Author: Antje

Day 10: Wednesday, July 14: Hamburg Day 3 (Art Museums)

We started the day with a leisurely breakfast of yogurt and cereal, with a long discussion about whether going to the exhibit on Raphael’s impact that just started at the main Hamburg art museum, the Kunsthalle, and then were off to a day with our friend Uschi in the museums, and did decide to go see . So this entry is more of a photo essay. Here we go!

Looking for Uschi at our meeting place to go see art (after a lovely lunch)
The lovely lunch–my pick: beet carpaccio with a salad
My post-prandial latte macchiato didn’t really want me to drink him. He was very sad.
The Kunsthalle, Hamburg’s premier art museum. We only saw a small fraction in the 2 1/2 hours we had.
The exhibit that lured us in despite its title: Raphael–Impact of a Genius. (Several in our group a very sceptical about geniuses and their importance.)

Here is a museum / exhibit tour of sorts, with some Antje thoughts in the captions:

The largest of the six actual Raphaels at the Raphael exhibit: a sketch of a cherub’s head, ca. 1509, probably for his Disputa in the Stanza della Segnatura. Since the exhibit is all from the museum’s own holdings (and it only had those five Raphael sketches) the main idea is to show Raphael’s enormous impact over time. –>
For example, in this engraving of early 19th-century women (majorly classicized to look like Roman beauties) swooning in front of the Sistine Madonna. I know quite a bit about this because George Eliot also did her share of swooning in front of it. We retraced her steps and saw the painting in the original 2 years ago in Dresden, but there was no swooning. Art historian caption: Kaspar Heinrich Merz, Vor der Sixtina, 1868, Engraving after a drawing by Bonaventura Genelli from the same year).
One of the lithographs of the Sistine Madonna, by Franz Seraph Hanfstaengel, 1845. The technique was quite new at the time, and turned out to be especially suitable for reproducing the famed softness of facial features. If you know the original well, you’ll notice that the curtain rod that is actually part of the composition of the painting (but was long concealed under a frame) is not represented here.
This is how 19th century artists imagined how the Sistine Madonna appeared to Raphael, inspired by St. Luke the Evangelist (with the ox) who is sometimes depicted as painting the Virgin Mary, as per a medieval Christian legend, and who became the patron saint of painters and artists in general because of that. From a series of engravings by the brothers Franz und Johannes Riepenhausen from 1816.
And then there is another popular 19th-century motif from the life of Raphael that was invented in the early 19th century: he is sketching the Madonna della Sedia (“Madonna of the chair”–she is sitting on one) from life on the lid of a barrel. The final result, which we saw 2 years ago in Florence, is a round painting (a tondo), a big tourist attraction in the Palazzo Pitti. Wood engraving for a newspaper, by Paul Schwanicke, 1895, after a drawing by Carl Grote.
The same motif on a 19th-century “collectible” card that you got when you bought a jar of Liebig’s famous bouillon in France. Chromolithograph from 1905.
Here we are with the catalog of the exhibit. Since the material was almost all from the Kunsthalle’s collection of etchings and engravings, what was missing were actual paintings–not just paintings by Raphael (we knew they don’t travel!) but also the wonderful, garishly colorful Nazarene and Romantic historical paintings of the Death of Raphael and the like. The huge catalog that went along with the exhibit was much more colorful and including many of the paintings that I would have liked to have seen. But I was not going to haul it back to the States!
Andrea’s current favorite painting: Anita Ree, Self-Portrait, 1930.
Peter’s current favorite painting: Max Beckmann, Große graue Wellen (Great Grey Waves), ca. 1905
Uschi’s current favorite: Ferdinand Hodler, Thunersee mit Stockhornkette, ca. 1910

This ends the tour of the museum. It does not end with a favorite for me because I couldn’t decide! The 19th-century Raphael adoration is fascinating to me because that actually became part of my masters’ thesis, but it’s not like I LOVE this kind of art (Mark, Andrea, Peter, and Uschi were even more lukewarm about it, but they are good sports when it comes to my enthusiasms!). What interested me most were the “meta” representations of viewers’ responses to “the genius” and his art, showing him with admiring students and patrons (as in the totally invented scene of Raphael sketching the Madonna della Sedia on the lid of a barrel), and also in representations of admirers of various art works, especially that scene of women (and the painter as a little boy!) adoring the Sistine Madonna.

And while there are wonderful 19th-century and early 20th-century paintings in the permanent collection of the museum (it lags a little when it comes to sculpture, but has world-famous paintings) but too many to choose from when you have as little time as we did to see even “just” the 19th-century and early 20th-century art that the Kunsthalle owns. I raced through various rooms and stopped occasionally to take a look in the half hour or so that we had left. But I was just amazed how little I remembered of the amazing collection that they have (it is not especially famous, but it is many times the collection of, say, the Joslyn. My main stop was to look at the paintings by Caspar David Friedrich (a whole room full, including the famous Eislandschaft with the crushed ship, and the Wanderer above the Fog–a closer look made me realize that there are highlights at the edge of his collar that indicate that his face, turned away from us, would be brightly illuminated, and I didn’t expect that.

When I had finished my rushed run-through, we all gathered at a bench where Mark and Uschi had been sitting and talking, since they were all arted out! We left at 4:30–the afternoon had passed way too quickly–and took Uschi home with us to Andrea and Peter’s. Peter and I stopped at the supermarket on the way for a few things we still needed. Our friend Karsten joined us a little after 5:30 (like Andrea, he is also a friend from high-school times, whom I happen to have been married to for a couple of years in my early 20s; Uschi and Karsten had not seen each other for probably 20 years, although we all knew each other well in the 1980s!). While the others chatted, Andrea and I put the food together: She had baked a wonderful polenta with veggies and cheese yesterday, along with brownies, and I fixed a salad and some capresi to go with that–all set up as a buffet in the kitchen, so the six of us would have lots of room for our food at the dining table in the living room. We had a wonderful time with the food, with Karsten having brought some bread and fabulous feta-cheese dips, and with brownies with ice cream and cherry sauce (like a pie filling) for dessert. Yum. We had a fantastic time talking, telling stories and laughing a lot. It sometimes felt like we were all part of a big improv comedy group, with Karsten as the catalyst who could always bring the conversation back around to some earlier hilarity in a perfect circle. Of course, that can’t be replicated. An earlier mini lecture of mine (since there is always one) about the Madonna of the Long Neck by Parmigianino) surprisingly came back up later when the conversation turned to paintings of hippos, rhinos and giraffes (also of the Long Neck), but in between, there were stories of fighting off bullies in high school and the woes of working during the pandemic, of becoming part of a patent because of suggesting a funny NAME for the patented process. The only problem was that I could not keep up with the translation, and the translation app Mark had on the phone could DEFINITELY not keep up at all.

Karsten stayed until 9:30, and then Andrea and I accompanied Uschi part-way home to the friend she is staying with, so that she could take an easy subway home. We were back home before 10:30, and sat around for a little bit, but did go to bed a bit earlier than the day before. What a wonderful day!