Türkentor & Museum Brandhorst: A Red Sphere and a Box of Crayons
Why is it significant?
Stop in front of the old stone gateway standing alone on the lawn, and peer through its arch: inside sits a huge, perfectly polished sphere of red granite, reflecting you, the sky and the trees. Behind you rises a long building whose skin seems to shimmer and change colour as you move.
Key Facts
| Place | Türkentor & Museum Brandhorst: A Red Sphere and a Box of Crayons |
|---|---|
| Address | Theresienstraße 35a, 80333 München, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.14720, 11.57380 |
| Part of Walk | Isar-Athens: Munich's Königsplatz, the Pinakotheks & the Blue Rider |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop in front of the old stone gateway standing alone on the lawn, and peer through its arch: inside sits a huge, perfectly polished sphere of red granite, reflecting you, the sky and the trees. Behind you rises a long building whose skin seems to shimmer and change colour as you move. Old Munich and new, ten steps apart.
The gate is the Türkentor, the Turks' Gate, the last surviving piece of a royal infantry barracks built in 1826 and destroyed in the Second World War. The name comes from Türkenstraße nearby, and that from an old canal. The story goes that it was dug by Turkish prisoners of war, captured in Bavaria's campaigns against the Ottomans around 1700. Since 2010 the gate has housed the Large Red Sphere by the American artist Walter De Maria... a planet parked in a doorway.
Now turn to the Museum Brandhorst, opened in 2009 and designed by the architects Sauerbruch Hutton. Its façade is made of some thirty-six thousand ceramic rods in twenty-three colours, hung in front of folded metal. Walk past it and the colours blend and shift, like an abstract painting that cannot keep still. Inside is the collection of Udo and Anette Brandhorst, with Andy Warhol and above all Cy Twombly, whose twelve-panel Lepanto cycle fills a room of its own.
And look at the name of the little path at your feet: it honours Marianne von Werefkin, a Russian painter who lived and worked in Munich and belonged to the circle around Kandinsky that led to the Blue Rider. The whole walk has been threaded with these quiet connections.
You began at a garden where three thousand paintings burned, and you end at a gate that guards a red planet. In between: a king who dreamed of Athens, a Faun who never wakes, a woman who hid Kandinsky, and a façade that keeps its scars. That is Munich's art quarter... not a showroom, but a city arguing with its own past, one museum at a time.