Wooden it be nice?

Nature's own sculpture

Not only do I not fly very often (thankfully), but it seems to have been a very long time since I sat next to an airplane window, in daylight, on a clear day.

But that happened when we flew back to the UK from Germany last week. And as we headed north west, the world below offered further evidence of something I’ve been aware of for a few years now: German towns and villages are never far from woods and forests.

Not only are forests at the heart of the German psyche, but it’s also reflected in the country’s love of wood as a material – and in particular, as a vehicle for art.

My maternal grandparents visited the Alpine region in the years after WWII and brought back a few small pieces, which my mother still has. So I’ve been familiar for years with the angular planes of wood on a carved mountain goat.

In 2000, my own parents went to Germany – the trip was my father’s retirement gift from his parishioners, and included tickets for the Oberammergau Passion Play.

They brought me back a pair of carved edelweiss flowers and a man with lantern and donkey, which owes something to the sentimental style of porcelain Hummel figures (if memory serves, my mother has a couple of those stashed somewhere too).

The central part of the Holy Blood altarpiece

When we headed into Bavaria for the first time last year, I expected to see plenty of wood carving, but in the event, the only obvious thing to be seen was cuckoo clocks.

This was not a trip where we were able to spend any time wandering in woods, but one of the specific things that we had penned in to do was to visit the Jakobskirche for some rather more polished wood.

The city’s main church, it’s Lutheran, although part of the many official pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela.

Built between 1311 and 1484, in 1525, the church saw the peasant leader Florian Geyer (a Franconian noble) read aloud the articles of the revolting peasants during the German Peasant’s War.

But if you climb up the stairs to a gallery behind the vast organ, you’ll find a Holy Blood altarpiece, carved by Tilman Riemenschneider between 1500-1505.

The raw material

Riemenschneider has been dubbed ‘Germany’s Michelangelo’ and his work is always worth seeing. This is one of his seminal pieces – Andrew Graham-Dixon goes into some detail about in in his TV series, The Art of Germany. The artist’s ability to create highly realistic faces that seemed to have an inner life puts him head and shoulders above many others.

The church is also home to a high altar created in 1466 by Friedrich Herlin, a pupil of Rogier van der Weyden, but the Riemenschneider is the undoubted star here.

Flanked by two relief panels showing scenes from the Easter story, the central section of the altarpiece is a vast, 3D representation of the Last Supper. But what lends this version so much power is the figure of a disciple looking away from Christ and down toward us. As Graham-Dixon explained, it is a direct challenge to anyone looking at it.

Art historian Kenneth Clark considered that Riemenschneider’s works showed an idea of German piety in the 15th century and were harbingers of the coming Reformation.

Wooden woodsman and mushroom

The challenge created by the disciple breaking through the fourth wall (in effect) is a personal one that can be seen as indicative of the ideas of a personal relationship with God that would develop.

Away from religion, we did spot one or two wood carvings – although one small shop was still closed for the winter.

But I did find a small woodsman, which has now safely made the journey back to London, where he’s joined by a small wooden mushroom, which I was charged just €1 for, after the woman in the shop we were in was so delighted by The Other Half making a substantial Christmas decoration purchase.

However, aside from wooden Christmas decorations that were purchased away from Käthe Wohlfahrt, Germany’s biggest Christmas decoration manufacturer, which has its headquarters in Rothenburg, together with a number of shops and a Christmas museum.

One visit convinced us that it is grossly overpriced and nowhere near the best quality around. Indeed, the owner of one independent shop told us that the company, via marriage, was effectively in Japanese hands and that Japanese tourists expect things to be expensive as a guarantee of quality.

Nature and time, wrought in wood

What we did come away with – well, what I insisted on coming away with – was a cuckoo clock: a genuine, hand-made one from the Black Forest (which isn’t that far away).

I picked the smallest one I could find; not one made to look like a chalet; with no painting on it. Not only is it made from wood – the traditional design reflects the woods and forests.

Back in London, I took my time getting it out of the box and mounting it on the wall. There is something ridiculously fascinating, in these technological times, in having something that requires no batteries or plugs – it’s almost a revelation that leaves you wondering how anything can work without that confounded electrickery.

It delights me that it’s properly hand made; that when you open the back, the inside reveals once more how it not mass produced. It is, then, thus evidence that real craftsmanship has not been lost.

It’s hardly a Riemenschneider, but it is an authentic piece of Germany in its own way, and in an era of  smart this and smart that, it’s a real pleasure to have.

Germany and the complexity of memory

VW Beetle at the British Museum. Ink on A5 paper, A Kendal

It is perhaps one of life’s little tricks that, having grown up in a rabidly anti-German home, I should become a Germanophile.

One of the contributory factors was history. Studying for my O’ level and bored to tears with the Corn Laws (well, who wouldn’t be?) the course that probably gained me a pass was Bismarck and German unification. Because it was the one course that absolutely fascinated me.

Some 20 years later, during a stint at the online version of the Guardian, I was subbing an article by its then Berlin correspondent, John Hooper, about the Lange Kerls, Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia’s extraordinary regiment of particularly tall men.

It was far from being the same period as that which I’d so enjoyed studying in the 1970s, but it reminded me of that. In the next few days, I started hunting in bookshops for books on Prussia; the start if an affair that would grow to encompass an ever-wider area of history.

And even now, I will judge a bookshop on the basis of whether or not its history section contains anything beyond the Nazi era.

So when it was announced that the British Museum was hosting an exhibition on Germany: Memories of a Nation, it was always going to be a must-see.

Neil MacGregor is director of the museum, and his own previous works include A History of the World in 100 Objects. Here, the exhibition itself was built around a substantial new tome by MacGregor, plus an acclaimed BBC Radio 4 series (which I missed), and takes a similar approach.

I’m not sure that I went expecting to be educated as such, but more that I went in anticipation of seeing things, in the flesh, that would provide a visual companion to some of what I’ve read in the past 14 years or so.

Having walked up the steps of the Reading Room, past a VW Beetle and a fragment of the Berlin Wall, the exhibition proper begins with a brief explanation of how Germany has not long been that; that it shares more borders with other countries than any other European nation, that its borders have been more fluid than those of other nations and, indeed, that there was, for most of its history, no such thing as a common and single ‘Germany’.

All this I – and The Other Half – was familiar with. Which made me realise that I’d probably never attended an exhibition with as much base knowledge as I already had in this case.

But to be honest, I don’t think that we were the core target audience.

The exhibition sets out, it seems to me, to convey a wider picture of Germany than that which has been dominant in the UK since 1939.

The Blacksmith of German Unity, print

You cannot, of course, omit the Nazi era, and the exhibition does not, including a range of exhibits from a pre-war anti-semitic poster to a 1935 sheet of a cut-out Hitler and marching brown shirts for children.

Here too is a replica of the gate to the Buchenwald concentration camp: wrought iron; small, like a garden gate, with its motto, ‘Jedem das Seine’ (‘to each what is due to them’) facing inward for the prisoners on the parade ground to see every day; a motto, one could feel, that is even more sinister even than the famous ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (‘work makes you free’) of Auschwitz, Dachau or Sachsenhausen, where it was facing outwards to be seen by those arriving at the camps.

But the designer of the Buchenwald gate, Franz Ehrlich, had learned his art in Bauhaus: the lettering was, unlike that elsewhere, an obvious nod to the modernism that Hitler considered ‘degenerate’.

And that motto could be seen in another way, as meaning that the guards, the torturers and the killers would, one day, get what they were due.

It is a perfect illustration of the complexity of German history.

MacGregor explains in the accompanying book that one of his aims was to examine how Germans see themselves and their own national story, a quarter of a century after it’s latest incarnation came into being with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

There are many things that could be viewed as strange omissions – and all of us with some knowledge would doubtless be able to cite a few.

Personally, I was surprised to see no mention in the exhibition itself of Thomas Mann, although he’s in the pages of Neil MacGregor’s book of the same name. There’s no Günter Grass in either.

Less personally but more surprisingly, there’s no mention that I can recall of music – and Germany provided two of the trio of composers who all singlehandledly changed the course of classical music. Setting aside Mozart as Austrian, that still leaves Beethoven and Wagner, whose absences seem particularly strange if one is attempting to convey that wider picture.

One can only guess that it was assumed that this was a known part of German history and culture, although the different ways in which, post WWII, these two composers have been treated can itself offer an interesting way of exploring MacGregor’s themes.

It is, I think, rather a butterfly of an exhibition: a gentle flit across a period of history that is largely unknown to most Britons.

Yet that lightness is deceptive, and in the selected objects there are plenty of things to fascinate, intrigue and even stun.

Napoleon's hat from Waterloo

You will not often, for instance, see an edition of Martin Luther’s own translation of the Bible into German, with his own handwritten version of Psalm 23 and his signature on the facing page, dated 1542.

That’s the sort of thing I find stunning.

And then there was one of the remaining 48 copies of the Gutenberg Bible from 1455, with its still-immaculate Gothic type.

Both these Bibles serve as a reminder of the linguistic and democratic impact of the Reformation – no matter how much the latter was to shock and appall Luther himself.

Among the other objects that hit one like a hammer is one of Napoleon’s hats, taken as war booty from his abandoned carriage after his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo.

There’s an intriguing iron and terracotta statue of Bismarck, showing the Iron Chancellor as a blacksmith, standing at his anvil, crafting a united Germany.

Next to it is a copy of Marx’s Capital, volume one, presented to the museum by the author himself, who had spent many an hour working in the old reading room.

A Bauhaus cradle by Peter Keler (1922) – a design still being produced – shows how good design is good not simply because it looks good, but because it works well too.

There’s a stage design for the original production of Brecht’s Mother Courage, plus Dürer’s Rhinoceros (1515) and then a vast Meissen porcelain version (1730).

If Isaac Habreacht’s 1589 ‘portable’ Strasbourg clock is incredible, then the astronomical compendium by Johan Anton Linden (1596) is simply astonishing.

But one of my particular personal highlights was the chance to see Tilman Riemenschneider’s Four Evangelists, stunning wood carvings from 1490-92 from an artist/craftsman I’d encountered before only thanks to Andrew Graham Dixon’s The Art of Germany.

Carved from the traditional lime wood, they are quite beautiful – not idealised, as you’d expect with the Renaissance, but with real, human faces. Unbelievably, they were, at one point in their history, painted. Fortunately, that has been very carefully removed.

Riemenschneider's Four Evangelists

But Riemenschneider’s own story – whether historically accurate or not – is entirely in keeping with part of MacGregor’s aim. Legend has it that, in the German Peasants’ War of 1525, as a city councilor of Würzburg, Riemenschneider took the side of the peasants. After their defeat, he was arrested and his hands broken. What is certain is that no work of significance by him exists after that year.

How you see it – what you choose to believe – is all very much about how we construct the wider stories of which we are parts.

That Thomas Mann, for instance, chose to believe the story of an heroic Riemenschneider siding with the peasants tells you something about Mann himself – not about whether it really did happen or not.

On the way out, passing the VW Beetle once again, it occurred that one can see the same duality there too: once hailed by Hitler as ‘the people’s car’, its later links with flower power and hippies effectively made it ‘entartete auto’. Which is really rather pleasing.

If this feels in some ways a very small exhibition, it leaves you with a sense of something far, far larger. On a practical level, you will need at least 90 minutes to really get the most out of this – and on the basis of what I’ve read so far, the book is vital to really extending knowledge and understanding of the exhibits and their context.

In asking about Germans and the construction of national memory, MacGregor opens the door to asking everyone else to do the same.

In England at this time, that would be every bit as pertinent an exercise.  

• Germany: Memories of a Nation is at the British Museum until 25 January 2015

A changing Dutch interior

Still life with asparagus.

The forecast for Friday involved rain, so one of the big set-piece visits of my entire trip – to the newly-re-opened Rijksmuseum – had been scheduled for our last day in Amsterdam.

The mock-gothic building was designed by Pierre Cuypers and originally opened in 1885.

Ten years ago, it was closed for a major refurbishment and redesign, with a limited amount of the collection temporarily housed in a smaller part of the building.

On 13 April, it was finally reopened by Queen Beatrix – her last public engagement before her planned abdication and the inauguration of her son, Willem-Alexander, at the end of this month.

We’d visited before – both prior to the refurbishment was begun and since.

It has a collection of treasures that is always worth taking a look at – and not least of these is the collection of paintings from the Dutch Golden Age, a period that covered the 17th century and came at a time of huge growth for the Netherlands as a whole, in a variety of walks of life.

But the day started with breakfast at Cobra, the café near the Rijksmuseum on Museumplein: coffee and a plate each of poffertjes.

Poffertjes – not health food.

Now, let’s be clear: by no stretch of the imagination could poffertjes ever be described as health food.

These delightful pancake pillows are served warm, drenched in icing sugar and melting butter. And oh, they’re gorgeous.

It was the perfect way to set yourself up for some serious culture vultury.

I had – in a fit of sensible behaviour – booked tickets online beforehand so that we could avoid the queues that were gathering early.

Since the re-opening, the Rijksmuseum is looking as popular as the Louvre – certainly on the basis of the coach parties that are heading to it.

Medieval chalice.

On our first visit, we’d started with the gallery of painting of Dutch naval might. By the time we got to the best stuff, I was both knackered and deeply bored.

Today, the ground floor has, on one side, a collection of medieval art and objects, and the Asian collection. We headed to the former.

This isn’t just a shuffling around of exhibits, but a groundbreaking decision to display objects and paintings and sculpture together.

Apparently there have been complaints – someone wanting to see all the cabinets together, for instance. However, this arrangement gives a far rounder sense of a period than simply seeing things according to individual discipline.

On a personal level, I would probably not, for instance, have gone somewhere to look at bishops’ crosiers, but because they were in a display case in a room with paintings I looked at them, and they added to my knowledge and appreciation and experience.

And that was repeated over and over, in a whole range of periods.

The Annunciation by Tilman Riemenschneider.

If you’d told me, 10-15 years ago, that I’d be interested in matters medieval, I’d have laughed as much as if you’d told me that I’d pay to see a silent film.

The breakthrough was probably a visit to the Louvre a few years ago.

We were among the first through the doors, but the mass rush toward the Mona Lisa sent us scurrying in the opposite direction.

And this led to a magnificent collection, and names such as Rogier van der Weyden that I hadn’t thought of since my days studying art at school.

The Virgin as Mater Doloroso.

And there was hardly anyone else there, making it even more enjoyable.

Last year’s trip to Bruges hardly damaged my interest and, of course, the trip to Lübeck had involved matters medieval.

Here, there was plenty to be astonished by.

The Annunciation by Tilman Riemenschneider in Würzburg (c1485-87) is regarded as unusual because, while it shows Mary receiving the news that she is to bear the Christ child in a subdued, shocked fashion – which seems a tad heretical, to be honest.

The Virgin as Mater Doloroso, (1507-10) attributed to Pietro Torrigiano – an Italian who lived in Bruges – struck me as looking particularly naturalistic for its era: it's also an example of the excellent new lighting in the museum.

The Rijksmuseum’s collection has a number of works by Dürer – the first I’d seen ‘in the flesh’, and they are marvellous – and there was plenty more to fascinate.

There were other works that delighted me too. 

The Shop of Bookdealer Pieter Meijer.

The Shop of the Bookdealer Pieter Meijer, by Johannes Jelgerhuis, from 1820, is a delightful take on the Dutch interior.

Parts of a surtout de table, in gilt bronze, made by Karl Friederich Schinkel in 1820-25 for Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia was yet another example of the sort of object that I would not otherwise have gone out of my way to look at had the exhibits been displayed in a more traditional manner.

There were also a number of Adriaen Coorte's still life paintings of food, including Still life with asparagus from 1696.

There were other pictures that featured food too – but we'll look at that another time.

The Other Half particularly wanted to see The Milkmaid again, Johannes Vermeer’s masterpiece from around 1658.

This was the juncture at which I got a bit thrusting. Crowds were milling around, shoving; people demanding to have their friends take a picture of them next to X or Y work, and The Other Half was about to turn away.

Surtout – Prussian eagle detail.

I pretty much waded through as gaps fleetingly appeared, summoning him behind until he could get an unobscured view – at least for a few seconds; just long enough to admire the brush work and observe (I’d not noticed it before) the Delft-style tile detail on the skirting board of the room.

But the most important reason of all for another visit – from my perspective – was the chance to view, yet again, some of the extraordinary work of Rembrandt van Rijn.

We barely bothered with The Night Watch: over a decade ago, I sat down on a bench some way back from it, able to get lost in this huge canvas. There was no chance of anything like that on this visit, as a scrum some half a dozen people deep at least had formed at that end of the room.

Is it snobbery to wish that you could have a little more space to be able to view a work?

Just to be clear: I fully believe that culture should be accessible to everybody; not an exclusive thing.

Scrum at The Night Watch.

I also believe that it can enrich lives and teach us all sorts of things. We know, for instance, that teaching children a musical instrument can help them to develop other skills, including concentration – never mind introducing them to aspects of our culture.

But if you’re racing through a gallery or museum, in large parties, squealing and paying little more attention than wanting a tick-box record of your visit on your smartphone, what is the point?

And for clarity, this is not a matter of generations: the problem occurs with people of all ages.

Fortunately, the gallery containing some of Rembrandt’s less well-known works was far less packed, and here you did indeed have time to stand and look and take in what you were seeing – as did other visitors.

Born in 1606 and dead by the end of 1669, Rembrandt produced a staggering body of work in those 63 years.

Jeremiah lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem.

Two works from that particular gallery stand out for me.

First, there’s the picture of Jeremiah lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem, from 1630.

Like so many of Rembrandt’s pictures, the lighting is stunning.

The background is minimal and all the concentration is on the figure of Jeremiah and the treasures that give him no comfort. The detail on the clothing is extraordinary – as is that on the face.

This is not heroic or idealised painting of a Bible scene, but something far more down-to-earth; more recognisably real and human.

The composition, the way the main subject and background create a curve, again takes us away from the formal arrangements of so much that had gone before.

My second pick of the bunch is the Self portrait as the apostle Paul, from 1661.

Self-portrait as the apostle Paul.

The apostle that Rembrandt painted himself as can be identified by the hilt of the sword and the manuscript that the subject/artist is holding in the picture.

But although he painted a number of other people in the guise of Biblical characters, it seems quite an extraordinary act of ego to portray yourself in such a role.

Yet at the same time, the portrait is brutally honest. There is nothing glamorous here – the face is lined, the nose enlarged and with a blackhead visible, the hair grey and disordered.

And look at the eyes – a combination of questions and challenge.

In the 18th century, a taste for Dutch painting was viewed, in England, as being ‘a Whig’ one, and in France it was associated with the Enlightenment and desires for political reform.

William II of the Netherlands.

When you see how Rembrandt painted real human beings – and how others of the age painted scenes from real lives (Vermeer’s Milkmaid is just one example) – then you can see why it became associated with such ideas.

As a slight diversion on this theme, one of the paintings we saw as we wandered around was a very informal picture of William II of the Netherlands  (1792-1849), painted by Jan Adam Kruseman in 1840.

It’s an extraordinarily informal pose when we consider pictures of British monarchs, both then and right up to the present.

This was the Dutch king who, in 1848, saw what the future held as revolutionary turmoil affected the continent – and decided that the best way to avoid such unrest in Amsterdam was to initiate moves to draw up a constitution.

“I changed from conservative to liberal in one night,” he apparently said at the time.

In the process, he quite possible saved his own house.

And Beatrix herself seems to continue with that certain relaxation.

A different sort of art – salmon.

In a bookshop window, I spotted this cover. But remove the print and you’re left with an intriguing portrait.

In the light and very limited palette, it could be harking back to Rembrandt. But as with Kruseman’s portrait of her ancestor, she appears relaxed and, in this case, almost shy.

Anyway, that – in a nutshell – was the Rijksmuseum.

Chocolate mousse.

To say that it's worth a visit is an understatement. The refurbishment is a superb job – the building as a whole is now so much lighter and more pleasant to spend time in.

But if you do, then I suggest that you get your ticket online (it doesn't limit you to any one day or time).

Get there for that day's opening and head right to the second floor and The Night Watch before the coach parties arrive. Once you've seen that, then you can take a little more time to wander in the less popular galleries.

We headed back to the hotel, needing food – a late lunch. And finally, the Café Americain properly came up trumps.

Salmon, with a crusty topping, the apparently obligatory trio of cherry tomatoes and a very nice buttery sauce.

It came with more handcut chips and a bowl of salad – and was by far the best thing we’d eaten there during this short stay, and we both followed it with a chocolate mousse that came covered in piped cream that had had a torch passed over it, and sitting in a 'fruits of the forest' compote.

Cheaper when alive (Rodin's Eve next to it)

And very pleasant it was too.

So that was pretty much that for our trip.

Later, we took an evening wander, where we spotted art shops that were selling a real Bruegel, a doubly signed print by Picasso and some bronzes (second castings) of Adam and Eve by Rodin.

Which really rather left me astounded – I always assume that every single such work is already in a museum or gallery – or in a private collection certainly not likely to be spotted in the window of a gallery on a street in Amsterdam.

Or anywhere else I happen to be strolling, for that matter. 

And that’s without mentioning the work by modern, living artists that was also on display in the shops on, some of which was absolutely delightful – and, in one shop, work by living artists had a nice discount.

And then we hit Café Hevel.

But if this trip illustrated one thing, it is that it is a nonsense to claim that Amsterdam is only sex and drugs and that you cannot visit without encountering both.

And as a final note: Eurostar – your food may not be 'disgusting', but Thalys rather left you in the shade on our return. And the fare cost less.