Kunstmeile (Art Mile)

Where else can you find such a concentration of art highlights and, what's more, right in the middle of the city? Hamburg’s Art Mile, which would take a quarter of an hour to walk along if you didn’t visit anything, is right next to the Einkaufs-City (shopping city) and Kontorhaus district (historical office city). The lofty institutions of culture stand cheerfully on either side of the bustling main railway station with its huge roof and historic turrets. The area, which developed gradually into a magnet for art lovers from all over the world, is steeped in history. The fortification walls of this Hanseatic city ran along here, as street names such as Klosterwall (monastery wall) and Glockengießerwall (bell-pourer wall) vividly testify. Then the railway came along in the last century. Today its tracks form a kind of backbone for the new Art Mile, which is flanked by a busy street and a car tunnel. But it also links two of the most beautiful sights, the historical Speicherstadt (warehouse district) at the edge of the port and Hamburg’s dress circle, the glittering square water surface of the Inner Alster Lake with its fountain shooting high into the air.

Let’s start down at the edge of the port. In the huge old buildings which now display modern art, the goods on offer were once rather mundane, although always fresh. All the buildings were covered markets and were converted only in the last few years. The most spectacular are the Deichtorhallen, which rise up above a wide open square with hipped roofs extending well out and huge light gables. A private sponsor and the Berlin architect Josef Paul Kleihues transformed the two dilapidated ruins, built in 1911, into two of the largest and most beautiful exhibition spaces in Europe. There are 6000 square metres of space which can be subdivided with 500 metres of movable walls. Zdenek Felix, the director of the Deichtorhallen, fills the spaces with international contemporary art in specially compiled theme exhibitions or individual shows, ranging from Warhol through Lichtenstein to Haring, complemented by the work of star photographers such as Newton, Leibowitz or Penn. Sometimes the exhibitions are nostalgic or amusing, but in any event they are crowd-pleasers, attracting at least 200,000 people each year. There is something outside for them to see too – a sculpture by Richard Serra – and changing events in a vault under the suburban railway line.

To get to the next stop on our walk, all we have to do is cross the road. Right opposite the northern market, writing on the multi-storied futuristic glass façade announces the title of the Kunstverein’s current exhibition. This is demanding fare which is not for everyone: concept art, experimental art and intellectual themes presented without elaborate commentaries for adventurous intellectuals.

Speaking of food: do you feel like a rest already? Next to the Kunstverein is "Jena Paradies", a restaurant popular with the in-crowd, which was designed and fitted out by - how could it not be in this environment - an artist, Werner Büttner from Jena. Pretty minimalistic, but still cozy

Still in the same building, the Markthalle, but around the corner is the Kunsthaus, which puts on temporary exhibitions, primarily of works by Hamburg artists. The next entrance leads to three private modern art galleries: Hauptmann, Barlach Halle K and Cato Jans.

To get to the next stop you have to walk up the slope a little and turn right over the bridge which crosses the wide stretch of railway tracks in front of the main railway station. In front of you is the large yellow and white Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe (Museum of Art and Crafts) which was built in the neo-renaissance style and opened in 1877. It has one of the most attractive collections of decorative art from a wide variety of eras and cultures. You can spend hours here looking at ancient porcelain, carved medieval altars, gothic glass, renaissance gold and ivory work, baroque furniture, 19th century middle-class interiors and the magnificent hall of mirrors built in 1909. The art nouveau and Eastern Asian departments are particularly well-known. Huge numbers of people flock to the large special exhibitions, which cover a broad range of themes, from the graves of the pharaohs to jewelry by Lalique or Tiffany to old gaming machines to current design, fashion and photography. The active museum, which attracts 300,000 visitors per year, will soon be able to offer even more variety when the new exhibition rooms in the courtyard are completed.

On the other side of the railway station, Hamburg’s venerable - and partly brand-new - Kunsthalle provides a pleasant conclusion to our art walk. Architecturally speaking, it consists of three quite heterogeneous parts: at the front there is a grey annexe built in 1919, with a colonnaded doorway and copper domes; in the center there is the ornate yellow brick Lichtwark-Bau (Lichtwark Building), the oldest section, dating from 1869, and finally, beyond an open square covered in red marble, the Galerie der Gegenwart (Gallery of Contemporary Art) designed by the Cologne architect Oswald Matthias Ungers. This is a simple classical cube made of light-colored sandstone with one vertical and several horizontal window bands, all neatly squared off. The rooms inside are as different as the exteriors. First comes Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) with a beautiful central rotunda, then classical rooms with colorfully lined cabinets, and finally a pompous staircase dating from the late nineteenth century. Then the visitor plunges down into long basement rooms displaying contemporary art and finally arrives at the unadorned new stories around the impressive high light well in the Ungers building.

The Kunsthalle offers its guests (350,000 per year) an informative walk through the history of painting and sculpture from the 14th century to the present day. A number of the exhibits are world-class. Highlights include Master Bertram’s altars of 1380, 17th-century Dutch paintings, 19th-century French and German paintings, particularly those by Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich, and early 20th-century works by Munch and Beckmann, Liebermann, Corinth and Kokoschka. Uwe M. Schneede, the director of the Kunsthalle, also organizes series of large international special exhibitions focusing on the 19th century. The new contemporary section, which you enter under illuminated rolling texts by Jenny Holzer, shows works of great international artists of our time, including Beuys and Oldenburg, Hockney and Kounellis. One of the upper levels is reserved for avant-garde German art. There you can see works by Baselitz, Richter, Lüpertz, Kiefer and Tröckel.

Finally, footsore art lovers can recharge their batteries in the nostalgic atmosphere of the Café Liebermann with its pillars, or at the Bistro in the new building, which has a terrace and a lovely view of the Alster. But is it possible to see all that Hamburg's short Art Mile has to offer in one go?

Back to the Top