So much effort for a party is rare: Eight months of rearranging, painting, WiFi built in for the new app, six curators at work who have striven for a "complete elimination of chronology", as collection director Oliver Kase explained at the presentation of the new exhibition "Mix & Match” explained.

They wanted to realize a paradox - "a dynamic permanent exhibition" in which - also for curatorial reasons - exhibits are exchanged every three or four months.

For Bernhard Maaz, Director General of the Bavarian State Painting Collections, the result is tantamount to a "fundamental paradigm shift".

Hannes Hintermeier

Feuilleton correspondent for Bavaria and Austria.

  • Follow I follow

In other words: No stone should be left unturned in the Pinakothek der Moderne.

With the exception of Joseph Beuys' installation "The End of the 20th Century", whose forty-four stones were not moved.

Beuys is one of the few male, white great artists of the last century who has kept his own space.

Others - Beckmann, Baselitz, Kiefer - had to make room for new colleagues.

More video, more photography, less flatware.

Twenty newly designed halls, 3600 square meters, three hundred and fifty works by one hundred and fifty artists, 635,000 euros in conversion costs, which could be paid with the help of many sponsors.

That's what the Pinakothek is too: an example of civic engagement.

More than ten percent of the construction costs came from private purses at the time.

Our most pressing concerns for the future

Although it only opened twenty years ago, according to some art critics, the third Pinakothek has always been “old school”, and that should definitely end now.

The "single file through art history" (Maaz) is over, from now on we are taking giant steps into the future, also using an app (German, English, simple language) with which you can go on a discovery tour according to your own taste.

The cross-over concept isn't entirely new, but it is an unmistakable expression of a time when, with big children's eyes, we realized that mankind is behaving in a way that is contrary to the rules in relation to nature.

So now rooms with topics that move the audience, migration, war, climate and so on.

The cabinets are each named after a central work: "Fighting Forms", "Naked Nation", "In the Forest", "Higher Beings", "Before the Masked Ball".

Unfortunately, the introductions are rhetorical crisis prose, for example in the "Continuous Fire Polar Circle" station: "We have recognized the sustainable use of natural resources as one of the most urgent concerns for the future.

Against the background of an overall crisis situation, the traditional motif of the landscape in art appears in a new light.”

Everything is ready for various readings

How can you imagine that?

The first is four cabinets in the north-west corner of the building, number one is called "Girl under Trees", the title is the famous picture by August Macke from 1914, but the real eye-catcher is "Kindergarten Antonio Sant'Elia", a video by Belgian David Claerbout from 1998, which initially looks like a black-and-white photo;

only on closer inspection does one recognize that the leaves of the trees are moving in the wind.

In cabinet number six, Lampedusa, are Olaf Metzel's sculpture of the same name from 2015 and Alighiero Boetti's Mappa from 1980, a map of the world in the form of a carpet. Various border lines already look very different today.

Opposite, filling the whole wall, dominating the room, Jeff Wall's "A Villager from Aricagöyum arriving in Mahmutbey-Istanbul, September, 1997", a sleigh by Beuys,

The white cube is dead, but not quite.

Everything is open, everything ready for various readings, for younger visitors who don't want to be forced into a canon.

The curatorial team is prepared for objections, and they will come.

Does Hitler's favorite painter Adolf Ziegler belong here with the triptych "The Four Elements" because he is part of the art production of the past hundred and twenty years?

Because at the time it was hanging in the nearby “Führerbau” on Königsplatz?

In terms of quality, the collection would certainly have been better.

At the age of twenty, personality development is still in full swing.

What did Collection Manager Kase say?

It is a Western European public museum that is rethinking its position in a globalized, digital world.

“Mix & Match” maps this process.

mix and match

Rediscover the collection.

Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich.

Until January 14, 2024. No catalogue.