IN HEAVEN WITH OTTO DIX

AND IN CHEMNITZ, OF ALL PLACES | December 12th 2007

"Self Portrait with Walker's hat"

Otto Dix's "Self Portrait with Walker's Hat" (1912), detail, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2007

Cornelia Rudat heads back to Chemnitz, at the bottom of the Erzgebirge Mountains, for another cultural milestone. The Saxon city now boasts the Museum Gunzenhauser, a treasury of German expressionism ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Some weeks ago I went to Chemnitz, a dreary, former industrial city, for the world's first show of paintings by Bob Dylan. There was something incongruous about such an attention-grabbing show in such a little-known city—albeit one that is still finding itself, after decades of communist rule. But last week I was back in Chemnitz again, for an even bigger event: the debut of the Museum Gunzenhauser.

Dr Alfred Gunzenhauser, a passionate octogenarian art collector from Munich, came for the opening day on December 1st. The museum serves as the new permanent home for his collection of nearly 2,500 pieces of 20th-century German art, about one-tenth of which can be displayed on the four floors at any one time.

Forgive me, Chemnitz, but once again, as with the Dylan collection, I found myself wondering: why here? In the case of Dylan, the answer was, a visionary museum director. For the Museum Gunzenhausen, the answer seems to be: supply and demand.

Gunzenhauser is a thrifty Swabian who bought his first painting, "Forgotten Coast" by Manfred Bluth, at a Berlin art gallery in 1954 for DM300, which he paid in monthly instalments of DM15. (The painting can now be seen on the first floor.) East Germans, by contrast, had neither the money nor the freedom to buy and collect art under communism. So Gunzenhauser decided to donate his own collection to this otherwise deprived region.

Munich, Leipzig and Dresden all tried to get their hands on it, but none could offer a whole building as "a permanent home for ‘my children'", Gunzenhauser said in a newspaper interview. "I found unbearable the notion that my collection of 290 works by Otto Dix, gathered over a period of decades, might be torn apart", he says in the museum's guide.

Ingrid Mössinger, the tireless director general of the Chemnitz Art Gallery, took up the challenge and found a suitable local building in 2003—the former headquarters of the Chemnitz Sparkasse (savings bank), built in 1930 by Fred Otto, a pioneer of formalist architecture during the Weimar Republic. Volker Staab, a Berlin-based architect, transformed the building into a magnificent modern museum between 2005 and 2007. The result has got a good press; and I was impressed by its understated elegance. The central red staircase—to borrow a topical reference this week—seems like a stairway to a heaven full of the collection's most remarkable paintings, by Dix and Conrad Felixmüller.

Gunzenhauser's collection of Dix, the largest in the world, is too big to display in its entirety. But even so, I was fascinated by the range of the painter's oeuvre. Dix was born in 1891 in Gera, 73 kilometres west of Chemnitz. A very early work, "Self Portrait with Walker's hat", 1912, welcomes you on the third floor. Other impressive Dix portraits include "Girl's Head with Curly Hair" (1930) and "Red-Haired Woman" (1931), which reveal an old-master influence.

Dix spent much time documenting the seedy side of his contemporary Germany, as in the pornographic watercolours "Dream of a Sadist I", "Rape I" (1927) and Rape II" (1927/28). But he was also responsible for quite a few romantic landscapes. I was pleasantly surprised by his idyllic mountainous winter scenes from the late-1930s and early 40s. A tour of the third floor ends with masterpieces by Conrad Felixmüller (1897-1977), a friend of Dix's and president of the Dresden Secession. "Londa, seen from the Ai—semi-nude", a self portrait of the painter drawing his wife in the nude, is one of his most admired works.

There is plenty to see on the second floor as well, with works by Alexej von Jawlensky and Gabriele Münter—both of the Blauer Reiter group—as well as by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Max Pechstein, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Max Beckmann, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Helmut Kolle and other renowned German expressionists. Mössiner is especially proud of the two rare works by Lovis Corinth: "Self-Portrait in Fur Coat with Fur Cap" (1916) and "Portrait of Hedwig Berend in Pink Morning Gown" (1916).

The first floor features abstract paintings by Ruprecht Geiger, Serge Poliakoff, Rolf Cavael and Willi Baumeister, among others. The ground floor, intended mainly for temporary exhibitions, now hosts some beautiful canvases, including two by Georg Schrimpf: "Children on the Steps" (1925) and "Three Children" (1926). Natives can chuckle (or curse) at an Andy Warhol triptych of Lenin (1986), displayed a stone's throw from a giant bust of Karl Marx in a city once named Karl-Marx-Stadt.

Chemnitz, once a poor rustbelt town, currently enjoys a windfall, almost an embarrassment, of cultural riches. And when Dylan's paintings return to America in February, Gunzenhauser's will stay. His apartment on the museum's top floor allows him to be near his "children", and to visit them as often as he likes.

(Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Museum Gunzenhauser, Stollberger Strasse 2, 09119 Chemnitz.)