by Gauvin Alexander Bailey

In June 1958, at the end of the initial burst of post-War reconstruction in Munich’s devastated city centre, the first reopened rooms in the bombed-out Residenz played host to Europäisches Rokoko, one of the largest Rococo exhibitions ever mounted, with over 850 paintings, sculptures, prints, furniture and porcelain from around Europe.1 The choice of subject was significant: Rococo had thrived in Bavaria as in few other regions of Europe, and a celebration of a style associated with the former Electorate’s artistic apogee was precisely what people needed at a time when Munich’s unsavoury recent past still weighed heavily on the popular imagination. This year Munich returns to the Rococo in the exhibition Mit Leib und Seele (With Body and Soul) at the Kunsthalle, Munich (to 12th April), where the confident twenty-first-century city celebrates Bavarian Rococo more specifically and, although it incorporates only 122 objects – mostly sculptures – their massiveness and dramatic presentation give the impression that the show is much bigger. Many are life-sized or larger; some tower above us from pedestals while others, suspended from cables, seem to leap through the air (Fig.63). There is even a magic sleigh: Johann Baptist Straub’s fairy-tale conveyance for the Elector’s winter entertainments is driven by the goddess Diana in Roman hunter’s garb and led by a horn-blowing putto (c.1740; cat. no.29; Fig.65). For someone with a weakness for Rococo it is
like being a child in a sweet shop.

Diana’s sleigh aside, the focus of the exhibition is religious sculpture but, as the title ­suggests, it is the product of a very profane kind of religion in which exposed thighs and supple flesh tones fuse faith with sensuality. For the first time the visitor can appreciate in one place a major selection of critical works by the giants of the era from twenty-five cathedrals, abbeys, pilgrimage churches and palaces from Ingolstadt to Oberammergau, including the Diözesansmueum Freising, a partner in the exhibition. The stars of the show are the Asam Brothers, Ignaz Günther and Straub, but it also includes distinguished works by lesser-known artists, notably Christian Jorhan the Elder and Roman Anton Boos. This reviewer has visited many of these works in their original context and it was a particular thrill – and revelation – to see them exhibited on their own, not merely because it allowed direct comparisons between objects that are usually miles apart, but because they project greater charisma than they do in their usual setting, where they are overwhelmed by gilded altarpieces and pulpits, false-marble piers, glittering mirrors, and the other accoutrements of the Bavarian Rococo church ­interior. The massive and sumptuously illustrated catalogue, edited by Roger Diederen with essays on the major themes of the show by established scholars such as Peter Volk, shows the works in their original locations, thus providing a useful accompaniment to the exhibition.2

Sharp chiaroscuro effects and walls painted in suitably Rococo pinks, dove greys and celadon greens enhance the sculptures’ presence, and occasional deep-red backdrops set off the rich patina of the more heavily gilded pieces. Some spaces feel like shrines. Notable is the opening gallery, dominated by Günther’s towering St Helena (1764–65; no.101), or the chapel-like space focusing on an outsized gilt frame from c.1742/45 (Munich court workshop) which overpowers the anonymous painting of St Anne teaching the Virgin Mary inside it and, thanks to deft spotlighting, casts intriguing spidery shadows on the floor (no.22). The wall text calls the frame ‘dainty’, but this reviewer found it vaguely menacing in its heft and crustacean angles: it recalls Karsten Harries’s remark that Rococo decoration ‘attacks its support almost aggressively’.3 The penultimate room, devoted to over-life-sized sculptures by Günther from the villages of Aholming and Eiselfing, is set up like a small parish church, complete with nave, lateral altars and a chancel, dark, as if illuminated by candles. This hushed presentation of certain sculptures, together with larger galleries in which works are positioned in dialogue with one another through carefully constructed sight lines, reminds this reviewer of the ­London exhibition of Spanish Baroque sculpture The Sacred Made Real – although this is a very different world indeed from the Iberian aesthetic of gloom and gore.4

Like the National Gallery show, Mit Leib und Seele also presents us with paragoni between sculptures and related arts. Through a judicious selection of graphic works related to the sculptures – some are preparatory and presentation sketches, others printed models – the curators have not only shown how Rococo circulated throughout Europe but reveal the minutiae of workshop practice and the profound debts the various media owed one another. One delightful room in green and salmon pink compares porcelain by Franz Anton Bustelli with wooden polychrome statues painted in porcelain colours by Jorhan the Elder, including a saucy, squirming quartet of putti (c.1770; no.52), newly liberated from their dazzling pulpit at Maria Thalheim. The next room shows a very different kind of putto by Joseph Götsch. Entitled the Four Last Things (Death, Judgment, Hell and Heaven), this suite of four wall-mounted sculptures shows dead, tortured and anguished cherubs, including a rare putto skull complete with peeling skin and missing teeth (1765; no.61; Fig.64), and two wincing in agony, one with a noose around its neck. This series is a far cry from the usual round of rosy-cheeked babies so common in Bavarian church vaults.

Some galleries are thematic, while others concentrate on individual artists. The thematic rooms include the porcelain gallery and a space devoted to the amorphous, asymmetrical shell-and-rock-like rocaille motif, the very essence of the Rococo. Highlights include Johann Georg Lindt’s tour de force Triumph of the Virgin Immaculate (c.1760; no.28), a spiky wooden polychrome shrine supported by allegories of the Four Continents which is constructed almost entirely of rocailles. The galleries devoted to individual artists are revealing because they demonstrate the degree to which figures who are now so little known (at least outside Germany) were the superstars of their age, particularly those who were exempted from guild rules by the Court. Some, like Straub, in a 1763 portrait by Balthasar Augustin Albrecht, adopted the trappings of the aristocratic connoisseur: dressed in courtly finery he looks more as if he is purchasing, rather than sculpting, the bust on the table next to him (no.3). By contrast Cosmas Damian Asam projects a swaggering image of genius in his self-portrait with his brothers. Wearing a bright red cape and velvet turban, he turns quickly around to stare us in the face, at the same time conveniently elbowing both brothers out of the way (before 1717; no.1).

One sculpture this reviewer was disappointed not to see here (especially since its permanent home in the Bürgersaal is just around the corner) is Günther’s masterpiece, his Guardian angel of 1763; the angel by Joseph Götsch (1763–66) that stands in for it is not in the same league (no.60). But Günther’s other showstoppers are there, notably his St Notburga, the popular Tyrolean peasant saint from Rott am Inn, who embodies the essence of Bavarian Rococo in the deceptive realism of carved lace and satin that beg to be stroked, false pink bows on bodice and shoes which look as if they can be undone with a single tug, and an apron full of mouth-watering, freshly baked rolls. She is supremely erotic, whether through her serpentine pose and ­languid face with raspberry cheeks, or again her shoes, her toes visibly alive beneath
the fabric of the slippers (c.1762–63; no.82; Fig.66). The only ingredient missing is humour: in its original setting on the left side of a painting of a miracle of St Francis Xavier, by a witty sleight of hand, the scythe she grasps threatens to decapitate the attendant of a gaudily dressed Indian potentate.5

The exhibition ends with Neo-Classicism and the work of the Bavarian academician and sculptor Roman Anton Boos, and although much is made of the differences between his grey and putty-toned sculptures and those of the earlier sculptors, they actually reveal how much Boos owed to the tradition of Straub and Günther, their swaying stances and ecstatic faces still evident in works such as Minerva (1776; no.117) or Bacchus with a child satyr (1782; no.119). This sense of compromise with Rococo – not part of the textbook ­narrative of Rococo to Revolution – was found in small parish churches from the Allgäu to Lake Lucerne, where, from the 1780s onwards, decorators found a happy medium between pastel colours and rocailles and the garlands and Grecian medallions of Robert Adam and Josiah Wedgwood.

1     Exh. cat. The Age of Rococo: Art and Culture of the Eighteenth Century, 4th Council of Europe exhibition, Munich (Residenz), 1958; reviewed by Michael Levey and Francis Haskell in this Magazine, 100 (1958), pp.422–27.
2     Catalogue: Mit Leib und Seele: Münchner Rokoko von Asam bis Günther. Edited by Roger Diederen. 416 pp. incl. 300 col. ills. (Sieveking Verlag, Munich, 2014), €35. ISBN 978–3–944874–15–9.
3     K. Harries: The Bavarian Rococo Church, New Haven and London 1983, p.17.
4     X. Bray, ed.: exh. cat. The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600–1700, London (National Gallery) and Washington (National Gallery of Art) 2009–10; reviewed by Rosemarie Mulchahy in this Magazine, 152 (2010), pp.50–52.
5     See G.A. Bailey: The Spiritual Rococo: Décor and Divinity from the Salons of Paris to the Missions of Patagonia, Farnham 2014, plate 7.