The legacy of Franz von Lenbach
In 1987, the Lenbachhaus in Munich held an exhibition marking the 150th birthday of its builder and original owner, the portraitist Franz von Lenbach, whose work epitomized an entire generation of fin-de-siècle society life in late 19th-century Germany. In chronicling the rags-to-riches story of an artist whose social tangent started in the company of bricklayers—his father’s profession—and ended with that of Chancellor Bismarck, the authors of the exhibition catalogue quote Heinrich Mann. He based his description of an artist’s residence on his familiarity with Lenbach’s house. This, according to Mann, was the house that Lenbach built: “the overabundant decor, full of reminiscences, set pieces, originals and copies ... was arranged as a backdrop for a man who used the past to stage a present in which he was, in his own lifetime, already a figure of historical greatness.” Peggy Guggenheim, not adverse to a little showiness herself, who sat with her sister for portraits here in 1902, treasured both paintings and the memories of Lenbach’s house all her life. In the early 1880s, a time when the artist was at the height of his fame, Lenbach decided to build his own residence in Munich—considered at the time to be the artistic center of Germany. “I’m thinking of building a palace,” he wrote, “that will link Europe’s powerful artistic past with the present. My villa in Munich shall be a forum for the arts and testament to their social relevance.” Having spent much time in Rome, residing at the Palazzo Borghese, he set about realizing his dreams of holding court in such a villa himself, acquiring a prestigious site close to Munich’s premier cultural venues, on the west side of Königsplatz. From the very beginning, it was his intention to build not just a private domicile, but a series of exhibition rooms linked to his studio and with access to the living quarters. This would permit his own work to be shown next to his favorite objets d’art (pieces from antiquity to the present), merging aesthetics and representation in a kind of gesamtkunstwerk, a museum, in fact, devoted to the ennobling influence of art on life. After Lenbach’s death in 1904, the property passed to his second wife, Lolo von Lenbach. In the 1920s, when the city was looking for a building to house the municipal art gallery, she agreed to sell the villa and bequeath a large number of paintings and objects to the gallery. Following some structural modifications and the erection of an extra wing, the entire building was opened to the public on May 1, 1929. Gone was the atmosphere of cavernous 19th-century fustiness; sober, well-lit exhibition rooms housing a collection of works from the 19th and early 20th centuries now greeted the visitor. Much of the house—including the artist’s studio and the famous tapestry hall—and some of the collection were destroyed during World War II. Renovation work after 1945 concentrated on creating spacious, light-filled rooms so that what remains today of the original villa is the beautifully laid-out garden, the ocher-colored facade and the vestibule as well as the so-called historical rooms on the first floor. Lenbach’s own opinions and artistic philosophy were already being challenged during his lifetime. The bombs of 1944 tolled the bell for what remained of his cult of the artistic persona and concomitant social trappings as expressed in his domicile. Today, the museum houses works by artists whose life-styles and political opinions surely have Lenbach turning in his grave. Besides some earlier paintings and those of Lenbach and his older contemporary Wilhelm Leibl, the gallery now focuses on the work of the Blue Rider artists’ group: the foundation stone of this collection was laid in 1957, when Gabriele Münter presented the gallery with a number of major works by Wassily Kandinsky. This was supplemented in 1967 with paintings by Franz Marc, August Macke and Alexei Jawlensky from the Bernhard Koehler bequest. From this time on, the gallery concentrated on the acquisition of early modernist works from the pre-World War I period, during which Munich played such an important role in the art world. In 1972 a new wing, the Kunstbau, was opened to accommodate a changing program of exhibitions in more commodious surroundings. Now that the overwhelming grandiosity of the original building no longer exists as a backdrop for Lenbach’s art and way of life, the house that Lenbach built has, in a sense, been freed from historical strictures. It really can, as Lenbach intended, serve as a bridge between past and present.