It was super awesome to spend a cultural day in München with the magnificent Eva. Not only can she pull off a top notch bodybuilding pose routine at BJJ Globetrotters Camp, she's a great tour guide too.
İn case you're wondering about all the Deutsch in the below video, Eva challenged me to speak to her purely in German while I was visiting. Apologies for my accent in advance, native German speakers. Many more vids to come. 😉
On Mondays, most of the galleries I would head to are closed. Fortunately the Neue Pinakothek, focusing on 19th century art, is open. There are also examples of 18th century, along with a few from the 20th. 😀
The building itself, dating from the 1970s, appealed to me. I thought it looked rather like a modern interpretation of a castle combined with a church. Again, lots of Deutsch, because I promised Eva. İf you have the sound on, the first and fourth vids are loud because they're outside, the second and third are much quieter due to being inside. So, don't blast your eardrums between vids 3 and 4.
This sinister sculpture by Honoré Daumier stands out from the rest of the room contents, except for the painting of Don Quixote next to it (also by Daumier, in a similarly twisted, angular style). İİRC the audio guide, it's a satirical take on rather malevolent characters who drummed up support for the authoritarian Napoleon İİİ, which is why he carries that big stick. 😉
I've been talking a lot about Bruegel recently, so here's another of my absolute favourite artists (top 3 for me), Goya. The place to see him best is the Prado in Madrid, which provides a comprehensive overview of his career, but it's always awesome to see more of his work. 😃
The Neue Pinakothek in München has enough Goya to almost fill a room. Mainly it's portraits, but they also have an example of his early style from the 18th century, along with a still life. 😍
As this is Goya, that's not just a random assortment of pleasant fruit. İnstead, it's a dead chicken, which probably stands for torture and suffering, following on from Goya's visceral depictions of those topics in his Disasters of War engraving series (which I think would have started around the same time).
I like the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood, who were active in the latter part of the 19th century. My interest in them led me to a slightly earlier group of painters from Germany, the Nazarenes. 👍
When you first walk into their room in the München Neue Pinakothek, you think you've come across work by Raphael, but it's actually early 19th century German art. The Nazarenes wanted more religion in painting, a heartfelt conviction: for example, von Schadow had converted to Catholicism in 1817. ✝
They also, like the PRB, harked back to a much earlier style than their contemporaries. Unlike the PRB, Raphael himself was a major model. I'm especially intrigued by the secular portraits, but annoyingly the audioguide doesn't talk about them. I'll have to do more research. 😉
I encountered both Arnold Böcklin and Moritz Von Schwind during my 2017 visit to Berlin. They cropped up again at the München Neue Pinakothek, with considerably more of both these 19th century artists compared to last year's art trip.
Böcklin painted a lot of mythical seascapes, the fantastical nature of which greatly appeals to me. There are also a few less interesting landscape scenes by him in München, of the mundane real world. Bleh to that: give me fantasy! 😉
Von Schwind also preferred to escape the real world, specialising in ornate altarpiece-like configurations with a fairytale theme. The large one in München is of Cinderella, running you right through the story. Gorgeous illustration. 😍
Eva sneakily took a pic of me taking a pic when I was looking at the Nazarenes, so here's a rare shot of me in my favourite place to be on holiday, a #gallery. 😉
The collection finished in the early 20th century, with Austrian big hitters Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. İt was a fitting way to close off my #art explorations since I landed in Vienna a little over a week earlier, where I'd gorged myself on both artists. 😋
There was also an old friend waiting for me, Fernand Khnopff. Little earlier than the other two, part of the Belgian Symbolists. 😍
In the days before cameras, developing a photo involved paint, a brush, a canvas and a lot of skill. 😉
it was cool to look at some views of München hanging in the Pinakothek from several hundred years ago, then wandering a comparatively short distance from the Neue Pinakothek to see that same scene, largely unchanged. 😀
The beautiful Neo-Gothic Rathaus, built in 1907 İİRC, so a late example of the style. There is a story behind those carvings, which @evagartzke carefully explained to me (she's an excellent tour guide)...but I can't remember it now. Eva? 👍😜
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