March 9 - The Art Museum in Hamburg

We had to wait until after 9 so that our CC Karten were good, so after breakfast Monika worked on a jigsaw puzzle while I wrote in the journal. So far in Germany I was writing from 1-2 hours each day to keep the journal up to date, which was consistent with previous Wanderungs. But finally I had caught up and we could leave to go downtown. Since it was cold and snowing, we decided on our typical indoor activity of visiting a museum and headed downtown to visit the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg Art Museum). At the Reinbek station, a woman came with a big baby carriage to the top of the steps and just as I was about to offer to help get the carriage down the steps she asked a man dressed in an orange colored coat. He readily agreed and helped her down that set of stairs and up the next one. Monika explained he was an official “helper” put there by the German train folks, and that surprised me. We have “redcaps” in the U.S. who help people with luggage, but they are private entrepreneurs as I understand it and they definitely work for tips, whereas this man did not.

It is curious where each culture puts its manpower, so to speak. In the U.S., for example, we use far more people in safety and security operations than they seem to have in Germany. For instance, in the Hamburg Art Museum they had one person patrolling a whole section of about 10 rooms, whereas in the Smithsonian’s National Gallery of Art I remembered seeing one guard for every two rooms of paintings. On the other hand, we saw 6 workers fixing some track across from the train station, and that looked like every construction site I’ve every seen in any country: 2 men doing the work while 4 men watched and made helpful (?) comments. Maybe that’s a cultural universal, as the anthropologists like to say! When we arrived at Hauptbahnhof, we stopped off at the Deutsche Bundesbahn Reisecentrum (German train travel center) to check on departure times for our planned trip to Schleswig next weekend for another Volksmarch before charging off to the museum.

We didn’t have to charge very far, of course, because the Hamburg Art Museum was essentially across the street from Hauptbahnhof. We didn’t qualify for the “family” rate of 11 Euro much to Monika’s dismay. To qualify as a family you have to have at least one adult and at least one child—Monika was incensed by that whereas I thought it was just another good reason to have some grandchildren we could tow around. So reluctantly we paid 6 Euro each for admission (for a total of 12 Euro if you’re keeping track), and started off with the Old Masters section (roughly 1550 to 1800).

I was fascinated by the photographic detail that many of these Old Masters had painstakingly included in their art. As far as I could tell, these details usually reflected life in that time and place about as well as a modern photograph would. For example, the details of the wood frame, brick, and plaster construction could be clearly seen in a painting of a tumbled down farmhouse. Another painting showed a small but sturdily built room perched up on some tree limbs that looked for all the world like a really nice child’s playhouse. We knew it couldn’t be that because children of that era didn’t really play like modern children and certainly farm children would not have had a playhouse. We later read in the museum guide that it was a pigeon coop, and that made a lot of sense since perching it in the tree would lessen the threat of predators to the pigeons. Another painting showed a street scene in front of an inn where both a dog and a man were casually relieving themselves while a gent on horseback was getting a cup of something from the innkeeper. Ah, the good old days of outdoor sanitation!

The printed museum guides available in different rooms were generally a great help in interpreting the Old Masters, but I could not always agree with their interpretation. In particular, I begged to differ with their interpretation of a picture called “Flora” by Jan Massys of Antwerp dating from 1559. This picture is dominated by a young, bosomy, woman clad from the navel northwards in a diaphanous gown. She is holding three carnations aloft and giving the viewer a “come hither” look while relaxing languidly on some kind of couch or divan. Being a simple, straightforward kind of guy, I interpreted that picture as an obvious if not blatant appeal to the base side (as opposed to the tenor side) of the average male viewer.

The guide said that this picture was to be interpreted allegorically rather than directly. That is, Flora was the ancient Goddess of Lust and the presence of a peacock and peahen in this picture meant that it was a warning not to be seduced by Lust. Maybe, but the peacock and peahen were painted so small that they weren’t even as big as, ahem, one of Flora’s knockers. I know I didn’t see them (the peacock and peahen, not the knockers) until Monika pointed them out to me. I was distracted, I guess, but that’s the point—I really think most other males would be similarly distracted. So the basic question is whether this painting is really pro- or anti-Lust. I think if we knew the early provenance of the painting more precisely it could settle the issue. If, for example, this painting was commissioned by a parish council to hang in a church foyer or a Sunday School classroom as an object lesson in the dangers of Lust, then I would agree that its theme was really anti-Lust. But if this painting was commissioned by some rich dude to hang in his den or bedroom, then I think you’d have to admit it is probably pro-Lust with just enough of that allegorical anti-lust detail to keep the Inquisition off the painter’s back. I can imagine Jan saying something like, “Hey, see those peacocks? Don’t they just cry out to you to avoid the temptations of the Lust goddess?” For some reason that reminded me of the lines from Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Mikado” where Nanki Poo protests he would never kiss the beautiful but betrothed Yum Yum: “This is what I’d never do (kiss, kiss), this or this (kiss, kiss), or this (kiss, kiss), or this (kiss, kiss). That is what I’d never, ever do!”

In another painting in that gallery from about 1650, I saw the earliest rendition of eyeglasses that I have found to date. The spectacles seem clear to me altho they do not seem to have the modern ear-pieces but are instead are apparently perched on his nose. This reminded me of seeing a picture of a boy thumbing his nose at Diogenes in a 1600s painting at the Zwinger museum in Dresden last year (see Wanderung 2). To me it is endlessly fascinating to track back cultural artifacts and thereby get some sense for the amount of stability versus change that occurs in cultures across the centuries. I sometimes wonder if cultural change is similar to the process of punctuated equilibrium in genetic evolution; that is, the cultures are relatively stable until times of upheaval like the industrial revolution. The problem is, as I see it, getting enough solid evidence across the time scale of centuries from enough cultures to estimate the parameters of the change process. It may also be possible that the content of some cultures, such as superiority, paranoia and xenophobia, simply tends to make them more resistant to change, I just don’t know. Still, it’s fun searching for these little cultural factoids.

After exhausting the Old Masters we transitioned to the New Masters (roughly 1800-1900) where we spent another couple of hours. Both of us enjoy the Impressionists and this museum not only had some Renoirs, Bonnards, Manets and Toulouse-Lautrecs we hadn’t seen, but it also had paintings by German Impressionists that we had never even heard of. These works were often stunningly beautiful in that unique non-photographic way the impressionists developed and which, for me at least, gives an additional emotional impact.

Somewhere along the way we paused for lunch in the cafeteria downstairs both to sit down for a bit and refuel. I discovered the phrase for “baked potato” is “Ofen Kartoffeln”, but I forgot to tell them to hold the mayonnaise—I just couldn’t quite get used to that on potatoes. With strips of grilled chicken it was, however, very tasty and filling. After lunch we continued our exploration of the galleries dedicated to more modern art (from Picasso, Klee, and the gang forward). We typically breeze thru these modern art galleries unless we see something that really catches our interest. I suppose we could stand there and try to puzzle out the meaning of each piece, but somehow it just doesn’t seem worth the effort. Maybe I should ask Kim to come with us and train me to appreciate modern art more thoroughly, but that’s the way it stands now.

The one gallery I did not explore was one on “Gegenwart” or present-day art. At the door leading into the exhibit there was advertising sign type of display about with moving words such as “torture, pain, and agony”. Given that introduction, I fully expected it would get worse from there, so I skipped it. I know that those things exist, but I just didn’t feel like having to thoroughly rub my nose in it so we went back up to the other galleries and worked out way out through the rooms we had not seen coming in. All together we spent about 4 hours in the Hamburg Kuntshalle and didn’t even see the special exhibit as we were too cheap to buy the tickets. We were running out of time, anyway—using the CC Karte we had to get back to Reinbek by 4 p.m. or turn into a pumpkin (oops, wrong metaphor: if caught we’d be busted and fined about 40 Euros each!) or wait till after 6pm.

Really we preferred to get home in the afternoon in time for “Kaffeetrinken” (that roughly corresponds to the English afternoon tea except that coffee is served instead of tea—I just eat the deserts). Then we could have a light supper sometime later during the evening and read, write, crochet, watch TV, or whatever. I found it a very relaxing lifestyle, so maybe we should try to become professional house sitters!

Really we preferred to get home in the afternoon in time for “Kaffeetrinken” (that roughly corresponds to the English afternoon tea except that coffee is served instead of tea—I just eat the deserts). Then we could have a light supper sometime later during the evening and read, write, crochet, watch TV, or whatever. I found it a very relaxing lifestyle, so maybe we should try to become professional house sitters!