Lenbachhaus: The Painter Prince and the Blue Rider
Why is it significant?
Stand at the garden railings and take in the villa: ochre walls, a loggia, terracotta roofs, a little piece of Tuscany dropped into Maxvorstadt. Beside it, a newer wing glows in a skin of brass-coloured metal tubes. Two centuries of taste, side by side, and they are quietly arguing.
Key Facts
| Place | Lenbachhaus: The Painter Prince and the Blue Rider |
|---|---|
| Address | Luisenstraße 33, 80333 München, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.14690, 11.56350 |
| Part of Walk | Isar-Athens: Munich's Königsplatz, the Pinakotheks & the Blue Rider |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand at the garden railings and take in the villa: ochre walls, a loggia, terracotta roofs, a little piece of Tuscany dropped into Maxvorstadt. Beside it, a newer wing glows in a skin of brass-coloured metal tubes. Two centuries of taste, side by side, and they are quietly arguing.
The villa was built between 1887 and 1891 by Gabriel von Seidl for Franz von Lenbach, the painter prince of Munich. Lenbach painted emperors, popes and, dozens of times, Otto von Bismarck. He was rich, famous and very traditional. In 1924 his widow sold the house to the city, and from 1929 it became the municipal gallery.
And this is the delicious irony: the house of Munich's most conservative painter now holds the world's greatest collection of the artists who blew conventional painting apart. In 1911 Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc founded Der Blaue Reiter, the Blue Rider, and in 1912 they published an almanac under that name. Colour was set free, horses turned blue, and Kandinsky drifted towards pure abstraction.
The collection came here because of a woman who kept a secret for decades. Gabriele Münter, painter and Kandinsky's partner until 1914, kept a huge body of his works and her own in her house in Murnau. Under the Nazis, who denounced such art as degenerate, she hid them, and they survived. In 1957, for her eightieth birthday, she gave them to the Lenbachhaus... around ninety oil paintings by Kandinsky and hundreds of works on paper, plus her own.
Inside, look for Franz Marc's Blue Horse of 1911, young and unafraid. Marc was killed at Verdun in 1916, and his friend August Macke had already fallen in 1914; the movement did not survive the war. The newer wing by Foster and Partners opened in 2013 to give these pictures more light. Now walk back across Königsplatz to its southern side, to the temple with the Corinthian columns.