This time I stayed awake to see the Vosges before the train dived under them and emerged into cloud.
I am reading some Maigret stories – currently “The Carter of La Providence”, which takes place near Dizy and Épernay, which was not too far from the TGV route. And the first book I read – “Pietr the Latvian” – opened in the Gare du Nord.
The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in the morning via a scenic route: the covered bridge and the waterway.
The museum was interesting: not merely art nouveau, but Mondrian, Kandinsky and a collection of female nudes, which gave them the chance to bring out their most bizarre objects by François-Rupert Carabin. The next time I am in Betty’s in Harrogate I will look at the marquetry panels by the Spindler workshop.
I amused myself looking at brushstrokes: little flicks of colour (“taches”), divisionism, blurring; I liked the wit of the depilation sign half-painted over in impasto.
In the afternoon, once I had said goodbye to the rest of the group, I headed off to look at another clutch of houses in Neudorf. Somewhat butchered in a couple of cases, but I could see both local (storks) and general (dragonflies) motifs. Catching the tram solo was also a little adventure.
A day when I spoke both French and German – and had to repeat myself each time, thereby removing the risk of any self-satisfaction at my attempted polyglotism.
It started in Strasbourg with more meandering around residential streets – this time around the allée de la Robertsau. The water lily tiles were obviously a job lot (we had seen some elsewhere yesterday), but the bullrushes, kingfishers and cherry blossom (japonisme) decoration was delightful. Plenty of organic forms combined with Gothic turrets and Renaissance bays in the Immeuble Schichtel.
Then to Karlsruhe to the Museum am Markt for its applied arts museum focusing on Arts and Crafts/art nouveau/Jugendstil. Everything was beautifully displayed and, to me, presented all that I have discovered about this period: William Morris to Henry van de Velde via Nancy, Mackintosh and the Vienna Secession. It was like revision! My steals would have been the chestnut leaf vase by the Daum brothers and van de Velde’s plates.
Things to remember:
Thus we walked around the Neustadt district looking at early 20th-century buildings.
As usual, my favourites were the ones – like the 1903 block by Lütke and Backes – that were more curvilinear. We were lucky in being invited to view the stairwell: trees and flowers on the lower half-landings until you reached the top, when you had a marvellous “view” of sky and the Vosges mountains. The Egyptian house was definitely an oddity.
After lunch it was the Palais Rohan in the shadow of the cathedral: paintings and the state rooms. My favourite paintings were by the Barbizon artists: simple rather than majestic, sublime landscapes or those deadly “academic” paintings by Bouguereau and de Loutherbourg. The state rooms – despite the occasionally amusing contemporary “interventions” – were just too much – but I could happily have walked away with a mid-18th-century dinner service by Paul Hannong.
E H Gombrich is responsible for the pull of Matthias Grünewald. I was introduced to the Isenheim Altarpiece in “The Story of Art”, where Gombrich sees Grünewald as an early Expressionist. I first went to see it in 1985 on a cycling holiday. Today I went to see it again.
I’m not sure what it is about it, for the flesh of the crucified Christ is almost putrefying – which makes the contrast with his resurrected body all the more wonderful. The multi-winged altarpiece was made (1512-16) for the Monastery of St Anthony, where plague victims and others with skin diseases were cared for: parallels and parables. It speaks of another era and another mindset – and also of sympathy and loving-kindness.
I was caught up in the whole of the Musée Unterlinden (yes! – I remembered musée is masculine). It’s a mediaeval convent, art nouveau municipal baths and modern extension linked by an underground passage. Until I reached overload, I found the objects fascinating: the figures that express extreme sweetness (the little figures from a nativity scene) and extreme suffering (crucifixions and gruesome martyrdoms) – but always a sense of resignation. There was Christ on a wheeled donkey, like some strange Triang figure; I’ve seen one before and I assume they were used in processions. I loved experiencing a fleeting sense of connection with the objects: a tacit sense of the stories they tell of human beings long gone and the stories that they told each other – the human being that I would have been had I lived 600 years ago. I also loved looking at tiny details of large paintings – like the strawberries with their individual seeds that Martin Schongauer painted at the base of the Virgin’s robe at the end of the fifteenth century. Each brushstroke made all those centuries ago! (But my prosaic self reminds me that they have very likely been restored, so my fancies need examination.)
For a while there was no stopping me: everything held out something. The giant keys to massive locks, the kougelopf cake moulds (an Alsatian speciality), the decorative waffle irons (yes, really), the glass harmonica looking like a swaddled baby in a cot, monstrances, vases by Gallé and by Daum, a reference book of cartes de visite . . . and then it was lunchtime.
I wandered around the art collection after lunch. They have Cranach’s “Melancholia” and a small collection of Otto Dix paintings (he was a PoW near Colmar at the end of WWII). It was interesting to go into a room of paintings by artists I had never heard of (from 19th to 21st centuries) and decide (a) what to look at and (b) whether I thought they were any good. On the latter question – it’s salutary to realise that I have no idea. There was an abstract colour field painting by someone I had never heard of and, in the absence of any response to it, I really could not see how it compared to, say, Rothko’s work – which doesn’t evoke any response in me either except for the pupil’s interest of seeing a work that is so widely admired. I was more entranced by the waffle irons and glass harmonica, which really did have an aura of their own.
I lingered over the Dix paintings. I like finding paintings that portray biblical scenes in a present-day setting. Dix’s painting of The Annunciation could almost have been by Paula Rego – that feminised sense of Mary shrinking from and wondering at the news that her childhood has evaporated and she is being pushed into the adult world.
The old public baths had lost its pool area (unlike Roubaix), but you could see how it once was. And – thinking again of the past – in the way to Colmar the train passed arable fields, a field of crosses and a trading estate before stopping at Sélestat. I had to check: it was a Jewish cemetery dating from the 17th century. Right on the edge of town. It is now a protected monument – which led me to thinking how the dead fare better than their living descendants did. But then – where were Jews buried in Britain?
First* impressions of Strasbourg: simultaneously French and German (mansard roofs next to Fachwerkhäuser); an astonishingly slender cathedral (my introduction to Rayonnant Gothic, where the clerestory windows seem as tall as the nave windows); hearty food and very nice wine.
It was interesting to visit the cathedral without knowing anything about it. Was it indeed mediaeval? Were the windows 19th-century or centuries old? The apse looked Romanesque – but what about the vault decoration? Yes, it was mostly as old as it looked, but the glass had been damaged in a siege during the Franco-Prussian war.
* Not including 1985, when I camped at the youth hostel, met up with a couple of French-Canadian sisters I had first encountered in Luxembourg, and thought only of the next day’s cycle into the Vosges.
A café au lait at the corner of Boulevard Magenta and Boulevard Strasbourg before I catch the train to Strasbourg. The sunshine, the springtime trees and the locally quarried mellow stone give a certain beauty to this otherwise unlovely corner.
Aides memoires part 3 