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Ever wondered what war smells like? Or pondered the odour of love, the stench of medieval Paris, or the fragrance of religion? A new exhibition in Germany allows visitors to discover unknown smells by sniffing their way through 81 different fragrances across 37 different galleries. The show “The Secret Power of Scents”, which opened to the public on Wednesday at the Kunstpalast museum in the city of Duesseldorf, combines fragrances with art, taking visitors on a journey of more than 1,000 years of cultural history. “This exhibition is an experiment – and an invitation for our audience to discover the history of scents with their noses,” says Felix Kraemer, the museum’s director general. The exhibition follows a chronological order, from religious artefacts of the Middle Ages through to contemporary art of the 21st century. The galleries are equipped with atomisers and diffusers to create a connection between the art and the smell of a specific time period or cultural context. The scent of myrrh wafts through a darkened gallery of Christian wood carvings depicting various scenes from the Bible. Christianity, Judaism and Islam all used myrrh as a symbol for prayer and purification, the show explains. Smell evokes stronger emotional reactions than any other sense. It comes as no surprise that visitors almost retreat in fear when they press a button in a gallery depicting war from World War I. The scent was created by mixing the pungent smell of gunpowder with the metallic odour of blood and sulphur. “Anyone who has ever experienced war, conventional war, will hate it, because you can actually smell the brutality of war here,” says Robert Mueller-Gruenow, the show’s curator and a leading expert in the field of scent and scent technology. “It’s the first exhibition worldwide to bring scents into a museum in this form, format and scale,” he says. On the other side of the fragrance spectrum, there is the Venus and Adonis painting from 1610 by Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, showing two lovers. “This room is all about passion and emotions,” Mueller-Gruenow says, adding that the smells diffused here are dominated by roses and the scent of the civet – a cat whose scent was considered erotic in the 17th century, but makes today’s visitors turn up their noses in disgust. Certain smells also connect to different eras of history; pressing the button to release the stench of medieval Paris makes some visitors choke when they inhale a mix of sewage, mould and unwashed bodies. On the other hand, in a gallery dedicated to the Roaring Twenties, there is an oil painting by Gert Heinrich Wollheim from 1924, which celebrates the liberation of women, who at the time began wearing bold lipstick, bobbed their hair and smoked cigarettes in public. The room is filled with the uplifting scent of tobacco, vanilla and leather – a mixture that is a nod to famous early fragrances such as the historic Tabac Blond, which was launched by the fragrance house Caron in 1919. Moving on to modern art, the museum presents more contemporary smells between works of Andy Warhol, Yves Klein or Guenther Uecker, that remind visitors of world-famous brands such as Coca-Cola or German airline Eurowings, which diffuses a pleasant and relaxing scent on the plane when passengers board. In addition to the application of scents in marketing, the museum also shows the role of very modern scents such as the fragrance molecule “Iso E Super”, a dazzling scent that supposedly makes its wearers more attractive. “It’s a fragrance that smells like cedarwood, but it also has something very velvety and skin-like about it,” says the curator. “It smells very human, warm and flatteringly approachable.” For visitors strolling and sniffing their way through the show, which runs until March 8 next year, the 81 different scents opened up a whole new world, visitor Kirsten Gnoth says. “I’ve been to the collection here before, but now it’s completely new with scents that match the pictures and eras,” she says. “It’s exciting to combine art with scents.”
