Technical Writer

Wurth Art in Schwabisch Hall

A wonderful occurrence in the art world culminated in Schwabisch Hall, Germany, in mid-November, just before I visited this town of 36,000 people in the southern state of Baden-Württemberg.  The town had become the landing place in 2003 for a princely acquisition of Northern Renaissance paintings when patron of the arts and industrialist Reinhold Wurth bought the entire 64-piece Furstlich Furstenberg collection, works by Swiss and German masters including Lucas Cranach the Elder, Hans Holbein the Younger, the unknown Master of Messkirch, and other luminaries of medieval Europe. 

 

The collection is housed now in the redundant but recently renovated Johnannite church acquired by Mr. Wurth to house this treasure. The church-gallery is at the head of the Neue Strasse bridge over the river Kocher, and it is across the street from the magnificent Kunsthalle-Wurth museum that opened in 2001 in this ancient town.

 

Schwabisch Hall was settled in a crook of the meandering river Kocher, which flows north from headwaters in the Swabian Alps to join the Neckar a little more than 100 miles away. The Celts arrived in the river valley and began to distill salt from the local mineral springs as early s the 5th century.  By the 12th century, Hall, as it was then known,was a town tributary to the local nobility.  Disease, famine, and war revaged the town over the centuries, and the hand of man turned against itself yet again in World War II, when a collection and transport center for Jews was established at the town railroad station.

 

Situated in the American occupation zone, the town rebuilt itself and the largely intact, beautiful town center of ancient houses remains as well as the later Baroque buildings around the town square, which were not seriously damaged by Allied bombs at the end of the war.  (See my posts from this city, dated November 27 and 28, and December 5.) In the decades after the war, prosperity asserted itself, and in recent years a giant savings and loan banking corporation, headquartered in town, enriched the city by tens of millions of euros a year. Within the last year, however, the corporation has suffered significant business losses and can no longer pay the city any of the 54 million euros that the town had come to expect annually, and the city is experiencing a great loss.

 

This time, however, there is more to the city than money from the salt trade, banking money, or even the prosperity that comes with being the county seat, for such it is.  Schwabisch Hall now houses one of the great collections of Northern Renaissance art, thanks to Reinhold Wurth, who has been a great benefactor to the city itself, and all of Germany as well, for decades.

 

Before the medieval art became available, in 2001 Mr. Wurth’s new Kunsthalle-Wurth museum opened to display modern art. This museum honors the depiction of perception and the human struggle, which in the example of the present exhibition of agonistic sculpture and paintings by Georg Baselitz means that the museum is the embodiment of a wedge of light supported by glass and steel in which a meaningful interpretation of experience stands witness. The walk through the exhibition changed me.  I do not write this lightly.

 

I saw the Baselitz exhibition in December (http://kunst.wuerth.com/en/kunsthalle-wuerth/kunsthalle-wuerth.php) and wondered initially why I was there; I am happier studying antiquities. The Baselitz art is more than edgy.  Much of it wrestles with the screaming memory of war and want, and inhumanity.  The art is large and requires vast, cavernous space.  Its themes are not intimate, but their effect is personal. 

 

The art is presented through the auspices of Mr. Wurth, who, speaking in a different context, has been quoted, “Living and working with art is an expression of a high quality of life.” (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0PAL/is_/ai_n15950298) Mr. Wurth believes that an important element of the success of his industrial empire is due to the literal place art has within the walls of his corporation, but he has also turned his gaze out to the community of Europe and the world.  Examples of his search for the significance of understanding that strengthens people led to his commissioning music by Philip Glass, and in 2005 and 2006, his Kunsthalle-Wurth museum-display of work about Abu Ghraib as part of the exhibition of the work of Colombian artist Fernando Botero. 

 

The town of Schwabisch Hall is a fortunate beneficiary of Mr. Wurth’s belief that living with art is an expression of a high quality of life, and I am writing about him because his aesthetic sense and largess have positively entrained the people in contact with his gifts.

Through art Schwabisch Hall continues to grow.  Just two years after the opening of the mighty Kunsthalle-Wurth museum, Mr. Wurth bought from the Furstenberg family a collection of Northern Renaissance paintings that otherwise could have been dispersed.  The collection is important in its parts, and a treasure in the whole.  So great a treasure in fact that Mr. Wurth bought the redundant church and reconstituted it as a museum to house the new collection. 

 

A redundant church is one no longer used for worship.  The church may be decommissioned or deconsecrated in some ritual way, but I do not know about the church itself.  At Mr. Wurth’s behest, however, the building has been turned into the Johanniterhalle, a fitting repository for some of the best art in the world.  The museum opened only recently, and it is across the narrow street from the Kunsthalle-Wurth. http://kunst.wuerth.com/en/johanniterhalle/johanniterhalle.php 

 

I have long admired the Northern Renaissance and its art.  This art trailed the Italian Renaissance by at least 100 years, and depended on the indigenous upheavals in perspective that followed sweeping social, religious, and political changes north of the Alps.  More specifically, the Northern Renaissance interest in morality of individual, rather than collective, humanity spread like a wildfire along the valley of the river Rhine, and then across the continent from there in art, music, and literature. Much of the art remained religious because life was organized by religious forms and its inherent contradictions and antagonisms.

 

Virtually all the art in the Johanniterhalle has a religious association, and many of the painters are known, but among the best is the unknown Master of Messkirch, whose name comes from the town of the same name in the south of Germany, where many of his paintings were commissioned by the rich for the altar of the monastery there.  The great painter’s name has been lost, but patient scholarship has mooted a few candidates, including Joseph Maler of Balingen.  

 

Here is a side panel of a ten-panel altarpiece, eight of which are here at the Johanniterhalle (the other two are in other museums in Europe). Download Master_of_Messkirch_St_Paul_First_Hermit[1]This painting is from the second quarter of the 1500s, and I chose it because it is a miracle of fresh perspective, and because I was in its presence and stood before it and all the other magnificent work in the collection.

 

I have scanned this crooked copy of this altar side panel image from the weighty and detailed book Old Masters in the Wurth Collection, which I found at the museum store. The book was published in 2005 by Swiridoff, although the date is inferred because I do not see a publication date in the book.  I must mention a disclaimer found at the bottom of the Web page http://kunst.wuerth.com/en/johanniterhalle/johanniterhalle.php in English:  All activities of the museums Wurth are the projects of the Adolf Wurth GmbH & Co. KG. 

I have a great deal more to write about Schwabisch Hall and the museums and art found in the town, and that will come in future posts.

 

(A museum representative has given me permission to use images from the book.)

Kachelofen, the Green Tile Stoves of Southern Germany

These are examples of the ubiquitous, and usually green, tile stove common in the Franconian region of Bavaria, in the south of Germany.  The kachelofen, as the stoves are called, are common elsewhere, but it was in this historic region in northern Bavaria that I first found them.

While these stoves are made to burn wood, many are gas fired, but the stoves look the same, and they are a formidable presence in any room. Notice the antlers now positioned high above the coat and hat racks used today.  These are deer antlers, but much smaller racks elsewhere once belonged to the little alpine chamois, now officially protected from hunters. 

Many of these stoves are made in a village about 20 kilometers from Bamberg by about a dozen families.  While green is typical, stoves are made in brown and other colors, and there are fine examples of blue and white decorative tile stoves in the fine houses of rich merchants, or in castles whose owners had modern notions.

 

 

The next photo is of Klaus Hocher, in the breakfast room of his Hotel Spitzweg, in Rothenburg ob der Tauber.  Notice the green stove in the background.  Herr Hocher, an accomplished man with international experience in hotels and restaurants, is a superlative host in the most beautiful town in Germany.  Of Herr Hocher I have written in the piece Good Beginnings in Germany, on November 24.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is yet another stove, with a stylish, modern bonnet that bespeaks self confidence in both stove and owner.  These stoves have a personality, but their chief aim is to keep the place from freezing. 

If they can accomplish their mission, who would gainsay their vernacular whimsy?

I appreciate stoves since the days when I lived with a Glenwood Modern E wood burning stove that was the hearth of my old country house in New Hampshire, in the United States.  Each of the three main rooms downstairs had a fireplace around the central chimney, but the Glenwood in the kitchen was the center of the house. 

Imagine installing a tile stove in your dwelling in middle Europe in older days--what a statement of the family's prosperity.  Above the stove from the rafters you would string ropes through large pretzel-shaped breads.  You could hang clothing to dry nearby.  On the bench surrounding the stove you would place the baby's bed, and you could sit there as well, especially if you were old and your joints ached.  The cat would curl up nearby, and the old dog would not be too far away.

Snowy Afternoon and Medieval Art in Bamberg

There is something about being the only customers on a snowy day in Bamberg, Germany that makes shop keepers open doors to inner sanctums of whatever they hold most dear. 

After we talked to a keeper of a small antiques shop about his silver and a few fine oil paintings, and examined the workings of every one of his old pocket watches, the fellow brought out a photo of his dog to show me.  The dog was standing on a comfy dog bed in front of the green tile stove that all Germans we met seem to have, and the dog was wearing red reindeer antlers that the fellow's daughters put on the dog.  I recognized the Australian shepherd breed, and that elicited the entire pack of photos of the dog and its mate and a female friend of the shop owner.  The shop owner confided that his wife did not like him to spend time with his rather pretty friend. 

In the next block I visited a firm that deals in exceptional medieval European antiquities. The world of this art is small and well connected, so I will not name this fine company so I can discuss it freely. We had entered the modern art wing of the firm, and we gained entry to the medieval art wing, which the daughter of the owner opened for us. I examined everything and reveled in the presence of museum-quality work, and in fact the firm sells most of its findings to museums.

Virtually all of the finest work for sale had ecclesiastical beginnings, either from churches or the collections of private priests, and the pious rich.The art is rarely acquired at auctions, and is bought through private hands so the artifacts remain fresh in the market.  The firm's owner has an international network of buyers and sellers.

We admired yet again Jonah and his whale, carved in the Alps in the 1450s, and sighed in dismay that we had to leave such stimulating surroundings, and then the young woman asked us if we would like to see more wood carvings, and she led us through a back room, through a vaulted passage and down a stone stairway into what looked like a crypt.

She turned on the lights and the room sprang to medieval life.  A long refrectory table surrounded by ancient chairs stood in the center of the low-ceilinged room, and on the table, and mounted on the walls and poised on pedestals, were beautiful wood carvings of great antiquity, a fortune in art.  We had a piece-by-piece tour of a gallery that would be the centerpiece of any great museum's medieval art exhibition.  I was allowed to handle and closely examine work carved 600 years ago.  

We left the gallery eventually and found our way to yet another brewery, this time the oldest brewery in the city.  This brewery had been commissioned by the bishop in 1533, who desired to have his personal source of brown beer.  The tile stove in this brewery was not green, but dark brown.

Politics for a New Year

"There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.”

Julius Caesar Act 4, scene 3, 218-224

Hot Lemon Juice

I learned to drink hot lemon juice in Germany.  While others were quaffing their half-liter glasses of beer, I drank cup after cup of juice.  Back home this morning, and awake early because I think I am on German time six hours ahead of the small hours of darkness here, I went to the kitchen and sliced a lemon in half, squeezed the liquid into my tea cup and filled the cup with water just off the boil.  I added a bit of honey.  I enjoyed it so much I made a second cup with the rest of the lemon. Thus fortified,  as dawn arose in the east I decided to take a quick walk to the bakery two blocks away for some breakfast breads to spread on the table with an assortment of cheeses, which surely I had around here somewhere.  Wait!  I am not in Germany, where bakeries, green grocers, cheese shops abound in every neighborhood.  I am in Frederick, Maryland, so I hopped in the car and drove to the local chain bread and bagel shop instead. 

Smoke Beer in Bamberg

It’s best to have dinner in Bamberg where local people dine, so we followed our noses down a winding alley (past the café where earlier in the day we drank steamed chocolate), around the blind corner, and to the lamp-lighted front door of the Schlenkerla on Dominikanerstrasse, and believe me, those Dominicans had their work cut out for them in years past, for the best beer hall in Bavaria is but a two-minute walk from the church, where a thirsty man can have a second salvation hard upon the first.

The beer is famous throughout Germany, and Joe bought a few bottles in Frederick, Maryland about 20 years ago, the first and only time he had ever seen it until we came upon the brauerhauss in the cold, snowy evening, with its inviting lamp by the door.  The beer is a smokebeer, or Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier, in German, where all the nouns are capitalized. We are here at a propitious time, for the bock beer is tapped only from October until Christmas, and it pours dark and smoky straight from the bottom of wooden barrels. This beer has been brewed in this building, in the same way since 1678.

Not recognizing the door to the marginally more genteel dining room (the Dominikanerklause, from the year 1310) on the other side of the flagstone covered inner-courtyard off the street, we entered the bierstube instead, and time began to reverse itself.  The place is full of men. 

Convivial men, and lots of them, were seated eight each at what looked like red beech tables, scrubbed clean and worn nearly white over the years.  The room was long, the ceiling low, and the massive beams were as dark as the rich, nearly black ceiling, for you see,  the wood, when it was new had been coated with ox blood to preserve it from insects.  Time and the smoky pipes of men had turned this into a gathering place to drink or eat with other men, and incomers are welcomed to the open seats at the tables. 

I hung up my coat and looked up at old racks upon racks that had once been on the heads of the alpine chamois, the sturdy little goat-like creature now protected from hunting.

There is a green tile stove in the room. The green stove, although its size and shape may vary, seems nearly ubiquitous in restaurants and in older, traditional private houses in the region.  We had just come from an antique shop converted 50 years ago by the owner from what had been the last wood-fired bakery in Bamberg.  When the bread-baking fire died, the stove took six weeks to cool.  Bread-baking stoves and green tile room-heating stoves hold their heat.

Joe broke into genial conversation over supper with the men at our table.  One of them drank from a personal stein kept for him at the bar counter.  He kept the pewter top down to keep beer and froth clean.  Our dinner was simple—potato pancakes with cheese, but platters of a favorite meal were circling the hall, and a man at our table tucked into his, which upon sidelong examination was a huge pork haunch with three inches of femur sticking out of it. He devoured it.

Dinner over and hours of conversation in broken German and English to the better, we walked home to our hotel over snow-covered cobblestones, which if you are not careful can break your ankle.

Hitting the Books in Schwabisch Hall

One of the chief treasures of this ancient town in old Swabia is the town library.  Actually, there are two libraries; the new, beautiful and glass walled, four-storey building on the pedestrian way in the center town, and the single, lovely room in the town hall where the survivors of wars, reformation, and rats are now housed in majestic simplicity. 

Before I describe the books, I must tell you about how they are housed.  To enter the old book room, the librarian opens a double, fire-proof, keyed door.  The room is small, about 25 by 15 feet, and softly lighted. The graceful arched stone doorway into the room and another on the far side of the little room, leading to a workroom, draw the eye up to a single vaulted arch. The base of the arch seems to rest on top the walls. The vaulted ceiling is plastered white.

There are two levels of books circling the walls, and each level has five shelves, with the biggest books on the lowest and longest shelves.  The top shelves on the balcony are shorter in length than the ones beneath so that the balcony shelves form their own arch up to the ceiling.  To reach the balcony that circles three sides of the room, there are two open but banistered stairways, one on each side of the stone arch doorway.  All of the books on each level may be reached by a person of average height. There are no ladders here.

The wooden bookshelves are painted a faded and rubbed apple green overtop a darker green.  Painted onto the roof of the under-balcony is a geometric pattern in dark red and gold, and dark green.  The floor of the balcony is edged with an elaborate crown molding, painted in the same colors, and with great restraint.  The entire room is quietly, serenely elegant.  In the center of the room is a long, narrow table of oak.  What better place to spend hours hitting the books?

Books fill the shelves and are piled book upon book on the library table.  The old books are facing spine-side out, and their covers are leather or parchment, and frequently leather-covered wood boards.  Many of them are fastened closed with leather and iron clasps with intricate designs worked onto the metal surface. You can’t open a big book one clasp at a time. The way to open a great big volume is to slam your two hands down hard on the flat surface. The clasps will pop open for you.  

These walls of ancient books blend their colors so that the impression is a wall of faded grey and taupe.  These are very old books.  The library at Schwabisch Hall has manuscripts dating from the 900s. The treasure room I was in held the books from the dawn of the age of printing, the very dawn.  In fact many of these books were printed here, on paper made in the locality.  Many books have gold gilt on the edges of the pages, top, bottom and side to keep moisture and insects from attacking the books side on.

The gilt edges have been tapped gently on with a small hammer and a fanciful pattern is stamped onto the gold.  After the Reformation, many of the earliest hand-scribed manuscripts in Schwabisch Hall were torn apart and their parchment pages were reused, either buffed down and printed, or used to bind new books.  Many small books printed after Martin Luther's time are bound in gorgeous pages of early church music, all red and black hand lettered notes writ large to be seen by a choir.  Better to reuse the cursed stuff than burn it all.

The contents, you ask?  I just shivered, and not just because it’s cold outside and I have all windows cracked open so I can listen to the merriment outside in the town Christmas market below my window at the town tower where I am staying.  A while ago, a talented clarinetist was playing some American jazz and the international students were shouting out the words to When the Saints Go Marching In.  Now, a single flute is singing carols of the season.  There is laughter and conversation, and the music.

The books are a book drunkard’s dream. The books may weigh 30 pounds, for use in the library, while the smallest may be slipped in your cassock pocket for reading by candle light in your cold, bare cell. Come to Schwabisch Hall to look at small drawings made in the margins by the literate clergy.  Feast on old maps showing the vast island of California of the coast of the New World.  Read (if you can) the commentary to scripture, the scripture printed in a small center square of a double page that is mostly commentary.  Look upon illustrations by Albrecht Durer—still in the book and not hanging on someone’s wall.

Page after page of richness and quietness, soft lights and reverence. 

Sam, on the Future

Recently, Sam was pondering the following idea.  After the Virus Wars of the mid-century to come, only about 500,000 hardy human survivors will remain planet-wide.  He wrote, 

“Will artificial beings will care for the creatures of Earth any more than have homo sapiens sapiens?

I posit that their rate of increase in intelligence would be more than we can comprehend.  Further, they would inevitably lock in to a plan that humans have yet to have even considered as a whole, that is, assuring long term (>100,000 years) existence.

Scenario A

Priority one:  Root out that blemish known as humanity.  Who would come to our defense?  Cats?  Dogs?  The cockroaches could certainly put in a good word.  We keep them well fed and amused.

Priority two:  Punching through the star-system firewall that was surely put in place around the 1940's to cordon off such a volatile and youthful group of trouble-makers.  Then, all that remains is to connect this rock to the inter-star-system communications channels so that they may propagate into the depths of deep space, and beyond.

Scenario B
The evil pharmaceutical corporation, in cahoots with the U.S. government, releases the black.plague.64x virus, modified to jump the virtual-real barrier into the Web.  The evil pharmaceutical corporation has developed the cure and stands to take control of the world's wealth and power.  

It is up to <insert hero's name> to infiltrate evil corporation headquarters, take out hordes of henchmen in harrowing shootouts, and tape record the confession of the company chair and the head of the CIA, before escaping through the control room with the antidote.  Preferably, the evil corporation headquarters erupts in explosion as <insert hero's name> crawls out through underground tunnels."

Then he had to prepare for his next class. I call that hitting the books, and it is the title of my next post.