Köln Art Museum and Germans learning from the French

During the group trip to Köln, me and Carden used the time between lunch and the roof tour to visit the Wallraf-Richartz museum. It has large collections of Baroque, Medieval, and 19th century paintings separated into 4 floors. All the painting descriptions in German had English translations beside them, which was nice.

We started on the top floor (2, since German floors start at 0 and there was a -1 floor), which was the Baroque art. They had a lot of the usual portraits, but also lots of food paintings (especially seafood), which I personally really enjoy. People at the time often used fruit paintings, especially of grapes and lemon peels, to show off. This explains why there are so many lemon peels in places lemon peels should not be, like in wine glasses and just sitting on table.

The next floor was full of Medieval paintings, which were mostly Christian in nature. They had a room of altarpiece paintings, which would be placed behind the altar or in the back of the church and I thought were very interesting. Many of them had “wings” that could be folded in or out, with the artists placing the most important scenes on the central part that was always visible, and the less important scenes on the optionally visible wings. My favorite of them was an altarpiece showing the story of St George and the Dragon, with a few other stories depicted on the wings.

The bottom floor was devoted to 19th century art, with a lot of impressionist paintings. One of the rooms was dedicated to early German Impressionism, and there was a sign on the wall talking about its history. Apparently German painters were a little slow to adopt the Impressionist style, because of their animosity with the French who started the movement, and even when they did the Germans took Impressionism in a different direction. There’s still the idea of having less blended colors on the canvas, and letting the human eye blend them, but the German paintings show a lot more detail, and almost look dreamlike.

Overall the museum was very interesting,  and the architecture of each floor was very open to allow people to wander around. Hopefully there will be other cool art museums to visit in Germany!

-Sam Owens

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