Academy of Fine Arts: Where Schwabing Began
Why is it significant?
Stand on Akademiestraße and let your eyes travel along the long, pale palace in front of you: the grand double staircase, the rows of arched windows, the figures along the roofline. Just to the south rises the triumphal arch of the Siegestor, the full stop at the end of royal Ludwigstraße.
Key Facts
| Place | Academy of Fine Arts: Where Schwabing Began |
|---|---|
| Address | Akademiestraße 2, 80799 München, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.15310, 11.58000 |
| Part of Walk | Munich's Schwabing: Blue Riders, Bohemians and Banned Poets |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand on Akademiestraße and let your eyes travel along the long, pale palace in front of you: the grand double staircase, the rows of arched windows, the figures along the roofline. Just to the south rises the triumphal arch of the Siegestor, the full stop at the end of royal Ludwigstraße. On that side of the arch, Munich bowed to its kings. On this side, it learned to misbehave.
This is the Academy of Fine Arts. It was founded in 1808, in the first years of the Kingdom of Bavaria, and in 1886 it moved into this Renaissance-style palace designed by Gottfried von Neureuther. Students poured in from all over Europe and even from America, and most of them were broke. They could not afford the elegant flats of the old town, so they rented attics and studios in the fields to the north... in a farming village called Schwabing. Within a generation, that village was the most famous artists' quarter in Germany.
Picture who climbed those steps around 1900. A Russian in his thirties called Wassily Kandinsky, who had turned his back on a career in law to paint, joined the class of the painter Franz von Stuck. In the very same class sat a Swiss music teacher's son, a fine violinist himself, named Paul Klee. Franz Marc, a Munich boy, studied here too. And a few years later came a student born in Greece to Italian parents, Giorgio de Chirico, who fell under the spell of the brooding, dreamlike paintings of Arnold Böcklin that he saw in Munich.
Glance back at the Siegestor before you go. It was built to honour the Bavarian army, wrecked by bombs in the Second World War, and restored with a new inscription: dedicated to victory, destroyed by war, urging peace. It is a fitting gate for this walk, which belongs to people who preferred pens, paintbrushes and very long evenings to parades.
People used to say that Schwabing was not really a place at all... it was a state of mind. Keep that sentence in your pocket. Now walk west along Akademiestraße and turn left into Türkenstraße, where the artists went to drink.