GERMANY’S GRAND DESIGNS

An international orgy of museum building is afoot in hamlets and great cities from Glasgow to Los Angeles. In Europe, France is remodeling the Louvre and transforming the old Gare d’Orsay railway station into a showplace for 19th-Century art. England is expanding London’s Tate Gallery and planning a satellite repository in Liverpool. On and on.

This frenzy of construction is such an inescapable cultural phenomenon it has provoked widespread speculation. What does it all mean? Well, for one thing, it reflects the glowing energy of the muse of architecture. Since that discipline broke with an arid and senile International Modernist doctrine, it positively has vibrated with witty, inventive designs unabashedly flaunting rich materials and mordantly intelligent reformulations of past and present.

“Whoopee,” said Architecture (although in modulated and gentlemanly accents). “Let there be Corinthian columns outlined in neon, plastic pediments, aluminum architraves and cloisters with mirrored ceilings. Let there be Steamship Gothic, Baroque Bauhaus, Variegated Vernacular and Regency Pop.”

The prudent observer sometimes gets the feeling that we are going to eventually blush at some of the fevered fruits of this renaissance but, in the meantime, we see one compelling building after the next. Half the time, getting back to that, they are museums. Why? Why? Why?

It is certainly of general significance that the absolute epicenter of the museum stampede is West Germany. According to one report, the country will build some 30 new museums by 1990. Perfectly sound and sober reasons are offered for this. When Germany started pulling itself out of the rubble of World War II, certain imperatives determined the order of rebuilding. First, there had to be shelter, hospitals, schools, markets, offices and so forth. As soon as possible, more ceremonial and recreational edifices such as churches and theaters erupted. Finally came museums devoted to art and just about every other imaginable topic from cinema to the postal service. (Germans are rabid museum lovers and attendance runs high.)

This hierarchy of rebuilding reveals a general truth. Museums are the maraschino cherry on the cultural sundae, the diamond earrings above the rainment of civic pride, the Phi Beta Kappa key on the full tummy of intellectual attainment. The new museums are being called the nondenominational cathedrals of the modern world, but they are more like the hood ornament on its Mercedes-Benz.

In our yuppified, consumer-oriented, prestige-conscious society, the museum renaissance makes perfectly good sense as a reflection of both its attainments and its insecurities. In Germany, these new museums must have special symbolic significance as talismans of a devastated nation finally redeemed and reintegrated into the cultural mainstream, amenities fluttering in the breeze.

What astonishes the visitor, however, is the apparent seriousness with which the possession of one of these new museums is viewed. There seems to be something so crucial about having one that they materialize in towns that don’t seem to need them either because they already have several perfectly good museums (German museums are already among the best in the world) or because--to a vulgar American--they are too small to need one. Cologne, for example, is building a rather lumpish and controversial edifice to house the contemporary holdings of chocolate magnate Peter Ludwig plus a German Expressionist and Old Master collection. It’s an impressive cache, but it already looks OK if slightly cramped in its present quarters in the nearby Wallraf-Richartz Museum. Insist Cologne needs a civic trademark and you will be reminded that the museum is next door to one of the most glorious Northern Gothic cathedrals in the world.

Even more surprising is the case of Monchengladbach, a town of 150,000 a scant hour’s train ride from Cologne. It has become home to a museum for contemporary art. The contents of the Stadtishes Museum Abteiberg might still be controversial in an American town of similar proportions, but its somewhat lapidary building by Austrian Hans Hollein would be a downright scandal.

It all appears to testify to Europe’s fabled cultural maturity, but there is more to it than that. These cities seem to regard a new museum as something very like a necessity, a testament to present--as contrasted with past--glory and manifest proof that they belong to the free world of individual creativity rather than that ominous totalitarianism lurking just across the border.

The museum infestation may be a sign of healthy cultural fulfillment or the hectic blush of fevered decadence. Either way, it represents values that are more easily graspable through the vivid reality of architecture and the entertaining ingenuity of design than through the murkier values of the more personal visual arts. It is certainly a sign of the times that two of the most talked-of new museum buildings--both in Frankfurt--are not devoted to painting and sculpture at all. Richard Meier’s Museum fur Kunsthandwerk houses a collection of decorative art. Just up the street on Frankfurt’s “Museum Row,” Oswald Mathias Ungers recycled Deutsches Architekturmuseum is the first European museum devoted exclusively to architecture.

By now, quite a lot has been written on these structures. Art magazines have printed long articles, the institutions themselves have monographs and Rizzoli issued a valuable book titled “New Museum Buildings in the Federal Republic of Germany.” The buildings have been analyzed for social significance and evaluated for aesthetic worth but scarcely a word has been said about what is in them, whether or not it is any good and how it is served by its much heralded surroundings.

Well, as it turns out, the art collections are quite splendid, even though they do give a visiting American a bit of a start. It seems that acquisitive Germans did a better job of buying American art of the ‘60s than we did. In fact, one of the motives behind the museum building is certainly the need to provide public showcases for contemporary collections put together by Bernard Sprengel, Karl Stroeher and the sometimes-controversial Peter Ludwig. Only a fraction of his encyclopedic treasure is on view, but even that includes everything from Roy Lichtenstein’s “Takka-Takka” to Ed Keinholz’s massive “Portable War Memorial.” (Seeing an American’s satire on the United States in a German museum sets up expressive vibrations that can only be described as funky.)

Probably even more impressive are the museum’s collective holdings in German Expressionist and other classic modern art. Despite Hitler’s proscription and sale of this art as “degenerate” in the ‘30s, the Germans repatriated their cultural patrimony. Despite the fact that some 300 examples of it are currently on loan to a landmark survey of German Modernism at London’s Royal Academy, there is so much left to see at home that the visitor fails to notice a gap. Good grief, there’s Otto Dix’s tightly woven master portrait of his parents right here in Hannover’s Spengler Museum right next to a baker’s dozen of fine Max Beckmann’s. The richness of the rest is somehow summed up by a German 10-year-old who skids to a stop in front of a canvas, pronouncing an awed “Paul Klee!” in the same delighted accents an American child would apply to the sight of Tom Selleck.

The new museums tend to emphasize new art, but at least two of them--Stuttgart’s Neue Staatsgalerie and Cologne’s incomplete Ludwig Museum--are linked to Old Master collections that provide historical setting as well as their own charms. Appropriately, the art leans to the German from ecstatically carved medieval altarpieces to indigenous Impressionists like Max Liebermann. However, any hint of xenophobia is constantly contradicted. It is splendid in Stuttgart to cross from the new to the old wing and find the collection introduced by Sir Edward Burne-Jones’ Perseus cycle.

Of the repositories taken in, the Neue Staatsgalerie by Stirling and partner Michael Wilford is the most certainly an architectural masterpiece. It is unfortunately located on the freeway-like Konrad-Adenauer-Strasse but its exuberant muscularity quickly overcomes the deficit. It lies long and low, rendered in bands of carmel-colored travertine and sandstone with a double-ramped entrance. A roughly “U-shaped” plan is centered on a deep circular-drum sculpture court festooned with hanging ivy and camp-erotic sculpture of female nudes. The galleries style has been compared to that of German Neo-Classical architect Karl Friedrich von Schinkel but the whole has an Italianate enthusiasm. Somehow Rome’s Castle San Angelo swims to mind.

Stirling took this brilliant paraphrase of a traditional building and jazzed it up with Beaubourg-like bright pipe-ramps, immense funnels and curving giant greenhouse mirrored windows with deep lime-colored mullions, a color he also uses on the lobby floor. Some find it an exotic affront, but it’s the same attention-getting hue worn by Stuttgart’s motorcycle cops.

Occasionally Stirling borders on the cute, as with sunken overscaled Doric columns in the court or stones that have “fallen” from the front facade revealing the parking garage in the manner of Best & Co. illusionism. But his humor is intelligent and infectious so we go happily along with its kicky drive.

The basic heresy of the new museums is that they claim--or rather reclaim--the right of architecture to assert itself. For the past two decades, museum architecture has been cowed into neutrality and self-effacement. Obviously, architecture possesses its own eloquence but needs to stop short of the, say, adversarial relationship set by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim.

The Stirling-Wilford Stuttgart structure endearingly has it both ways. Having had a vigorous work-out with the exterior, lobby, theater and cafe the architects sensibly backed off and produced an enfilade of traditional, beautifully proportioned white galleries. At the moment, the permanent collection is mainly out of sight to make room for a big Francis Bacon retrospective (reviewed in last Sunday’s Calendar), but there is no reason to suppose that the museum’s strong holdings in classic modernist art will look any less splendid than Bacon’s haunting pictures.

Up in Frankfurt, another new museum is attracting scarcely less attention and is of particular interest to visitors from Los Angeles. Its architect, Richard Meier, landed the prestigious commission to build the Getty Trust’s new museum-and-think-tank complex in Brentwood over the next decade. The architect has said he will do something quite uncharacteristic in California, but one can’t resist the feeling that Frankfurt is somehow a prelude to Lotusland.

On the banks of the river Main, Meier’s Museum fur Kunsthandwerk hovers like an apparition of a girl in summer white who might at any moment vanish in the sunlight. It is a building of astonishing, even disturbing, sensitivity. Meier thinks of himself as a neo-modernist, updating and refining the vocabulary of the Bauhaus and Le Corbousier.

Unquestionably this building is the ne plus ultra of exquisite minimalism. Its huge stretches of white-mullioned windows and crisp rectilinear walls clad in enameled aluminum have been calculated to the last scintilla. The building is large and rises three stories but it appears utterly weightless. It is Bauhaus Rococo and comes across like the architectural formulation of California’s light-and-space art, achieving a sense of breathless lift through sensory deprivation.

A certain camp-stylish edge that haunted his High Museum in Atlanta has been tamed to invisibility despite the fact that he employs his familiar vocabulary of ramps, marine balustrades, and see-through gallery spaces. The principle quality of this building is a mannered sensitivity pitched at such a scale that the whole thing barely stands on the ground.

One object of this cranked up regard is a solicitude for he original museum building, the graceful 1803 Villa Metzler. Meier derived his proportions from its cubical structure and has surrounded it at a distance like a great hovering nurse. When he does touch the old house, it is with a glassed bridge that is surely one of the most gracious and graceful existing examples of modernism bowing to tradition.

Refined manners are classed as a virtue, but the Museum fur Kunsthandwerk shows us how they set up their own rather authoritarian rules. The matter of the museum is an encyclopedic, 30,000-work collection of decorative arts reputed to be among the finest in the world.

The first batch of it encountered is a selection of Art Nouveau furniture and objects that makes you want to promote Meier to Head Magician in charge of bringing out the pure art in the objet d’art. A pair of bisque female figures in the manner of Alphonse Mucha are as lyrical as a Watteau designed by Mercedes-Benz. Encounter the Medieval section, however, and you are not so sure. Lumpy brass and splintering wood looks ponderous. Maybe not. Then the soaring sonorities of a particularly fine Baroque section restore your faith in Wizard Meier.

Finally, you realize that an apparent unevenness in the collection is a question of affinity. When the art marches to the same aesthetic drum as the architect, it looks great. When not, not.

Then, too, there is a question of scale. The specter of Meier in a white tuxedo keeps running ahead of us waving a linen hanky with grand and courtly gestures. Soaring atriums, peek-a-boo galleries and generous swaths of landscape seen through glass lend such importance to “the museum experience” that one is left with a feeling that the building is overscaled in relation to the art.

So much said, it is still true that the Museum fur Kunsthandwerk is a very fine building indeed. Its anxiety for perfection may make one a bit nervous. It may be just a shade off as a showcase but in an odd way that circumstance is encouraging for Meier’s Getty project. The Frankfurt building does not look like a museum. Its slightly meandering design and park setting with neo-mod arches and fountains looks like a school, think-tank or high-tech laboratory. That is potentially perfect for the Getty airie with its conservation and humanities institute.

Of course, the Getty also is building a museum up there. Maybe Stirling. . . .

Achtung .

We are in Frankfurt approaching the one museum where there is no question of nit-picking about appropriateness of package to contents. It is Oswald Mathias Ungers’ landmark Deutsches Architekturmuseum. The building is about architecture. Ungers gutted a traditional villa, wrapped the street level with a rusticated block arcade, enclosed the back garden court with a curved translucent roof and turned the central atrium into a monumental toy house.

One might argue that this and other conceits are a bit too coy or that his Chinese-box concept makes the museum a trifle too maze-like but one cannot deny it’s popularity or aptness as a home for architectural exhibitions. It even displays the profound good sense to have a large projection and video room to ease the always-sticky business of trying to understand architecture from models, plans and photos.

Das ist gut .

Let’s get to something were there is some room to grouse. Whats the good of being critics if we can’t kvetch? Well, the Sprengel Museum in Hannover is not a very good target. It is open in plan, and modern in the collaborative design by Peter and Ursula Trint and Dieter Quast. It displays a tendency of these museums to be fortress-like. An attached restaurant has a vaguely tacky air, but that’s OK. We’ve already suggested its very solid collection which does not fail to acknowledge Hannover’s native son, Kurt Schwitters. The Sprengel suffers only from being a decent and modest museum that is bigger than it looks.

Monchengladbach is another matter. Here, somewhat submerged in a hill overlooking a lovely park, is Hans Hollein’s Museum Abteiberg. It makes a mini-skyline of its own with a mirrored aluminum tower, sawtoothed skylights, a glass shaft, an aluminum-clad room cantilevered over the hillside. There are sufficient reflective materials on the exterior to cause the building to respond to the weather. It twinkles in sunlight and sulks in shade.

So far, wunderbar.

The interior is white with marble floors and more staircases, varied gallery shapes and levels than you can easily fathom. It’s even hard to say what the style is. There are echoes of Peter Behrens Expressionism and Viennese Jugendstil plus big infusions of high tech and--in the use of commonplace materials--low tech.

Anyhow the net effect of the whole is light and markedly theatrical. There is a tendency to want to look at big lumps of fat by Joseph Beuys through Hollein’s graceful doorways with their circular stairs. Makes Beuys look like he’s on view at Bergdorf-Goodman. The building searches so hard for a certain kind of harmony that its galleries seem to have been color coordinated in response to a design sense wafting through the place. There are galleries with nothing but black and white Op art, galleries with white-on-white Minimalism or wood or crazy-quilt color. One still sees the art perfectly well, especially stunners like Andy Warhol’s portrait of Beuys or the half-forgotten silliness of Martial Raysse and underrated people like George Brecht and Marcel Broodthaers.

It’s fine, but it’s also a situation were art tends to become set dressing for Hollein’s building. The effect is subtle so you begin to wonder if the building isn’t just plain more interesting than the art. There is evidence that Hollein restrained himself in the galleries. His museum cafe is a high-tech romp to make Melrose Avenue envious and his punk-tech projection room is a hoot like a pair of leopard skin peddle-pushers.

Anyway it’s not a disaster, just a bother. None of these museums get one’s back up. In fact there is more delectation of the delighted kind. Well, there’s a controversial all-black Kunstsammlung abuilding in Dusseldorf. Maybe that will be a scandal.

Meantime, nothing to do but applaud the Germans and look to our own laurels. Meier will likely be good for us. Arata Isozaki is building Los Angeles a museum of Contemporary Art that appears the peer of the blooming Germans. Now if we can just make some more interesting art. . . .

The only thing we can never do is get this city down to proportions where we can walk to all our museums, stopping along the way in a Weinstube for bratwurst and beer.

Well, drat and auf wiedersehen .