Museum Brandhorst

Not yet ten years old, the Brandhorst Museum in the northeastern corner of Munich’s Kunstareal (art district) is impossible to miss. With its Technicolor striped exterior, this dazzling addition to Munich’s art scene displays around 200 modern works from the collection of Anette Brandhorst and her husband Udo Fritz-Hermann. Big hitters include Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Bruce Nauman, Andy Warhol and Cy Twombly. The polygonal room above the foyer was designed exclusively for Twombly’s Lepanto, a breath-taking, twelve-canvas sequence depicting a fiery 16th-century sea battle between the Ottoman Turks and so-called “Holy League” of European forces. In panoramic scale and colors as luminous as the Brandhorst facade, the sequence is at once at the heart of the battle drama and a historical reflection on the tragedies of conflict. For those fond of printed matter as much as pictures on the wall, the Brandhorst collection also boasts one of the most comprehensive holdings of Picasso-illustrated books.