearest metro. A few stops took us to a cluster of museums, and an area of galleries and small restaurants near the Brandhorst Museum.
BRANDHORST MUSEUM
We decided to go to the Brandhorst Museum because an entire section is dedicated to Cy Twombly (one of my very favorites!). The museum is smallish, housed in a contemporary, box-like building. The first floor covers pop art and contains a great collection of Andy Warhol prints and paintings. An outstanding feature of this museum is the written descriptions, which clearly outline art movements and artist intent. Work was nicely displayed, often salon style, filling entire, tall walls. The basement floor houses the most contemporary works. We rushed through this floor, not because we were in a hurry, they just weren’t the best.
But Twombly, ah, the entire top floor. Fantastic. The work is presented from most recent, the year he died, 2011, to his earliest work, and includes his monumental flowers and the twelve large paintings that appeared in the Venice Biennale. The exhibition provides an experience in his genius, a talent that combined intellect, art historical knowledge and an impeccable understanding of composition and line with playfulness and a child’s freedom of expression.
DOCUMENTATION CENTRE FOR THE HISTORY OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM
After the Broadhurst, we stopped for lunch at a Thai restaurant around the corner, then headed to the The Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism. Surprising to us, it was free, and included an audio tour. We would spend the next two plus hours in this museum, learning about the origins of the Nazi Party beginning after WWI, Hitler’s training and rise to power, Munich’s complicity in the rise of the Nazi party and the war, war atrocities, and what happened after the surrender of the National Socialist Party.
The audio tour was heavy on words and detail. Though the exhibition includes documents, some photos and a few videos, it is mostly text-based and large, covering three floors. One floor is devoted to a temporary exhibition — the one we saw compared racism from the beginnings of Nazism to racism in Germany today.
There were very few people, maybe ten, tourists all and mostly Americans, in the museum, and no Germans aside from a small group of students with their teacher. It must be hard for Germans and particularly people from Munich to deal with the information in this museum. Most people in Munich, Bavarians specifically, supported Nazism. Very few resisted. They were even proud of the “nationalism” Hitler brought to Munich.
Shockingly, some buildings Hitler planned to complete, but had not finished by the end of the war, were completed after his death. These buildings were manifestations of his aggrandized visions of nationalism and expansionism, and its hard to understand how the people of Munich, knowing all that he did and stood for, would choose to complete his projects. It’s also a fact that many war criminals were given short sentences, and regained their positions once the Cold War started. The thorough and meticulously documented information in the museum is deeply disturbing.
Off to Vienna tomorrow.
