Traveler's Guide to Art & Architecture

Germany's art ranges from medieval carved wood statues to Dürer prints to expressionist paintings, its architecture from Gothic cathedrals and riotous baroque chapels to neoclassical temples and Bauhaus buildings. This overview should help you make sense of it all.

German Art

Romanesque (11th-12th C.)
Artistic expression in early medieval Germany was largely church related. Because Mass was said in Latin, the illiterate masses had to learn Bible lessons via bas reliefs (sculptures that project slightly from a flat surface) and wall paintings, which told key tales to inspire faith in God and fear of sin.

The best examples of this period include scraps of surviving Romanesque sculpture on the 11th-century, carved wood doors at Cologne's St. Maria im Kapitol, Augsburg's Dom St. Maria, and the intricate The Shrine of the Magi reliquary (1182-1220) in Kölner Dom (Cologne Cathedral).

Gothic (13th-15th C.)
Late medieval German art continued to be largely ecclesiastical, including stained glass, church facades, and massive wooden altarpieces festooned with statues and carvings. In Gothic painting and sculpture, figures tended to be more natural looking than in the Romanesque, but remained highly stylized.

The best examples and artists include stained glass in Ulm Münster, Rothenburg's St. Jakobskirche, and Cologne's St. Gereon's Sacristy. Stephan Lochner (active 1400-51) was the premier artist of the School of Cologne, where he painted the Cologne Cathedral's Altar of the City Patrons (ca. 1440) and the Wallraf-Richartz Museum's Madonna in the Rose Garden (1450). Bamberger Reiter is an anonymous equestrian statue in Bamberg's Kaiserdom, a masterpiece of 13th-century sculpture. Tilman Riemenschneider (1460-1531) was Germany's genius Gothic woodcarver of languid figures draped in flowing, folded robes. Some of his best works remain in Würzburg, including statues in the Mainfränkisches Museum.

Renaissance (late 15th to 16th C.)
The German Renaissance masters, striving for greater naturalism, included the greatest of them all, Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). A genius painter, superb illustrator, and one of the greatest draftsmen ever, Dürer was the most important Renaissance artist outside Italy. His art matched the scientific and geometric precepts of the Florentine Renaissance with a command of color learned in Venice, a Flemish eye for meticulous detail, and the emotional sensibility of the German Gothic. He was the first to paint stand-alone self-portraits (including one in Munich's Alte Pinakothek), as well as watercolors and gouaches for their own sake rather than merely as sketches. His paintings grace Berlin's Gemäldegalerie and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in his native Nürnberg.

Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) melded Renaissance sensibilities with a still somewhat primitive, medieval look. As a young artist in Vienna, he helped popularize landscape painting as a member of the Danube School (Rest on the Flight into Egypt [1504] in Berlin's Gemäldegalerie) and invented the full-length portrait (Duke of Saxony [1514] and The Duchess [1514] in Dresden's Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, in the Zwinger complex). Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543) was second only to Dürer in the German Renaissance, and one of the greatest portraitists ever. Germany preserves precious little of his work, but you can see the Portrait of Georg Gisze (1532) in Berlin's Gemäldegalerie and a Nativity in the Freiburg Cathedral.

Baroque & Rococo (16th-18th C.)
The baroque is more theatrical and decorative than the Renaissance, mixing a kind of superrealism based on the use of peasant models and the exaggerated chiaroscuro ("light and dark") of Italy's Caravaggio with compositional complexity and explosions of dynamic fury, movement, color, and figures. Rococo is this later baroque art gone awry, frothy and chaotic. Artists from this period include Andreas Schlüter (1660-1714), whose sculptures can now be found at Berlin's Schloss Charlottenburg. Balthazar Permoser (1651-1732) was court sculptor at Dresden. His stone pulpit stands in Katholische Hofkirche, his sculptures in the Zwinger.

Romantic (19th C.)
The paintings of the Romantics were heroic, historic, dramatic, and beautiful in contrast to the classically minded Renaissance artists or the overly exuberant baroque artists. Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610) created tiny paintings that bridged the gap from late Renaissance Mannerism (a style characterized by twisting figures in exaggerated positions), through baroque, to proto-Romantic. His Flight into Egypt (1609) resides in Munich's Alte Pinakothek. Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) was the greatest of the German Romantics. Dresden's Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in the Zwinger complex houses his famous Cross in the Mountains (1808).

Early 20th Century
Until Hitler, Germany was one of Europe's hotbeds of artistic activity. But the Nazis outlawed and confiscated what they called "degenerate" modern art. Almost all the artists listed below are represented at Cologne's Museum Ludwig, save Höch and Grosz, whom you can find at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie. At least one artist from every movement is at Stuttgart's Staatsgalerie, and there are also good modern collections at Düsseldorf's Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen and Dresden's Albertinum. Munich's Pinakothek der Moderne is strong on expressionist artists.

The major artists and movements of the early 20th century include expressionism, which abandoned realism and embraced, to varying degrees, exaggeration, visible artistry (thick paint, obvious brush strokes, and strong colors) and, most important, abstraction -- all to try to "express" the emotions or philosophy of the artist himself. Pure expressionism fell into two main groups, especially Die Brücke, founded in 1905 Dresden, which sought inspiration in folk art, medieval examples, and "unspoiled" landscapes. Its greatest members were Ernst Kirchner (1880-1938) and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884-1976), though Impressionist Emil Nolde (1867-1956) also later joined for a while. They have their own Brücke Museum in Berlin. The second movement was Der Blaue Reiter group, set up in Munich in 1911 by Russian-born Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Franz Marc (1880-1916), and August Macke (1887-1914) to oppose the cultural insularity and antimodern stance of Die Brücke. The "Blue Riders" embraced international elements, modern abstraction techniques, and bright, vibrant color schemes to seek an emotional, visceral intensity in their work. Determined critics of the horrors of World War I, Dadaists were by turns abstract, nihilistic (inviting gallery visitors to help destroy the art), and just generally anti-art (many made random collages of found materials). Its proponents included Hannah Höch (1889-1978), who collaged photographs and magazine cutouts to make social statements; George Grosz (1893-1959), who was more strictly a painter, and later moved on to the Neue Sachlichkeit movement (below); and Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), who eventually started his own splinter group called "Merz," which experimented with abstract and Russian constructivist elements.

Both Max Ernst (1891-1976) and Alsatian Jean "Hans" Arp (1887-1966) started as Blaue Reiter expressionists and, after their Dada collage period, ended up in Paris as surrealists (Ernst as a painter, Arp as a sculptor and painter of amorphous shapes).

Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) was a 1920s Berlin movement opposed to the abstraction of the expressionists. Their caricature-filled art was painted in harsh colors and focused on even harsher subjects such as sex and violence. Proponents included Otto Dix (1891-1969), who started as an expressionist but quickly became one of the most scathing and disturbing New Objectivity painters; George Grosz ; and Max Beckmann (1884-1950), who also was originally an expressionist.

Post-World War II Art
Germany hasn't had any one style or school to define its art since World War II, though terms such as neo-expressionism (an anti-abstract, anti-minimalist, anti-conceptual trend that grounds itself more in tradition and figurative art) are often bandied about. There have been, however, several important artists. All three listed below are represented in Stuttgart's Staatsgalerie and Bonn's Kunstmuseum. Notable post-World War II artists include Josef Beuys (1921-86), an iconoclast and nonconformist who made constructivist sculpture from trash; Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945), who made a return to huge, mixed-media figurative art, often with a strong historical bent; and Georg Baselitz (b. 1938), a figurative painter -- and a sculptor, since the 1980s -- a neo-expressionist with a penchant for portraying people upside down.

Architecture

Romanesque (10th -13th C.)
Romanesque architects concentrated on building large churches with wide aisles to accommodate the masses. Identifiable features include rounded arches, thick walls, small windows, huge piers, tall towers, dual chancels, and blind arcades.

The best examples include Mainz's Dom, which looks more like a castle fortress than a church; Worms's Dom St. Peter, with a dual-chancel arrangement and two imposing facades; and Speyer's Kaiserdom, the largest cathedral in Germany, a four-towered Romanesque basilica with dwarf galleries and blind arcades.

Gothic (13th-16th C.)
Ceilings began to soar with Gothic architects, walls became thinner, and windows -- often stained glass -- proliferated. On the exterior, graceful buttresses and soaring spires rose over a town. Pointed arches, it was discovered, carried more weight than rounded ones. Other features included cross vaulting, a facade flanked by two towers, flying buttresses, spires, gargoyles, and delicate tracery.

The best examples of Gothic include Cologne Cathedral, Germany's finest, at once massive and graceful; Freiburg Cathedral, built almost entirely during the Middle Ages; and Ulm Münster, second in size only to Cologne's cathedral. Ulm's Münster sports the world's tallest spire -- though it did take 500 years to complete. The best-preserved town centers with Gothic-style houses and buildings include Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Goslar, Regensburg, and Tübingen.

Renaissance (late 15th through mid-17th C.) 
Germany was so busy with the Reformation that the country had little time for the Renaissance, which really had an effect only in southern Germany (transalpine influences from Italy) and a few isolated examples in the far north (influences from Flemish and Dutch neighbors). Other than a close eye to the Renaissance ideals of proportion, symmetry, and the classical orders (distinguished by the use of three column capitals: Corinthian, Ionic, and Doric), little specifically identifies Italianate Renaissance buildings.

Weser Renaissance was a late-16th- and early-17th-century style prevalent in Lower Saxony, distinguishable on houses by pinnacled gables (the triangular upper portion of a wall at the end of a pitched roof), heavy scrollwork, elaborate dormers (an upright window projecting from a sloping roof), rounded pediments (a low-pitched feature above a window, door, or pavilion), and decorative stone bands.

Celle is the best preserved town center in the Weser Renaissance style, including its moated Herzogschloss. The Pied Piper town of Hameln has several fine Weser Renaissance houses, including the Rattenfängerhaus, Hochzeitshaus, and Dempterscheshaus. The only solidly Renaissance church in Germany is Michaelskirche in Munich, built 1583 to 1597 by Jesuits to resemble their church in Rome.

Baroque & Rococo (17th-18th C.)
With a seamless meshing of architecture and art, the German baroque flourished in the south and in Lower Saxony. Germany's brand of over-the-top, baroque chaos worked better perhaps than in any other country. Whereas rococo is usually used as a derogatory term for the baroque gone awry into the grotesque, in Germany the rococo actually succeeds (sometimes). Baroque lines follow a complex geometry and interplay of concave and convex surfaces. The overall effect is to lighten the appearance of structures and add movement of line and vibrancy to the static look of the Renaissance.

The best example of a baroque palace is the Residenz in Würzburg (1720-44), designed by Balthasar Neumann, including a monumental staircase under the world's largest ceiling fresco by the Italian master Tiepolo. Friedrich the Great's Sanssouci Palace at Potsdam (1744-1860) is one of Europe's best examples of the rococo.

Jean François de Cuvilliés (1698-1767), a French dwarf, was originally the elector of Bavaria's court jester until his talent for architecture was recognized. After schooling in France, he returned to Munich to craft its greatest rococo monuments, including the jewel box of the Residenz's Altes Residenztheater, which now bears his name, and the facade of the baroque Theatinerkirche. His masterpiece is Schloss Nymphenburg's Amalienburg hunting lodge, which became a model for palaces across Europe.

Neoclassicism & Romantic (mid-18th through 19th C.)
As a backlash against the excesses of the baroque and rococo, by the middle of the 18th century architects began turning to the austere simplicity and grandeur of the classical age and inaugurated the neoclassical style. Their work was inspired by the rediscovery of Pompeii and other ancient sites. However, many of their interiors continued to be rococo, though more muted than before. The sterility of German neoclassicism didn't last long, however, and the 19th century left the increasing nationalist German society looking into its own past for inspiration, kicking off the neo-Gothic Romantic Movement.

The Prussians remade Berlin in a neoclassical image, starting with the Brandenburger Tor and moving on to the buildings of Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841), among which Altes Museum, Schloss Charlottenhof, and Nikolaikirche are his best. There's a museum devoted to him called the Friedrichswerdersche Kirche-Schinkelmuseum. In Munich, Ludwig I had Leo von Klenze lay out neoclassical structures across his "new Athens," including those surrounding Königsplatz and the nearby Alte and Neue pinakotheks. Caught up in Wagner's dramatic operas set in the heroic Middle Ages, "Mad" King Ludwig II was the ultimate Romantic, building for himself a series of faux medieval fairy-tale castles, including Herrenchiemsee's Neues Schloss and the incomparable fantasy of Neuschwanstein Castle, a festival of banner-fluttering towers and battlements right out of a Brothers Grimm folk tale, its entire setting chosen solely for its picture-postcard perfection.

20th-Century Architecture
Germany's take on the early-20th-century Art Nouveau movement was called Jugendstil. The Bauhaus was a 1920s avant-garde school of architecture led by Walter Gropius (1883-1969) that combined industrial-age architecture with art and craft to create functional buildings and furnishings. Among its chief designers and institute teachers were Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Schlemmer, and Paul Klee. The Nazis closed the school in 1933, though it was reborn in Chicago. Jugendstil houses and hotels exist across Germany, but the movement took its name from Jugend magazine published in the Schwabing district of Munich, where many buildings in the style survive. Munich is also home to the Jugendstil Museum in the Stuck-Villa, a hybrid neoclassical/Jugendstil structure. Bauhaus structures, too, pepper Germany in unobtrusive ways, often in city outskirts. One fine example is Berlin's Die Siemensstadt, the first modern housing complex, built with long "slab" blocks by Walter Gropius. Berlin also has the Bauhaus-Archiv Museum für Gestaltung, devoted to Bauhaus drawings, photographs, and some design examples.