by Brooks Riley
For years I lived in the Kunstareal, an area of Munich surrounded by museums, great museums, the kind that people travel thousands of miles to visit—the Lenbachgalerie with its Blue Rider painters, the Alte Pinakothek with its Dürers, Brueghels, Rubens, the Neue Pinakothek with its 19th century European painters—to name just a few. I lived less than 5 minutes away from 10 museums and could explore the history of art from Greek and Roman times to the present day, as easily as I could pop around to the corner store.
When I first moved to the neighborhood I thought, ‘ How convenient, I can go anytime.’ ‘Anytime’ came to mean ‘almost never’. I suffered from the museum variation of the Parkinson principle: If work fills the amount of time allotted to it, then exploring the riches at my doorstep would take more than a decade.
It’s not that I had never been to any of these museums: On visits to Munich in my teens and twenties, I had gone to the Alte Pinakothek several times, long before I lived around the corner. I knew my favorite painter could be found there. I knew how emotional I could get, standing in front of the self-portrait from 1500, convinced that Dürer had painted it for me and me alone. He was looking at me, wasn’t he? Such narcissism thrives in the solitary contemplation of a painting, but the fear that I might be wrong wasn’t what kept me away. And my avoidance was never a case of ‘been there, done that’ but more of ‘want to, will do. . . whenever’.
It turns out that during all those years I stayed away, one of my favorite Dürer works, the Paumgartner Alterpiece triptych, was also absent, the victim of a sulfuric acid attack in 1988 by a deranged pensioner. Restoring the painting took 21 years. Had I known, how I would have missed the antithetical Paumgartner brothers who frame the central panel: the older, frumpy Stephan as an ineffectual St. George (the dragon at his feet looks still alive), the younger cocky Lukas as St. Eustace, upstaging his brother in both regalia and attitude. This gentle dose of Cain and Abel exposes an intriguing aspect of Dürer’s work, which is full of asides and painterly winks, among them, surely, the perspective oddities of the triptych’s central panel.
Dürer, Kandinsky, Friedrich, Schinkel and Co. were my neighbors all those years, waiting for me to drop by on my way to buy milk. They cried out to me in the night, “When are you coming to visit us?” The more they nagged, the more I resisted and the guiltier I felt, as though they were parents awaiting a long overdue visit from an only child.