LOVE & HATE IN DUESSELDORF

Here the Rhine is broad and muscular like a runner’s thigh and crossed by elegant suspension bridges that seem to be made of steel arrows. In the distance stands a space-needle tower swathed in gray fog so that it is perpetually in silhouette, hovering like a UFO.

The town catches a stranger off guard. It feels like a seaport even though it is inland. You hear that it is an important industrial center, so the gritty ambiance around the Hauptbahnhof is no surprise. What is is a marked sense of big-town variety. Down by the river there is an old-village ambiance with squares of official stone buildings surrounding green statues of who knows what king or kaiser on horseback. Quaint winding streets of cuckoo-clock buildings attract student backpack wanderers to wurst and pizza. In the afternoon the beer-hall crowds spill out into the streets where they get sloshed on gemuetlichkeit and pretzels.

German towns like Hannover, Stuttgart and Cologne are built to an agreeable scale so the visitor can get the lay of the land in an hour’s walk. Duesseldorf is not overpowering like a big American megatropolis, but it is surprising at night to find so many streets lighted with shops. You feel it would take a few days to sort it all out.

The big Koenigsallee divides off the old town section with a formal canal where bronze deities perpetually spit water. This is the street that implants the idea that Duesseldorf is a center of style. Spit-polished malls line the way, phone booths are elegant Post-Mod Art Deco and the people look like mannequins from the designer boutique windows. But not arch. One lady got her high heels stuck in a sidewalk grate and stepped out of them laughing like a delighted infant.

This is where snap judgment decides that maybe Duesseldorf is the Milan of Germany, heads-up tough and chic as a whippet. Irrationally, one is visited by the gestalt that the symbolic color around here is black. Not morbid sinister black, but black-sheath-with-pearls and smoking-jacket black. Black-velvet black.

Black is the color even before you get to the point of the mission, the new museum for modern and contemporary art, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, to us the State Gallery of North Rhine-Westphalia. Boy, it is black. Situated in the center of town, its facade is a three-story, block-long curve of polished Swedish granite that is a Stygian mirror for the city gallery and the baroque church across the square. Its sonorous Bach-black mood is interrupted only by a white greenhouse structure. Otherwise it would look like a gigantic Vietnam memorial without the names.

Frau Harmz is the director of public relations for the museum, a tall, handsome ash blonde with pale-green eyes, dressed in a gray silk blouse and tailored slacks even on her day off. (The visitor has managed to bumble in to town on one of those mysterious European holidays that turns Tuesday into Sunday.)

Frau Harmz looks puzzled when asked if black has any special symbolic significance in Duesseldorf but she gets the point. The locals have hated the museum partly because it was designed by a Danish firm, Dissing and Weitling, when they think a German architect would have been a more patriotic choice. More than that, they reacted grumpily to the stark facade. Now that the museum has been open a few months they admit it is rather smart, especially on nice days when it essentially disappears, becoming a mirror of the surroundings. When it drizzles, like today, they continue to mumble “mausoleum” and “wailing wall.”

Criticism has also been leveled at the collection, not because it is not good but because it is so exclusively the “elitist” creation of museum director Werner Schmalenbach. The scholar has been given extraordinary latitude by a board of trustees that routinely rubber-stamps his determination to simply find the best examples of modern and contemporary art available.

Interesting test, considering the bulk of the material has been acquired since Schmalenbach became director in 1962. Can you make a terrific museum so late in the day? Is it possible to make a sensible experience out of a highly personal selection that does not pretend to strive for historical completeness?

Only way to find out is to have a look.

The museum follows a growing practice of beginning chronologically at the top floor and working down, so that if you are given to steps rather than elevators, you see the history backward. The last chapter comes first and it is a rather sad one, especially for a Los Angeles wanderer.

The first last thing is a cavernous grand hall that rises the entire building height. At the moment, the massive blocky granite sculpture by Eric Ruckreim barely makes a dent in it even though the German is a powerful if rather laconic carver. What was originally supposed to make a dent in it were big conceptual works from the collection of Count Panza. The Germans were disappointed when the Italian collector pulled out because of changes in Italian tax laws--just as Los Angeles was recently disappointed when negotiations with a group of our museums failed to get his heavily Californian holdings back here. Now he is negotiating with an unbuilt museum in Massachusetts. Count Panza, the wandering collector.

Never mind. We want to know how the collection is.

Well, to not prolong the suspense, it is a drop-dead business that recycles the visitor like a revolving door mumbling deleted expletives that refer to feces and take the Lord’s name vainly. What Schmalenbach has rather miraculously done is not only ferret out works of extraordinary quality but works that feed toward a core sensibility that is yet not that easy of description.

A huge, white Jasper Johns flag has his usual delicacy of touch but combines it with a startling pile-driver power. A black-and-white Jackson Pollock might look too spare to somebody, but its synaptic, raw-nerve crossings expose the essence of his art. An Andy Warhol soup-can comes with the usual arch irony but its torn, scorched label tells us something about the deadly specter that stalked the artist who wanted to be a machine.

Nobody is perfect and Schmalenbach has his occasional lapses into the knee-jerk Yves Klein or Lucio Fontana, but he always makes them up with, say, a Richard Lindner like “The Street,” where the kinky artist had a rare attack of being as good as Max Beckman.

If there is a formula here it is to find every artist at his most powerful without doing damage to his temperament. A skull still life by Picasso, vintage World War II, gives us his fury at war tempered by elegiac mournfulness. A big Fernand Leger hints at languid sensuality and a couple of Mondrians show how to combine brains with drama. A big Bonnard still life throbs with muffled Expressionist power, and the core collection of Paul Klees is like a car stripped down for a race compared with his usual production.

Duesseldorf comes near the end of a long trip and wraps up a couple of years of sojourns to check out the German museum-building boom. The country loves museums and is by no means finished with them, but there is a thoughtful pause for some obvious observations.

German museums cannot be left off the agenda of anybody interested in advanced American art of the past three decades, classic German Expressionism or Post-Modern museum architecture. From Richard Meier’s decorative arts museum in Frankfurt to James Stirling’s New State Museum in Stuttgart to Hans Hollein’s jewel in Moenchengladbach, West Germany is on the cutting edge of the architecture that writes the definitions.

One is left with funny feelings about the current practice of using museums as ornamental pawns in the game of inner-city renewal and public entertainment. The new Orsay Museum in Paris is a hoot, but what happens if people figure out that all the salon art it contains is still as boring as it was the first time it got mothballed? On the other hand, what if a museum like L.A.’s MOCA fails to attract business for downtown merchants? Aren’t we attaching the wrong set of expectations to such projects? One hopes museums can serve multiple masters but let’s pray it works. What if people find out museums are about art? Will they be disappointed?

More generally it seems that all of the arguments about how museums should serve art boil down to this: A museum cannot do much damage to great art without going out of its way to insult it the way Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim does. Architecture mainly tips our feelings about the art a bit. Hollein’s lapidary building is more entertaining than the art it contains. Meier is inclined to insist that art either come up to his architecture’s pristine standards or look a bit shabby. There is still a lesson to be learned from the fact that art often looks best in buildings that weren’t originally constructed for it. Such wildly contrasting examples as the Paris Picasso museum and L.A.’s Temporary Contemporary serve the point. Art looks good in old town houses and converted warehouses.

And collections? If you cannot have encyclopedic collections like the Met or the Modern, passion seems to provide the best glue. On this trip, the Epiphany collections were those that broadcast the fervent convictions of their collectors, the mysterious transcendence of the Menil collection in Houston and the powerful balance of Schmalenbachs’. If this is elitism, art must cleave to it to flourish.