Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Galerie im Lenbachhaus has the most comprehensive collection, much of it donated by
Münter, who managed to hide her colleagues' paintings from the Nazis. A good selection
of Münter's own paintings are on view at the Schlossmuseum Murnau, a town in the Alps.
At the Buchheim Museum on Starnberger See, the focus is on the equally avant-garde
artist group called
Die Brücke
(Bridge), founded in 1905 in Dresden by Ernst Ludwig
Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.
NAZI ERA
After the creative surge in the 1920s, the big chill of Nazi conformity sent Germany into
an artistic deep freeze in the 1930s and '40s. Many internationally famous artists, includ-
ing Paul Klee and Max Beckmann, were classified as 'degenerate' and their paintings
confiscated, sold off or burned.
MODERN & CONTEMPORARY
Post-1945 creativity revived the influence of Nolde, Kandinsky and Schmidt-Rottluff, but
also spawned a new abstract expressionism in the work of Willi Baumeister. The com-
pletely revamped and enlarged Franz Marc Museum in Kochel am See traces the evolu-
tion of pre- and post-WWII expressionism.
An edgy genre that has found major representation in Bavaria is concrete art, which
emerged in the 1950s and takes abstract art to its extreme, rejecting any natural form and
using only planes and colours. See what this is all about at the Museum für Konkrete
Kunst in Ingolstadt and the Museum im Kulturspeicher in Würzburg.
The Bavarian photorealist Florian Thomas is among the influential artists whose work
is now in the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden. Other good spots to plug into the
contemporary art scene are the Neues Museum in Nuremberg, and the Pinakothek der Mo-
derne and the superb Museum Brandhorst in Munich.
Theatre
Theatre in its various forms enjoys a wide following in Bavaria, especially in Munich,
which has the famous Münchener Kammerspiele, but also in Nuremberg, Regensburg and
Bamberg. Bavaria's longest-running drama is the
Passionsspiele
(
Passion Play
), which
has been performed in Oberammergau once every decade since the 17th century.
For a dose of local colour, head to a
Bauerntheater
(literally, 'peasant theatre'),
which usually presents silly and rustic tales in
dialect so thick that it's basically incompre-
hensible to all non-Bavarians. But never mind,
The website
www.theaterparadies-deutschland.de
(in German) is the ultimate thespian's portal with
