Discovering the Marvels of the Alsace



When a painter friend heard that my husband, Howie, and I were planning to visit Alsace, he said, “You have to go to Colmar and see the Isenheim Altarpiece! It’s life-changing!” Our friend isn’t given to hyperbole, so hearing him suggest that a work of art might change our lives doubled the excitement we already felt about going to Alsace, in northeast France, on the border of Germany and Switzerland. The region not only straddles three countries and cultures but contains a wealth of extraordinary art and architecture. Alsace is also famous for its culinary traditions, for its wine and cheese and for its choucroute garnie: a heavenly stew made from sausages, charcuterie and sauerkraut.

I’d heard about Alsace for as long as I could remember. Howie’s great-grandfather emigrated from there to New York in the 19th century. I recall learning, in school, how the region had been claimed by both France and Germany. With each war, each invasion and occupation, its inhabitants had been forced to switch their allegiance, their citizenship and even their language from French to German and back again.

But I had never been there, nor for some reason had I thought much about going until our friend Wendy suggested that a group of us travel there for a long weekend, to celebrate her birthday. It was one of those fantastic occasions that seemed too good to be true but was, a trip to Europe — made possible by Wendy’s generosity — aboard a private jet with friends from various aspects of her life.

She had been to Alsace before. She’d gotten to know Marco Baumann, the proprietor of the Hotel des Berges, a country inn, and its restaurant, Auberge de L’ Ill (with three Michelin stars) in Illhaeusern, not far from Strasbourg. And she had fallen in love with the area — its medieval half-timbered houses, its quiet waterways, its vineyard-covered hills, its art and its food.

Our plane landed in Strasbourg, the region’s capital, on a crisp morning last fall. The Isenheim Altarpiece, just under an hour away, would have to wait. A bus arranged by the hotel took our group of 16 to the closest of the marvels we would see on our trip, the Gothic Cathédral Notre Dame de Strasbourg, the monumental church, one of the world’s tallest, constructed of red sandstone and decorated with delicate tracery, gargoyles and sculpted figures of the prophets, the Virtues and Vices, the Wise and Foolish Virgins. Built over a period lasting from the 12th to the 15th centuries, the church features magnificent stained glass windows, an elaborate pulpit and organ, and a famous astronomical clock that shows the position of the sun and moon, and from which, every day at half-past noon, a procession of figures — Christ and the apostles — emerges as a rooster crows three times.

After touring the cathedral, we stopped in at the Musée Alsacien, a folk art museum dedicated to the history and the crafts of the region. To me the most attractive objects — the ones I most coveted — were elaborate heating stoves made from ceramic tile. But the museum has something for everyone: costumes, toys, beer mugs, woodworking tools, model rooms recreating the interiors of a peasant house and a pharmacist’s studio, complete with an alchemist’s oven.

For lunch we went to the Brasserie Les Haras, a restaurant in the 18th-century building that once housed a riding academy and a stud farm. After we crossed the stately, classically lovely courtyard, it was something of a shock to enter the ultramodern interior, pale wood bent in circles and spirals, like a spaceship about to launch from inside the austere stone walls.

But that shock is rapidly dispelled by the excellence of the food: a menu that changes weekly and that, for us, meant pumpkin and goose liver tarts; a salad of chestnuts, green apples, pomegranate seeds and pears; seared scallops with a corn pancake — and one of the wonderful cheese plates that graced most of our meals.

Our lunch at the Brasserie was only one of many superb meals we enjoyed in Alsace, remarkable not only for the quality of the food but for the liveliness of the company and the seamless ease with which Wendy’s friends got along, nearly all of us from New York, and most of us past 50.

On our first night at the welcoming and unpretentiously luxurious Hôtel des Berges, on the banks of the Ill, a placid river on which one can take a small boat or watch a family of ducks, we dined in the informal hotel bar: local foie gras, followed by a stellar choucroute, the sausages and meats obtained from nearby farmers or prepared and smoked in-house.

On our final night at the hotel, we moved to the more formal restaurant for the sort of meal that has won the place its three stars, a dinner that included a series of nearly impossible choices between breaded quail and lobster salad; between salmon soufflé and a filet of pike-perch (sander) with an extraordinary risotto made with greens, herbs and chorizo; between veal with cepes and pigeon with truffles; between a pear tart and a medley of chocolate desserts. Other memorable meals occurred at JY’s, in Colmar, and at Les Trois Rois in Basel (the Swiss city is less than an hour from Illhaeusern) in a magnificent dining room overlooking the Rhine.

I often had trouble deciding what (aside from the sheer fun of being with friends) was the more pleasurable and memorable part of our trip to Alsace: the food or the art. I was struck by how many terrific museums exist within such a small area. Perhaps I should explain that many of the people on the trip were architects, so attention was paid not only to paintings but to the buildings that housed them.

Probably the most elegant was the Fondation Beyeler museum, over the Swiss border in Basel. Founded by the art dealer Ernst Beyeler and designed by Renzo Piano, the airy, light-filled space is notable for its long, narrow exterior made of porphyry imported from Patagonia, for its glass roof, and for the way in which its large, strategically placed windows make the galleries seem to interact with the landscaped gardens outside.

One is always turning a corner into a room full of paintings — when we visited, there was a show of futurist works by Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin and the artists they influenced — and being confronted by a gorgeous view of the foliage, the shrubbery, the lawns that surround the building and enhance the pleasure of being in the museum without competing with the art.

Equally interesting is the Schaulager, also in Basel, a somewhat fortresslike structure, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, that combines an exhibition space with a warehouse dedicated to the conservation and storage of art. Among the considerations in the building’s construction was the need for ideal conditions (humidity, temperature, light) for art preservation. Last fall, the show on view included paintings by Andy Warhol, Max Ernst and Elizabeth Peyton, and sculptures by Bruce Nauman, Robert Gober and Jean Arp.

Upstairs, the storage spaces had been opened to visitors. (The art on view changes when work is being shown elsewhere in the world.) One could wander along the bare corridors and into rooms containing videos by Bill Viola and Steve McQueen, an installation by Matthew Barney, and — most interesting to me, since I’d been unfamiliar with their work — hundreds of whimsical clay figures, acting out often hilarious, original and occasionally moving scenarios, created by the Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss, whose work recently appeared in a major show at the Guggenheim in New York.Our art-filled day ended at Vitra, a combination factory, furniture showroom and architecture and design museum just over the German border in Weil am Rhein, also less than an hour from Illhausern. Vitra’s main buildings — the Vitra Design Museum and VitraHaus — are used for temporary exhibitions (during our visit there was a show about the Bauhaus). The Vitra home collection is on permanent display in a showroom featuring furniture by Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson and other designers whose work Vitra is licensed to distribute, and in some cases manufacture.

Our group toured the grounds on which there are buildings by Frank Gehry, Herzog & de Mueron, Zaha Hadid, Renzo Piano and the Japanese architectural duo known as Sanaa. Perhaps the most beguiling work is a charming gas station created by Jean Prouvé in 1953.


But by far the most daunting structure is Carsten Hölller’s Vitra Slide Tower. One climbs upstairs (an ascent of over a hundred feet) to the top of the tower, where there is a viewing platform and a clock. Then, using a protective blanket to prevent friction burns, the intrepid can slide down a sort of tunnel, a metal tube that corkscrews vertiginously all the way back to the ground. I chose to sit on a nearby bench and watch the stunned expressions and happy-to-be alive grins of friends as they reached the bottom of the slide.

On our last full day, we took a break from art and a turn toward history and wine. A friendly and funny young guide took us around the Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg, a massive castle built and rebuilt over several hundred years, but whose style mostly reflects that of the 15th and 16th centuries. And later, we stopped in Riquewihr, a picturesque town, its streets lined with half-timbered buildings. There is a lot of that sort of charm in Alsace, but concentrated in one town, it reminded me, not entirely happily, of a set for “The Sound of Music.” The town is popular with tourists, and we had a very good lunch at Au Trotthus, which served an unlikely but tasty Japanese-Alsatian fusion: Our food arrived in a sort of elegant Franco-German bento box.



Our bus driver pointed out the huge ragged nests made by the storks for which Alsace is famous and which have become the region’s unofficial symbol. No one needed to be reminded to look at the beautiful rolling hills covered with vineyards, the grape leaves beginning to turn a bright autumnal yellow. One of these vineyards belongs to the Bott Frères winery, in Ribeauvillé, where the gracious Nicole Bott took us around her family business, which is also clearly a family passion. The winemaking machinery — vats and bottles, dials and tubes — is not only ingenious but beautiful, even fantastic, like the equipment one might find in a grown-up version of Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory.

But what I recall most vividly from our trip is the Isenheim Altarpiece. Our friend was right.

The painting, done by Matthias Grünewald in the early 16th century, is perhaps best known for the spidery fingers and arms and wrists of the agonized Christ, emaciated, waxy-skinned and covered with sores and bruises, and for the sharpness of the crown of thorns in the Crucifixion that appears in the altar’s central panel. I should explain that the altarpiece is not only a painting but a contraption. Its panels fold up like an amalgam of an enormous book, a piece of furniture and a work of art.

Except for special holy days, the doors were kept closed so that one saw the outside panels: the Crucifixion in the center, flanked by St. Anthony and St. Sebastian. The wings can be opened to reveal a scene of the Annunciation, the Madonna and Child, and the Resurrection. When the wings are opened yet again, one sees St. Paul and St. Anthony in the desert, and the temptation of St. Anthony, beset by monsters and demons. Between these two painted panels of the saints is a sculpted, gilded panel done by Niclaus of Haguenau, also in the early 16th century.

On the day of our visit, we were obliged to view the masterpiece under less than optimal circumstances: the Musée Unterlinden, where the altarpiece is normally kept — and to which it has been returned — was being renovated and the work was installed in a Dominican chapel nearby. The panels were detached and shown separately, and while it was helpful to be able to see all the paintings at once, it did make it harder to figure out how this marvelous construction was meant to work.

Ultimately, it hardly mattered. Several of our friends knew parts of the paintings’ history, and we were able to piece our fragments of information together into a sort of collective narrative. The painting was commissioned for the chapel of the monastery of St. Anthony, in Isenheim (near Colmar), which treated those with a disease that came to be known as St. Anthony’s Fire, triggered by ingesting ergot, the LSD-like byproduct of spoiled grain that causes skin eruptions and terrifying hallucinations.

The artwork was intended to be visible to the hospital’s patients, to give hope to the hopeless and — with its depictions of phantoms as threatening as any the patients were imagining themselves — to make them feel less alone. Who knows if it succeeded, if indeed the sick were helped by Grünewald’s depiction of monsters that suggest a 16th-century Maurice Sendak.

But what I found thrilling — and yes, life-changing — is the evidence that, at some point in our history, a society thought that this was what art could do: that art might possibly accomplish something like a small miracle of comfort and consolation. It seemed enormously inspiring for anyone who makes, or who cares about, art.

But even without this profound encounter with Grünewald’s work, we would have had a wonderful time in Alsace. What better reasons to go to a place than good food, good wine, beauty, history and life-changing art?

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/travel/alsace-francine-prose.html?hpw&rref=travel&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well