It’s a somewhat grueling uphill path to get to the Franz Marc Museum in Kochel am See, Germany. It’s even tougher with a toddler and a pushchair. But the steep climb was worth it, enough that we even did it several times in one day.
Nestled amongst beautiful golden orange trees, the museum peeks through like a child squinting through shade. The museum is small and quaint: it looks like a bleached white Bavarian house complete with sloping roof and balconies, whilst attached to the left side is a more modern, one-storey building with spectacular wide windows.
I’ve been obsessed with Franz Marc for years, ever since I discovered him (I forget how) and did an art project on his Tower of Blue Horses in secondary school. Something about the dynamism of his animal forms, the emotions captured in the sinuey stretch of an elegant deer’s neck. And those gorgeously bold primary colours. Marc is everything I hope to be as a painter.
So, seeing his work in person, I would either be blown away or left sorely disapointed by the weight of my own expectations. Thankfully, I was blown away. The minute I stepped into the first room and caught sight of his Haystacks in the Snow and could see his brushstrokes, the careful application of layers, I was even more convinced of his genius. I wandered, I looked, of course I sketched, and I wrote. Even more than the finished paintings I loved the room that was full of his watercolour studies, sketches and studies of horses. There was a foal in one, with its mother, and in another study further around the room, two brown horses nuzzling each other with Marc’s signature exquisite rounded forms. I wonder if they are the same mother and foal, and if Marc studied them throughout the foal’s first years of life?
Surprisingly enough, the painting that struck me the most wasn’t one of Marc’s at all. I’d somehow missed it on our first visit to the museum with our two-year-old son Alfie in tow – it was a slightly more hurried and eyes-in-the-back-of-your-head walk through than the leisurely half-days we’d usually spend in a museum or gallery.
But for our second visit, my husband and I decided to divide and conquer. I’d go to the museum alone in the morning and take as much time as I wanted, while he stayed with Alfie. Then, we’d swap. And second time around of course I was able to sit and quietly observe far better. But then I entered a room with (only) a single painting in it. But before I saw it (and it’s hard to miss) I could smell it. The smell of fresh, moist oil paint hung richly in the air, it was as though the painting was still wet on the wall. Of course, it wasn’t. German painter and sculptor Anselm Keifer seems to have carved a huge abstracted field of wheat directly out of pools of paint. It is painted so thickly though that you could believe it took the lass 75 years to dry. The scale and texture of it was daunting, but the smell of the paint was hypnotic. It made painting sensual, in the literal sense.
The museum was just as beautiful looking in as out, as those windows looked out onto the stunning leafy grounds, offering views of the lake itself. It was as though the paintings were designed for the space, and the museum was designed for the hillside on which it sat. Rarely does one encounter a place as harmonious as Kochel.
