FOOD, FILMS 'N' TINGS

Munich, Art and Beer

The Haus der Kunst (‘House of Art’) is a contemporary art museum located on the corner of an intersection where Von-der-Tan Straße becomes Prinzregentenstraße in the city of Munich. Whilst the museum exhibits art of the present, the museum building itself dates from 1937 being originally built under the Nazi’s to house work that regime considered true ‘German Art’. Hubert Wim, a pro-Nazi artist explained at the time that the latter exhibition was about the “representation of the perfect beauty of a race steeled in battle and sport, inspired not by antiquity or classicism but by the pulsing life of our present-day events”.

In reality the Exhibition staged the kind of pompous, sterile rubbish beloved of fascists everywhere. Meanwhile across town at the Institute of Archeology in the nearby Hofgarden, the Nazi’s staged a counter presentation of work the regime hated, work which they felt evinced the ‘moral decay’ of the Weimar era. That exhibition was of ‘Entartete Kunst’ (‘Degenerate Art’) and it featured work drawn from the modernist spheres of Dada and Surrealism. The Exhibition’s raison d’être was the mockery and denigration of the avant-garde by linking it’s concepts with an alleged Jewish-Bolshevik plot to undermine the ‘wholesome family values’ of the Nazi state.

The exhibits at that exhibition were a small portion of the 16,000 art works seized at the time which the State deemed ‘degenerate’. Many of these works were then sold by the State overseas for “hard“ cash“ whilst some 5000 were burned in Berlin, mirroring the ritual destruction of thousands of literary works in book burnings across Germany a few years previously.

Paintings by artists of the calibre of Otto Dix, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Emil Nolde, George Grosz went on show at the exhibition. The works were deliberately hung askew on the walls with adjacent graffiti mocking the artists and the subject matter of the paintings. The idea was to rubbish the art by presenting the paintings as morally and artistically worthless.

Portrait of the journalist Sylvia von Harden, 1926 by Otto Dix

Unsurprisingly, given the quality of the artists whose work was on involuntary display, the Exhibition of Degenerate Art attracted significant crowds of visitors whilst across town the dismal counter event of the Nazi approved Great German Art Exhibition drew a far smaller crowd

Today, the Haus der Kunst looms somewhat forlorn and sullen on the Prinzregentenstraße in the centre of the city where it stands as a space for contemporary modern art, the exact opposite of it’s original function. In its interior it’s cool, spectral rooms and corridors eventually end up at the surprisingly elegant and atmospheric Golden Bar. The murals in the Golden Bar date from 1937 and it’s centrepiece chandelier came from the Hotel Savoy in Zurich.

Beautifully renovated in 2010, the Golden Bar opens out on to a terrace whose columns are crowned with a lengthy banner of Yiddish slang, Meshugener, Alter Kocker, Pisher, Plosher….The banner is an art work named ‘The Joys of Yiddish’ by the American artist, Mel Bochner and it is now a permanent fixture, having originally been exhibited in 2013 and then reinstalled in 2021. The banner’s text is rendered in yellow letters on a black background, the same colours used for the ‘Star of David’ patches and armbands worn to identify and denigrate Jewish citizens.

Modern Art survives in splendour in Munich and of the city’s many galleries a special mention should be made of the Pinakothek der Moderne, one of Europe’s largest collections of contemporary design, architectural and artistic installations.

Classic designs at the Pinakothek der Moderne

The museum exhibits include a favourite of ours ‘Sledge’ by the artist Joseph Beuys as well as a reproduction of the iconic image of that artist titled ‘La rivoluzione siamo Noi’ (The Revolution is Us) produced for an exhibition in Naples 1971 featuring Beuys striding towards the camera in his trade mark fedora and fishing vest.

According to Beuys, his art was shaped by his experience as a Luftwaffe pilot during WW2 when the plane he was flying was attacked and shot down and he crashed into a Crimean landscape peopled by nomadic Tartars who saved him from freezing by wrapping his body in a heat retaining mix of felt and fat before taking him to safety on a sledge pulled by dogs. A wonderful story indeed and one upon which Beuys built his mythology. Nevertheless, as influential on Beuys though it may well have been, the story is probably little more than fiction.

‘Patti Smith 1’, a large scale painting by the Swiss born artist Franz Gertsch also hangs at the Pinakothek der Moderne. The work is the first in a series of five paintings of the American poet/musician by Gertsch dating from 1977. Four of the five paintings in the series were created by Gertsch from a poetry reading Smith gave at Galerie Veith Turske in Cologne in 1977 on the anniversary of the death of Arthur Rimbaud. An illicit recording was made of the performance and later released on a cassette tape. An article Smith wrote for ‘Hit Parader’ magazine about her visit to the city at the time can be found here http://www.up-to-date.com/bowie/heroes/smith.html.

Around the corner from the Pinakothek der Moderne is another modern art gallery, Museum Brandhorst with it’s distinctive ceramic exterior.

The museum has a permanent exhibition of the work of the late American artist, Cy Twombly, one of the largest collections of work by the artist in the world. In fact, the entire first floor of the museum is dedicated to his work. This is not so surprising as Twombly had a special relationship with Munich, a city where he exhibited frequently and of which he was exceptionally fond.

Behind the Brandhorst and back to the grounds of the Pinakothek der Moderne we found a welcome collection of food trucks and a hopeful dog at a cheese stall.

The dog should have made it’s way to the Viktualienmarkt a daily food market in the center of Munich near the St Peter’s church! Dating from the early 1800’s the market has over a 100 food and craft stalls as well as the city’s most central beer garden.

There is also a smaller beer garden at the ever popular Kleine Ochs’nbrater with its organic sausages, pretzels, fried potatoes, cabbage and, of course, wheat beer from the local Landshut brewery. Much as we loved the food, beer and busy ambience at this café, we felt that overall, the curry wurst in Berlin is generally better than the same dish in Munich.

….but if beer is your drink of choice, you have come to the right place. Munich is indeed a beer drinkers paradise with some of the best breweries in the world within its environs. Our favourite ‘staple’ is the Paulaner Münchner Hell, a classic light beer dating from a brewery first established in 1684.

Modern craft breweries are also making their mark on the Munich beer scene with the Schiller brewery particularly noteworthy. The brewery is housed on their premises on the Scillerstraße which is near city’s main railway station. Their copper mash and brewing tuns are housed at the front of their premises whilst their beer is served with very traditional local food in the restaurant behind. Their beers range from light and dark brews to a classic wheat beer. Food includes sour vinegar dumplings, schnitzels, pork and potatoes.

Finally, we will let another poet , T.S.Eliot, an influence on both Patti Smith and whose poem ‘The Waste Land’ was of particular interest to Cy Twombly. Elliot mentions two Munich locations in the extract from the poem below.

“April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. “

T. S. Elliot, “The Waste Land,” 1922

Althea McNish, Dim Sum and Phở

The Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester in the north of England is currently showing an exhibition of the work of textile designer Althea McNish. Her designs were not only highly innovative, they were highly influential in helping to shape the look of Britain in the 1960’s and 70’s. If you grew up in that era, McNish’s work you will be readily familiar with the style of her work, especially in the numerous watered down copies found in the design of textiles for summer blouses and dresses, wallpapers and other household items in high street stores up and down the country. She even designed the fabrics for the late Queen Elizabeth II’s dresses for her tour of the Caribbean in 1966.

As Britain had once designed and created textiles for the clothing of women in its colonies in West Africa in the form of wax prints (and Manchester was central to this textile trade), so McNish (of the former colony of Trinidad) created designs for the textiles of Britain.

As an introduction to the life and work of Althea McNish, the Whitworth Art Gallery provides the following excellent summary in its exhibition notes:

Althea McNish (1924-2020) was one of the first designers of Caribbean
heritage to gain international recognition in the field of textile design andwould go on to become one of Britain’s most influential and innovativedesigners. Her painterly designs took natural botanical forms to the edgeof abstraction, using a riotous colour palette that overturned the staid rules of British post-war design.

Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, McNish showed artistic promise from a
young age and became active in the Trinidadian art scene. Age 26, she
emigrated with her family to the UK, arriving in London on 9 November 1950.

McNish studied commercial graphics at The London School of Printing
and Graphic Arts and in 1954 won a scholarship to the Royal College of
Art where she studied textiles. Within days of graduating her career as a professional designer was launched when her designs were commissioned by Liberty and Zika Ascher. McNish would go on to develop a hugely successful design career spanning more than forty years in textile design, as well as commissions for commercial interiors. Teaching in higher education followed and she was an active member of professional design bodies. In 1976 she was awarded the Chaconia Gold medal of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago for ‘meritorious service to art and design’.

McNish established her career at a time when many people in the UK
would have been familiar with the racist taunt to “go back home”. McNish subverted this prejudice, inserting her Caribbean identity directly into the British home through her popular wallpaper and fabric designs.

A few minutes walk from the Whitworth Art Gallery is the multi- million pound Circle Square development. A mixed use neighbourhood of accommodation, retail and leisure properties, the area is especially popular with Chinese students not least because of the presence of Hello Oriental, a three story market hall of Asian food. It’s ground floor houses a Chinese bakery, below that a Vietnamese restaurant and on the lowest floor a Chinese and Korean restaurant and mini mart. Hello Oriental is rightly popular especially with students and it is a welcome addition to the city’s excellent Asian food scene.

High Peak to Wolf Hall

A short walk from the house where Vivienne Westwood* grew up is the Derbyshire village of Hadfield.

The village lies on the edge of the moors in the High Peak district of Derbyshire. The town of Glossop lies to the south.

Hadfield was the childhood home of celebrated author Hillary Mantel.

(*for Westwood see the previous post ‘High Peak to the World’s End’)

Mantel passed away recently leaving behind a stunning legacy of work including her multi-million selling Wolf Hall trilogy.

Thomas Cromwell whom readers of Wolf Hall will know

Mantel’s autobiography Giving Up The Ghost provides a sharp recollection of her childhood locale.

“…..the area where I grew up is on the fringes of the Peak District, a place of complex geology and inventive forms of human deprivation, of inhospitable uplands and steep-sided valleys. Tiny fields, bordered by drystone walls, lie like a worn blanket on a pauper: sharp angles of limestone protrude like bony spurs through a token covering of green. On high ground, in the deep winters of my early life, snow lasted till April. At the fringes of the Peak, where limestone gives way to sandstone, icy streams tumble over brown boulders. There are miles of moorland, flat, featureless, sodden—trackless, or traversed by ancient, faded bridleways.”

Another local, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, was also cautious of the moors. She recollects:-

“As I grew up I was free to wander in a countryside which was beautiful and intimate until you got to the moors. After that it was wild and a little frightening. ”

Mantel’s most famous work, the Wolf Hall trilogy are largely set in and around the court of King Henry VIII.

The first and most famous novel in the trilogy was named after the family seat of the Seymour family, Wolf Hall in Wiltshire. Jane Seymour, who became Henry VIII’s third wife, lived there with her family.

Henry and his then queen, Anne Boleyn, visited the Seymour family at Wolf Hall in the county of Wiltshire in 1535. Within 6 months of the visit Henry would marry Jane Seymour and Anne Boleyn would be dead, executed for alleged adultery and incest.

The original structure of Wolf Hall is largely gone and the remains were incorporated into the current building.

Westwood was once the subject of media inspired hatred after using an adapted image of Queen Elizabeth II in her fashion designs. She was roundly critised at the time for what were percieved as anti-monarchist sentiments. It is clear however from her later comments that she has great affection and respect for Elizabeth II.

Mantel was also respectful of the monarchy. Nevertheless she thought that the institution was now in its endgame and would not last too much longer. She was a fan of Meghan Markle whom she thought had been especially badly treated by the English media in particular.

Neither Westwood nor Mantel were admirers of the late Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher was apparently disliked by Queen Elizabeth II as well. Westwood imitated Thatcher on the cover of Tatler magazine as an ‘April fool’ in 1989.

Mantel was even more open in her dislike of the politician. ‘I can still feel that boiling detestation’ she once said of Thatcher. Her short story The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher was sparked by a coincidence in her own life when she spotted Thatcher from the window of her London flat as the latter walked in the garden of the grounds of the adjacent private hospital after undergoing an eye operation.

Twenty years later and another iconic cover for Tatler.

Both Westwood and Mantel were made Dames by Queen Elizabeth II and Prince (now King) Charles respectively.

High Peak to the World’s End

The village of Tintwhistle lies in the High Peak district in the county of Derbyshire in Northern England. The High Peak area is the more elevated section of the Dark Peak which is made of moorland and bogs. It’s limestone foundation is covered in sandstone and shale. In winter, with heavy rainfall and snow, the soil is almost always saturated with water and ice.

The countryside around the village is attractive but not a little wild and the fairly bucolic pastures soon give way to the moors themselves.

The most notable former resident of the village is the fashion designer and activist Vivienne Westwood. Westwood grew up in a row of stone cottages known as Millbrook located just outside the village on the main Manchester road. The village of Hollingsworth lies to the West, the town of Glossop to the South.

Westwood was born Vivienne Isabel Swire in Glossop. Her father was a storekeeper, her mother worked in the local cotton mill. The Millbrook cottages and the surrounding countryside was her playground. She went on to become the arguably best fashion designer (and certainly the most innovative) the UK has ever produced.

“Millbrook Cottages were at the bottom of an old quarry and from the earliest age my mother lifted me over our back wall to play in a dell where bluebells grew. As I grew up I was free to wander in a countryside which was beautiful and intimate until you got to the moors. After that it was wild and a little frightening”.

Although the city of Manchester (with its music clubs and art galleries) was not too far away, the Pennine area Westwood grew up in would have seemed culturally remote in the monochrome 1950’s.

“I lived in a part of the country that had grown up in the Industrial Revolution. I didn’t know about art galleries until I was 17. I’d never seen an art book, never been to the theatre.”

Westwood moved with her parents to London when she was 17 and she has lived in the city ever since. It is London, or rather her shop premises at 430 Kings Road, Chelsea that is for ever associated with her daring designs. From its rock’n’roll, fetish wear and punk roots in the 1970’s, the shop that was initially known as ‘Let it Rock’. It them became ‘Too Fast To Live, Too Young to Die’, then ‘Sex’, then ‘Seditionaries’ and finally ‘Worlds End’ as it is still known today. (World’s End is the name given to this eastern part of the district of Chelsea in London where the shop lies). With the changes of name, the designs and very nature of Westwood’s creations would abruptly change.

Worlds End storefront with the 13 hour clock face

In this year of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee and her recent death, it is worth looking back at Westwood’s attitude to the Monarchy.

Initially, you could be forgiven for taking the view that Westwood was an out and out Republican. One of her initial designs featured a screen print of the famous Cecil Beaton portrait of the Monarch with a safety pin through her lips.

Her shop at 430 Kings Road helped clothe the Sex Pistols who stormed the UK music charts with their ultra controversial hit single ‘God save the Queen’ at the time of the latter’s Silver Jubilee in 1977.

Westwood herself was arrested and detained on the day of the Jubilee celebrations in 1977 following a very infamous boat trip with the Sex Pistols and various luminaries on board. The group belted out their songs as they sailed along the Thames until they passed the Houses of Parliament when their boat was detailed by a flotilla of police officers who promptly arrested all and sundry, including Westwood.

Nevertheless, Westwood is very much a monarchist who holds the Queen and the Hereditary monarchy in high regard.

“ The Queen performs a national service. She holds the country together. She is a figurehead of international diplomacy. We all owe her our gratitude’’.

‘’I think that it is important that our Royal family is hereditary, the family members learn diplomacy by osmosis and develop a sense of duty to our country and the world.’’

Westwood is very much an Anglophile and monarchist in her designs and she has often use royal images and traditional materials ranging from a Harris Tweed collection to worsted’s, tartan kilts and bondage jackets and to the choice of an Orb logo for her business logo.

Her notorious 70’s rubber clothing was stitched and assembled by obscure fetish wear manufacturers in the North of England who had been making garments in the material for their specialist customers for many years.

Westwood was born in Glossop, a town just South of her home in Tintwistle. Glossop is where she went to school. There was talk a few years ago about building a museum in the the town dedicated to her life and work but the idea was apparently rejected. A local graffiti artist, Deggy, recently created his own mural in the town in honour of Westwood.

Glossop is a handsome town with loads of character and it is certainly worth a visit in its own right. Our favourite place is The Globe pub on the High Street

The pub is a well known music venue and it serves an exclusive Vegan menu of super cheap and very tasty bar classics. Recommended.

When it comes to beer, the local Distant Hills brewery and tap room is also a good bet.

In 1992 Westwood received an OBE from Queen Elizabeth II. The Queen made her a Dame in 2006.

Black Sabbath, Brum and Balti

Birmingham (colloquially ‘Brum’) is the second largest city in the UK. It is famous for its industry and cultural heritage. It was the early childhood home of author J.R.R. Tolkien .

In the fictional world created by Tolkien in the epic Lord of the Rings , Mordor was the name given to the fictional land of darkness, fire and smoke of the evil Sauron.

“Fire glowed amid the smoke. Mount Doom was burning, and a great reek rising. Then at last his gaze was held: wall upon wall, battlement upon battlement, black, immeasurably strong, mountain of iron, gate of steel, tower of adamant, he saw it: Barad-dûr, Fortress of Sauron. All hope left him’’.

An influence on Tolkien and the fictional Mordor was the ‘Black Country’, an area of the West Midlands around the city of Birmingham named from the smoke and pollution from the thousands of foundries, forges and iron works in the area.

‘When I was a kid, you’d come up this hill, and all of that’ – and he gestures to the valley in front of us – ‘was on fire. The foundries and the forges and the ironworks. The potteries. The whole place glowed – sheets of sparks, 50 foot high. The fires never went out. It looked like hell. That’s what your Lord of the Rings is about. Tolkien was from round here. He was writing about how the industrial revolution turned the Midlands from Hobbiton to Mordor.’ (Journalist and broadcaster Caitlin Moran recalls her father’s comment in her memoir ‘How to build a girl’).

Tolkien’s early childhood home was in the Worcestershire countryside, just south of Birmingham in the village of Sarehole. The idyllic village is said to be the model for ‘The Shire’, the home of his Hobbits. The 250 year old water mill in the village was the basis Tolkien used for’the great mill’ in The Hobbit. Tolkien also based the bad-tempered miller in The Lord of the Rings on the actual miller at the Sarehole mill. The mill can still be visited today.

A Few miles to the North West of Sarehole (itself now a part of the Birmingham conurbation) lay the real Mordor, the smoke and din of the Black Country. Unsurprisingly, given it’s industrial heritage, Birmingham is the undisputed home of heavy metal music, and there is no better example of heavy metal than Black Sabbath.

Black Sabbath were formed in Birmingham in 1968 by four local lads (‘Brummies’). The band is the true pioneer of the genre known as ‘heavy metal’ music, a far darker and deeper sound than the then prevailing blues rock with it’s psychedelic and pastoral overtones and more than a hint of ‘the Shires’ about it. There was certainly nothing pastoral about the music created by Sabbath’s band members, Geezer Butler (bass), singer Ozzie Osbourne, Bill Ward (drums) and guitarist Tony Iommi. The music the band created was the sound of the factory floor and the pounding of the iron foundry best exemplified by the buzz and drone of Iommi’s unique guitar work. The fact that the tips of two of his fingers were missing from an industrial accident at the foundry where he worked only contributed to the band’s sound as he developed his unique style in spite of injuries that would have finished the career of most guitarists.

The band’s lyrics often touched on themes of war, doom and black magic although there was nothing of the satanist about any of the band members. Taking their name from. 1963 Boris Karloff move the band were more influenced by the graphic novels of writer Dennis Wheatley than black magic itself. Wheatley’s occult based fiction was doing the rounds in cheap paperbacks at the time and his books were a particular favourite of the band’s main lyricist, Geezer Butler.

In the city centre, Birmingham has commemorated the band with a memorial celebrating 50 years. It is not a city to shout aloud about itself or its heroes and the quiet modesty of the Black Sabbath memorial signage and bench are typically understated examples of the way the city announces itself and the achievements of its sons and daughters.

Created by Egyptian Artist Tarek Abdelkawi from an idea by Mohammed Osama, the bench was forged in Birmingham and has images of the four original band members. It is inscribed ‘Geezer Ozzy Tony Bill Made in Birmingham’.

The bridge and bench can be found where Broad Street crosses the canal in the city centre a short walk away from the city’s stunning public library. The library was designed by a Dutch architect, Francine Houben of Mecanoo, Delft (and if you love great design, the Dutch are way ahead in our opinion),

The library was formally opening on 3 September 2013 by Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafza, who as a schoolgirl survived an attempted assasination by the Taliban. She lives in Birmingham, ‘her second home’ although her birthplace of Swat, Pakistan is the place she holds dearest. She is a fan of Justin Bieber apparently although we forgive her if she is not enamoured of her adopted city’s real heroes, Black Sabbath.

Malala at the opening of the Public Library

Nevertheless, the world of satirical art recently brought both Malala and the four musicians together in a work entitled ‘Benny’s Babbies’*

*Benny was the name of a character in the old TV soap opera ‘Crossroads’ which was based around the Birmingham area. The term ‘Babbies’ is local Birmingham slang for ‘Baby’s’ being a reference to the local celebrities in the picture.

Benny’s Babbies. Benny himself smiles behind the Rotunda

The artwork is by the legendary ‘Coldwar Steve’, a locally born artist whose satirical work is nationally admired. He is a former probation officer who began making photomontage art on the bus to his job. “Birmingham is unparalleled in the sheer diversity of its contributions to British culture” he said of the artwork. Malala is pictured in green with other local celebrities including the former Mayor, Yvonne Mosquito.

Black Sabbath can be seen performing from the top of another local landmark, the Rotunda building.

If Black Sabbath are synonymous with heavy metal music, the ‘balti’ has become synonymous with the city’s food. A ‘balti’ is a highly spiced ‘curry’ served in a double handled steel dish known as a ‘balti bowl’ (or karahi in Pakistan). The best bowls are ‘blackened’, seasoned over time like a great wok.

Balti dishes are served in many restaurants in the United Kingdom. The precise origins of the balti style of cooking are uncertain. Some believe the style to have been invented in Birmingham, while others believe it originated in the northern Pakistani region of Baltistan in Kashmir from where it spread to Britain. Wherever it’s origin, a balti dish is best had in Birmingham in our opinion and the ‘balti triangle’, an area of many restaurants just south of the city centre, is a must if you like your food spicy. We like Shababs on Ladypool Road in particular.

A short drive south of Shababs is Moseley Bog, a nature reserve and a childhood playground of Tolkien’s. The bog inspired the ‘old forest’ in both The Hobbit and The Lord of Rings.

Tolkien acted as an early reference for Sabbath’s ‘The Wizard’ with its influence of the character of Gandalf in its lyrics.

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