thomas m wilson

“Sometimes, I overheard my aunts discussing these blighted destinies; and Aunt Ruth would hug me, as if to forestall my following in their footsteps. Yet, from the way she lingered over such words as ‘Xanadu’ or ‘Samarkand’ or the ‘wine-dark sea,’ I think she also felt the trouble of the ‘wanderer in her soul.”

The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin

I was reading Bruce Chatwin’s letters while sick in bed at the start of this year. Strangely that book and that experience was part of the inspiration for my peregrinations in 2023.

“I haven’t got any special religion this morning. My God is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don’t need any other god.”

― Bruce Chatwin

I wouldn’t go as far as that, but I do agree with Chatwin and other such as Wordsworth, that if you want to cast off low spirits or confused thinking, just walk for at least two to three hours a day, every day. If you don’t believe me, then try it. It works for me.

The other day I was sitting in Dussman’s in the centre of Berlin – a very stylish bookshop with a large English language section. As I was browsing I came upon this map.

This place is huge! And you won’t have any crowds to deal with, even in the highest of the high season. Personally I have found this to be my favourite gallery in Europe in terms of overall experience, of the range of artists and the quiet and spaciousness of the gallery context. The Uffizi Gallery in Florence is great, but it isn’t so enjoyable to visit if you are being jostled by a crowd of thousands.

The Birth of Bourgeois Man. From around 500 years ago in north-west Europe, in places like this and people like Holbein’s merchant, we get a gradual shift in psychology. Institutions like stock markets, banks, market towns, and universities affect Western psychology and that that psychology becomes more about acquisitions, hard work, deferring gratifications, bending over the desk and focussing on personal enrichment. The eyes of the individual become dull and joyless. In this painting by Holbein we have a perfect representation of this new kind of man. The middle class striver, and pen pusher. Money lays on the desk, keys hang in the top right – make the money, buy the stuff, lock it up. Keep good records. The slender poesie of flowers has but a moment before it will wilt. Our living moments are passing and fading away as we focus on the jingling coin. There are so many details in this painting that you can focus on when you see the large original canvas, for example the Turkish rug covering his table makes me think of global trade flows.

The fire burns in this man, and his eyes tell you that. A ruggedly beautiful face from the brush and the imagination of van Dyck. He was court painter for Charles I in England but this is my favourite painting of his and its here in Berlin. He is an apostle for all passion and all certitude of conviction.

So much is happening whenever you take the time to look at a large canvas by Brueghel. Here Christ is carrying the cross to the hill of Golgotha where he will be cruxified. It is a central moment in the religious imagination of the Western World. And yet…

And yet… W. H. Auden was right in his poem about another painting by Brueghel. I will quote a few lines and you’ll see what I mean:

Musee des Beaux Arts

W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

Now look at the section of the above painting I’ve included. Look at the two men on horse back having a quiet chat on the way up the hill, and seemingly not galvanised by the magnitude of the moment and its cosmic significance. As Auden says, suffering takes place ‘while someone is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’. In other words, part of emotional maturity in life is recognising that you or your preoccupation are not centre of the universe. You are not the protagonist in the mind of another person, as you are in your own. Perhaps not even Christ is, sometimes.

This next painting by Jan Steen is a festival of bad behaviour. Boozing, and smoking, and gorging on cake. It was only in the 1500s that highly refined sugar got to Europe in large quantities. As the middle class grew in the 1600s in the Netherlands and north-west Europe more people could have sedentary professions and in combination with lots of alcohol, smoking, and refined sugar, we get more of the mismatch diseases endemic to the modern West. The arteries of these men and women, our ancestors in a sense, start to get more clogged, and their blood pressures start to rise. Diseases of affluence, the one’s that modern hospitals labour under the weight of today in the West, started long ago. In this painting by Jan Steen we see a world where they are really getting under way in earnest. The old are still singing this tune, and the young are still piping the refrain.

This is a huge canvas, and you stand in front of it and are humbled by its size. The screen can’t communicate that to you. But it is a reminder of how much French and English and German aristocrats loved Rome and its glories. It is a reminder of how much I love the sheer scale and majesty of the piazza in front of St. Peters in Rome. It is one of the great human made spaces in the world, certainly one of the greatest public spaces in Europe. Here the world seems larger and the ceiling of cultural possibilities higher.

And what is another obvious choice for a great public space in Europe? Well just walk on through the Gemäldegalerie and come to the Canalettos…

I cast my mind back to the Venice this painter knew, full of mouldering Gothic edifices and shimmering sunsets and pungent odours, and I am nostalgic for a world I have never known. Today Venice is still beautiful and to be treasured, but she is dying under the weight of over tourism. The city has been loved to the point of death in 2023. I got up at 5am one morning last year and stood by a column next to the Ducal Palace and looked out from the molo, and felt for a moment this old European splendour and beauty with hardly a soul around in the weak dawn light.

One thing is certain: if you want to escape the world of over tourism, just visit the Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. For reasons I don’t understand, this place is wonderfully uncrowded.

Another wonderful building on Museum Island is the old national gallery building. King Freidrich Wilhelm IV had the idea of a temple-like building raised on a plinth decorated with motifs from antiquity, and that is the Alte Nationalgalerie we have today.

Perhaps the most well known German painter in the world today is Caspar David Friedrich. His painting from the early nineteenth century ‘Abbey Among Oak Trees’ is in my opinion the best darkly Gothic painting of all time. Seeing it in the full size original you are struck by its ineffable force, its spiritually poised atmosphere of mortality and mystery. Monks gather under the ruins, and the early dawn light. My intuition is to not try to describe the painting too much as much of its pleasure is in one’s own individual reception of it.

I have mentioned before that the man who is very central to the history of Germany and of Berlin, Frederick the Great, was an excellent composer of flute music, and player of the flute. In the audio guide to this painting they have helpfully included some eighteenth century flute music, and standing in front of this very large canvas and listening to the music the candle lit atmosphere of cultivation and good taste of that long lost world, conjured by Menzel so perfectly in this painting, comes through strongly. Gorgeous.

I for one can think of few better things than having a room that gives onto an old harbour town quay, with the sea beyond, and a guitar laying nearby. I’m clearly not the first person to love this ensemble.

This painting by Renoir took me by surprise. So much luminous colour and beauty. How could you not be lifted up by this if you saw it on your wall every day, showering you in colour and abundance? Possibly the painting that has startled me most with sheer pleasure and warmth.

Thanks to a special exhibition I was able to also see some of the paintings of Klimt, on loan from Vienna. The above painting really struck me with its lambent glow and strange beauty. Unfortunately that is hard to recognise on an electronic screen.

The Alte Nattional Gallery had a long line outside when I went. However if you really want to experience great art and you are in Berlin, I suggest heading to the Gemaldegalerie, which is what I did next…