Due to its location, Partenkirchen was always a transit area for goods and ideas.
Eighty-eight years ago, the former Roman settlement of Partanum was merged with the western neighboring municipality of Garmisch, which the signage on the A95 with "Garmisch-P." does not adequately express.
The Ludwigstrasse in the historic center of P. follows the Römerstrasse from the Brenner Pass to Augsburg.
From the eighteenth century onwards, this was the center of reverse glass painting, which made its way to China and back again.
It can be seen in the Werdenfels Museum, which is financed by the district of Garmisch-Partenkirchen and resides in Ludwigstrasse.
Hannes Hintermeier
Feuilleton correspondent for Bavaria and Austria.
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In 2019, the house got an extension that is used for special exhibitions, the old building still has the original floor plan.
The rooms are crammed with folk art, furniture, kitchen utensils, violin-making tools, crucifixes, mountaineering memorabilia - and hundreds of reverse glass pictures, which, with almost three hundred exhibits, are among the focal points of the collection.
Seehausen, Uffing, Murnau and Oberammergau in the “Blaues Land”, along with the centers of Tyrol and Augsburg, are among the hometowns of this handicraft, whose best pieces influenced the members of the Blue Rider.
Christian motifs, images of saints and mountain landscapes dominate.
The handwriting of the new director
Back glass painting was a way to make money alongside farming, as was carving.
Technically, she literally reverses the way of painting by applying the paint to the back, which means that painting has to be mirrored.
Reverse glass paintings flourished between 1550 and 1850, and the technique spread to the Far East around the mid-seventeenth century.
During the Chinese Empire, a production center was established in the Pearl River Delta, in today's Guangzhou.
Around the year 1740, the rise of reverse glass painting as an export good began from there.
Constanze Werner established the connection between Bavarian and Chinese handicrafts.
She has been in charge of the Werdenfels Museum since May, most recently she pushed the Oberammergau Museum and before that the violin making museum in Mittenwald.
When he took office, Werner obtained approval for the thorough renovation of the old building, after which she would like to redesign the permanent exhibition.
She is now giving a foretaste of her signature with the show "Silver Luster and Color Rush", with which she makes fruitful contact that must seem exotic to local behind-glass traditionalists.
Heavy casualties from the Cultural Revolution
For years, the collector Rupprecht Mayer and his wife Haitang Mayer-Liem have been caring for treasures from the Chinese late phase of this popular art, created between 1860 and 1965, with their "Mei-Lin" collection. The sinologist, author and translator Mayer worked in Beijing and Shanghai for worked for the Foreign Office before returning to his Bavarian homeland ten years ago.
The mid-seventies reports that many Chinese believed that reverse glass painting was only for export.
Even the Kaiserhof was one of the customers, only during the Cultural Revolution almost all domestic stocks were lost.
The topic is also relevant in northern Germany: until mid-April you can get an impression of it in the “China Behind Glass” show at the State Museum in Hanover.
Also these exhibitions
In the Werdenfels Museum, the appeal lies in the contrasts – fifty Chinese pictures are shown next to fifty Bavarian pictures hung in close proximity, which opens up correspondences, but also massive differences in colouring, figure design and picture structure.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, Johann Chrysostom Geiger from Murnau painted the picture "Saint Anna teaches Mary to read".
In the same century, in the province of Shenyang, the depiction of a rosy-cheeked mother and her maid examining her son to see how well he had memorized Confucius.
If you interpret the boy's facial expression correctly, he is not optimally prepared.
A courtesan shows her face with pale make-up in the center of the picture, the shape of her body is barely discernible under the floor-length coat, only a tiny foot reveals the eroticism of the portrait - here the baroque has imposed less restraint.
The Bavarian portraits – such as that of the skeptical-looking Queen Caroline of Bavaria – are juxtaposed with the individual or symbolic typifications on the Chinese side, many pictures were given away as good luck charms.
A sky fairy brings the desired offspring on a qilin, a mythical creature that only appears in times of peace.
In landscape depictions, Chinese painters often used mirrored glass to depict the sky and bodies of water, which gave the pictures unusual perspectives.
Western viewers might have trouble interpreting the numerous mythological allusions, each flower - daffodils, chrysanthemums, lilies, peonies - stands for a different semantics.
So the exhibition relies on mature onlookers.
Although a brochure helps to break down individual images, it is not enough for an in-depth classification.
Silver luster and color frenzy
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Behind glass pictures from China and Upper Bavaria.
Museum Werdenfels, Garmisch-Partenkirchen;
until March 31st.
No catalogue.