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Category Archives: Museums

Photos that expose “The Other America”

Mitch Epstein, American Power, Plate-forme pétrolière “Ocean Warwick”, Dauphin Island, Alabama, 2005 / Ocean Warwick Oil Platform, Dauphin Island, Alabama, 2005, © Black River Productions, Ltd./Mitch Epstein. Courtesy Thomas Zander, Cologne

Article first published on 21 September 2011 by Swissinfo.ch: http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/culture/Photos_that_expose_The_Other_America.html?cid=31187806

In the wake of the 9/11 commemorations, three major contemporary American photographers present unfamiliar and intriguing images from the United States.

Emotion, power and nostalgia are the distinct themes presented in three parallel exhibitions under the collective title, “The Other America”, at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne.

By revealing the paradoxes of their homeland with images of sometimes brutal beauty, Frank Schramm, Saul Leiter and Mitch Epstein show us a different America.

The photographic language of the artists whose works fill Switzerland’s premier photography museum could not be further apart. But they share a sharp sobriety and elegance that challenges the divide between documentary photography and art.

“These three exhibitions encourage us to question our attitudes towards the US,” Elysée Director, Sam Stourdzé, said at the opening.

Frank Schramm, Stand-ups – Reporting Live from Ground Zero, 28 septembre, 2001 (#4) / September 28, 2001 (#4), ©Frank Schramm. Courtesy Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

Reporting from Ground Zero

Frank Schramm was in New York on September 11, 2001. But rather than chronicle the event, he stepped back to portray those who were on the frontline of the news delivery. Over the following weeks, he photographed the TV presenters who provided the news in an endless loop.

Segregated in an area on the West River at some distance from the cordoned-off Ground Zero, they became the “stand-ups” reporting the live events that they themselves were not allowed to see.

“Photographing the journalists became my way of dealing with my own emotions,” Frank Schramm told swissinfo.ch. “In my emotions, I was wondering how they were dealing with theirs.”

The resulting portraits, many of which have the glossy perfection of a fashion shot, have never been shown publicly before this year. None carry any names, although many of the portrayed presenters are well known.

“This work is not about the journalists. It’s not about who they are. It’s about: can a tragic event bridge towards art,” Schramm observed.

Pauline Martin, who curated the show, explained that the journalists, as they became the mediators of a nation’s collective trauma, were also unwittingly contributing to the success of the terrorist act by amplifying the media coverage.

“The series serves as a manifesto: terrorism cannot exist without the major role played by the media and the images they broadcast,” she insisted. Press fortunes and careers are made overnight by disasters.

“Life goes on, we move forward. I wanted to remember what we were feeling,” Schramm recalled.

Frank Schramm, Stand-ups – Reporting Live from Ground Zero, 17 septembre, 2001 (#5) / September 17, 2001 (#5)

“American Power”

Under the provocative and ambiguous title, “American Power”, Mitch Epstein documents the massive reliance of the US on unlimited amounts of energy.

From 2003 to 2008, Epstein crisscrossed the country in search of the installations either in use, or abandoned, that have contributed to the “power of America”.

“He uses an artistic approach to tackle important social issues,” Stourdzé said of Epstein, whom he considers to be one of the most important photographers today.

“By looking at the larger American landscape and identifying the sites that produce energy, I watch the story between communities, corporations and the government unfold,” Epstein explained, adding, “This work is a reflection on American culture at this time.”

He said that he was not an environmental activist, but that he realised that America takes a lot for granted. “We were handed a lot and we expect a lot. This has created a sense of entitlement.”

Mitch Epstein, American Power, Barrage de Hoover et Lac Mead, Nevada/ Arizona, 2007 / Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, Nevada/ Arizona, 2007, © Black River Productions, Ltd./Mitch Epstein. Courtesy Thomas Zander, Cologne

Politics are the driving agenda, according to Epstein. Workers who have contributed to the might of the nation become renegades when the power plants are abandoned or relocated. He sets out to tell their stories too.

“My pictures are complex because I want to produce a metaphorical narrative of things American and compress as much as I can into a single image,” he said.

It is not without irony that his panorama includes images of lakes once used to cool off nuclear power plants and that have now become leisure areas, mostly for immigrant workers.

The 65 pictures of scarred landscapes have a stand-alone perfection that makes them almost abstract. We are looking at a country’s destructive reliance on energy, but at its optimism as well.

Photography is a language, Epstein stated. “It is my job to use that language in all its fluency.”

“Early Color”

Sam Stourdzé, who curated the third show in a theatrical display that occupies the entire third floor of his museum, presented the works of Saul Leiter, too aged to be present.

Leiter, born in 1923, first trained as a painter before exploring photography. He discovered “street photography” by visiting the exhibition of Henri Cartier-Bresson at MoMa in 1947 and from there on began to photograph his environment. But he was less interested in scenes, than in capturing fragments of scenes.Saul Leiter: Early Color, Taxi, 1957

“His early attempts in black and white were fairly ordinary, but when he switched to colour, his eye as a painter and a colourist took over,” Strourdzé explained. Images become compositions, each one the beginning of a story.

“Leiter plunges us into a nostalgic America of the Fifties,” Stourdzé explained. “He is sharing his solitary moments of reverie.”

It is precisely the poetic dimension of The Other America that allows a documentary exhibition to emerge as art. Stourdzé is convinced that “visual narratives can transform the way we look at things”.

This is the first time the pictures have been shown in Switzerland.

Saul Leiter: Early Color, Parade, 1954

Modern masters from a unique Swiss collection

“Van Gogh, Bonnard, Vallotton…”. Lausanne’s Fondation de l’Hermitage is offering a rare chance to view works by modern masters from the acclaimed Hahnloser collection.


Pierre Bonnard, Le débarcadère (ou L’embarcadère) de Cannes, 1934, huile sur toile, 43,5 x 56,5 cm, Hahnloser/Jaeggli Stiftung, Villa Flora, Winterthour © photo Reto Pedrini, Zurich © 2011, ProLitteris, Zurich

Article published in www.swissinfo.ch on 5 August 2011: Modern masters from a unique Swiss collection

Built up in Winterthur between 1905 and 1936 by an ophthalmologist, Arthur Hahnloser, and his artist wife, Hedy Hahnloser-Bühler, the collection is a valuable snapshot of a period in art history poised between Impressionism and Modernism.

It is also the uncommon story of how a Swiss family of neither great means, nor artistic standing, shaped a prestigious private collection.

“The collection is unique not only because of its vision and coherence, but also because it is one of the few private art collections that has remained virtually intact,” Angelika Affentranger-Kirchrath, curator of the Villa Flora in Winterthur, told swissinfo.ch.

Villa Flora is the former home of the Hahnloser family that became a museum in 1995. Inspired by the Viennese Secession style, or Jugendstil, it is considered a work of art in itself, but is not large enough to showcase the large art collection gathered over 30 years by the Hahnlosers.

The 150-work exhibition currently on view at Fondation de l’Hermitage in Lausanne provides an opportunity to grasp the significance of the obsessive collecting of a family from Winterthur, as well as discover some outstanding art.

Meeting with Hodler

It was the Graubünden painter Giovanni Giacometti, father of Alberto, who introduced the Hahnlosers to the art scene, including to Ferdinand Hodler, the controversial, but admired painter whose work they would subsequently defend.

Ferdinand Hodler, Le massif de la Jungfrau vu depuis Mürren, 1911, huile sur toile, 72 x 91 cm, Hahnloser/Jaeggli Stiftung, Villa Flora, Winterthour © photo Reto Pedrini, Zurich

Hedy later wrote of the encounter with Hodler, “We were experiencing for the first time what we would live through hundreds of times: the irrepressible desire to look at the world through the eyes of a master.”

“Hedy was clearly the driving force behind the collection,” says Affentranger, although she points out that Hedy’s husband, Arthur, and cotton magnate brother-in-law, Emil, also played active roles. Emil Hahnloser’s part of the collection reverted to the Hahnloser estate upon his death in 1940.

“She wanted above all to live with her times and  believed that art was actually the best way to do this,” says the curator of a woman whose Protestant upbringing and health problems due to tuberculosis were to leave the image of someone both incredibly strong and exceedingly frail. She survived her husband by 16 years.

“Hedy Hahnloser wanted to decorate life with art, but there was nothing ostentatious about her,” Affentranger says.

Hedy Hahnloser-Bühler at Villa Flora in Winterthur, 1935 (Willy Maywald)

From 1908 until the doctor’s sudden death in 1936 the couple made frequent trips to France, including to Cannes where they had purchased a house to be close to the artistic community.

They acquired works from the contemporary artists that they visited in their studios, often inviting them to stay at Villa Flora. This was a novel approach to collecting art, Affentranger emphasises.

The Hahnloser’s dedication to the artists of their times pinpoints moments in art history that are visible in the current exhibition.

A unique exhibition

“This is the first time that so many of the works have been displayed together,” Affentranger says, adding that the process of curating the Lausanne show in collaboration with Juliane Cosandier, the departing Hermitage director and her successor Sylvie Wuhmann, was a complex, but inspiring experience.

The collection threads it way through the gracious Lausanne mansion not in chronological order, but in single artist or thematic presentations, an arrangement that produces some interesting associations.

“The Nabis form the heart of the collection, so we decided to present a ‘collection within the collection’,” says Affentranger explaining the monographic displays by Pierre Bonnard and Félix Vallotton, the main proponents of the post-Impressionist movement who became close friends of the Hahnlosers.

Félix Vallotton,La Blanche et la Noire, 1913, huile sur toile, 114 x 147 cm, Hahnloser/Jaeggli Stiftung, Villa Flora, Winterthour © photo Reto Pedrini, Zurich

The intimacy of what Bonnard called his “enchanting moments” – women lost in reverie as they bathe or wait for something to happen – comes in stark contrast to the fiercely enigmatic works by Vallotton.

Fauvists

Other revelations include an Odilon Redon of unusually riotous colours and works by Impressionists of an unexpected nature: Paris rooftops by Cézanne, streaks of fireworks by Van Gogh and feathery landscapes by Renoir.

To cap the collection, the Fauve artists, who succeeded the Nabis, are represented by Matisse, Rouault and Henri Manguin, possibly previously unknown to many visitors.

Henri-Charles Manguin,La Sieste ou Le Rocking Chair, Jeanne, 1905, huile sur toile, 89 x 117 cm, collection privée, Villa Flora, Winterthour © photo Reto Pedrini, Zurich © 2011, ProLitteris, Zurich

“We have restored the initial excitement and the radical achievements of one of the most important private collections in Switzerland,” says Cosandier, who admits she is pleased to be closing her 15 successful years as Hermitage director with this prestigious exhibition.

Sagmeister, prince d’un graphisme art-pop au mudac

Le mudac à Lausanne consacre une importante exposition à Stefan Sagmeister. L’artiste autrichien établi à New York est le plus conceptuel des ad-men et le plus chic des graphistes art-pop. Avec ses mises en scène provocantes et absurdes, un sens de l’humour débridé mais élégant, Sagmeister est passé maître dans le ‘over-statement’ visuel au service de ‘l’under-statement’ commercial.

Sagmeister, c’est le minimalisme érigé en expression artistique, l’imagination au service de l’efficacité.

« Je vends la culture, les corporations, mes amis et moi-même » annonçait-il lors de l’inauguration de son exposition le 6 mars 2011.

« J’étais tenté, à l’occasion de ce projet, de m’éloigner du design. Mais, en somme, c’est quelque chose que j’ai souvent fait, alors j’ai décidé, au contraire, d’entrer de plein pied dans le commercial en ne présentant que des commandes. »

jusqu’au 13 juin 2011, « Encore une exposition sur la promotion et la vente », le titre de la 11ème exposition de la série « carte blanche » du mudac – le musée de design et arts appliqués à Lausanne – explore l’efficacité de l’image au service du message.

« L’impact culturel d’un message m’importe encore plus que son résultat en terme de chiffres d’affaires, » explique Sagmeister.

« Du reste, plus les spécifications (the brief) sont longues, moins le projet sera bon, » précise-t-il.

Stefan Sagmeister, « Singes en Ecosse », 2007 (détail) 6 sculptures gonflables géantes © Stefan Sagmeister. Pendant la journée et pour la durée de l’exposition, un de ces singes explose d’une fenêtre du mudac, à moitié dedans et à moitié dehors.

« Notre mission est de révéler la puissance de la vie, » (the power of life) Sagmeister déclare sans sourcilier, ses lèvres posées dans un immobilisme que ses yeux contredisent.

L’exposition à Lausanne est une retrospective qui retrace l’acheminement d’un créatif touche à tout sans tabous. Il joue avec les mots autant qu’avec les objets. Une chaise réalisée comme un bloc note ondulé, avec des affiches qui s’effeuillent, et une table magnétisée révèlent une imagination hors limites, mais pragmatique, car ces objets, ô surprise, sont merveilleusement utilisables.

L’artiste publiciste s’est d’abord fait un nom dans la musique. Designer attitré de David Byrne, Bryan Eno, Talking Heads, Lou Reed et, occasionnellement, des Rolling Stones, il a trouvé, dès le début de sa carrière, la parfaite parade pour combiner ses deux amours : le design et la musique. “C’était la meilleure façon de rencontrer Bryan Eno, précise Sagmeister, un vrai plaisir pour ce qu’il dit encore plus que pour sa musique.”

Plusieurs exemples de ces collaborations, dont certaines ont été couronnées de Grammy Awards,  figurent dans l’expo.

Issu de la petite ville soporifique autrichienne de Bregenz à l’extrémité est du Lac Constance, à quelques encablures de la Suisse, Sagmeister se dit très attaché à sa ville natale.

A la suite d’études à Vienne, continuées à New York et couronnées par un passage à Hong Kong, il s’est installé de manière définitive dans la Grande Pomme en 1993.

Mais Stefan Sagmeister retourne régulièrement à Bregenz, la ville qui a également donné naissance, en 1997, au Kunsthaus Bregenz (KUB), le légendaire musée de Peter Zumthor. Sous des airs de fausse candeur, Bregenz montre une singulière audace, tout comme Sagmeister.

Affiche réalisée à l’occasion de deux expositions au Japon sur le travail de Sagmesiter. Pendant une semaine, il a ingurgité la somme des produits visibles, son poids passant de 81 à 92 kilos en 8 jours. Stefan Sagmeister, “GGG-DDD Poster”, 2003 © Stefan Sagmeister

 

Se réservant une soupape de compression, il disparaît régulièrement à Bali pour des périodes sabbatiques pendant lesquelles il refuse tout mandat, y compris celui de s’occuper de la première campagne présidentielle d’Obama, comme ce fut le cas. Actuellement là bas, il est venu quelques jours en Suisse à l’occasion du lancement de son exposition à Lausanne et d’une conférence à l’écal, l’école cantonale d’art de Lausanne. Sagmeister explique qu’il s’impose ces arrêts pour retrouver les repères de sa créativité.

La rétrospective lausannoise a la particularité d’être une carte blanche boomerang, où l’artiste concerné offre lui-même carte blanche à des personnes de confiance pour la réalisation d’un projet sur lui-même.

Ainsi, le zurichois Martin Woodtli, ancien collaborateur de Stefan Sagmeister, a été chargé du carton d’invitation, de l’affiche et du (superb) catalogue, alors que le collectif lausannois très en vue Big-Game a réalisé la scénographie de l’exposition.

Mais la personne pivot de cette entreprise, qui sera reprise par le musée des Arts Décoratifs à Paris du 13 octobre 2011 au 19 février 2012, n’est autre que la directrice du mudac de Lausanne, Chantal Prod’Hom, dont on soupçonne que les années auprès de la fondation Benetton, à laquelle a également été associé Sagmeister, ne sont pas complètement étrangères à ce choix.

“Ce qu’il y a de formidable dans le travail de Stefan, dit Chantal Prod’Hom, c’est ce qu’il raconte.”

« L’exposition est plus limpide et précise que si je l’avais élaborée moi-même, » conclut Stefan Sagmesiter en hommage à ses hôtes avant de reprendre l’avion pour Bali.

http://www.sagmeister.com/

Réalisé à l’0ccasion d’une campagne de sensibilisation contre les coupes budgétaires du gouvernement américain, le bus dédoublé qui sillonait les Etats Unis s’est révélé un moyen de communication plus économique et efficace qu’une importante campagne d’affichage d’après son auteur. Stefan Sagmeister, « True Majority », 2004, Bus dédoublé © Stefan Sagmeister

Lust and Vice censored in Bern

Bruce Nauman, Vices and Virtues, 1983–1988/2008, Neon-Schrift (18-teilig), Courtesy of the artist and Stuart Collection, University of California, San Diego. Photo: Markus Mühlheim © 2010, ProLitteris, Zürich

A remarkable panorama on the portrayal of sin by artists over the last 11 centuries is being held at the Kunstmuseum Bern and the Zentrum Paul Klee. But the last-minute removal of 3 works on the theme of lust and the decision to restrict access to under 16 year-olds sends worried ripples through the art world. The public flocks, but is it for art or titillation?

The exhibition ‘Lust and Vice, the 7 deadly sins from Dürer to Nauman’ until February 13 at the Kunstmuseum Bern and the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern has become a succès à scandale, precisely what it was seeking to avoid.

Coming hot on the trail of the much-disputed censorship of a retrospective in Paris of the American photographer Larry Clark, the last-minute removal of two pictures by the same artist from the exhibit has met with criticism, especially since one of the works is on the web anyway.

“There is definitely a before and after the Paris decision,” admits Juri Steiner, director of the Paul Klee Zentrum, where the section on lust is displayed.

He and his Kunstmuseum Bern counterpart, Matthias Frehner, made a last-minute joint decision to take out the two Larry Clark photographs, as well as an explicit watercolour of female genitalia by the German political expressionist George Grosz. They also established the age restriction rule.

In Paris, the popular Socialist mayor, Bertrand Delanoë took the unprecedented decision to ban under 18 year-olds from seeing the Larry Clark photography retrospective Kiss the past hello at the Modern art museum.

For the past 50 years Clark has chronicled teenagers in situations of great vulnerability and sometimes distress as they discover lust and drugs. Google his name and you will understand.

“We decided to remove Clark’s photographs,” Steiner explains, “because we realized that they had the power to focalize attention at the cost of the 250 other works in the exhibition.”

Vice and Lust is the culmination of two and a half years of work by curators Fabienne Eggelhöfer (ZPK), Claudine Metzger (KMB) and Samuel Vitali (KMB).

The vivacious and spirited Fabienne Eggelhöfer takes time off to explain how the two major Bern institutions worked together to cover a theme that would be any curator’s dream.

“We have already collaborated together,” Eggelhöfer says, “but this is the first time we have worked on a theme,” adding that the combination  secured more significant loans.

“It has been interesting, if not always easy,” she develops, explaining that the three curators met together every week. Without any subject segmentation, they discussed their different perceptions of sin and come to an agreement on the choice of the art works.

 

Jealousy: Fernand Cormon, Jalousie au sérail, 1874, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie, Besançon

The seven deadly sins, Fabienne Eggelhöfer explains, were defined as early as the late antiquity under the Egyptians to preserve the monastic vow of an intact relationship with God. This meant proscribing the sinful thoughts or behaviours that could get in the way.

These included pride, greed, envy, anger, laziness, gluttony and lust.

 

Lust: Sigmar Polke, Ohne Titel, 1973, Kunstmuseum Bern Sammlung Toni Gerber
Bern – Schenkung, 1983 © 2010, ProLitteris, Zürich

 

“The seven sins became a reoccurring theme throughout art history,” Eggelhöfer says, although it was sometimes difficult for the curators to decide to which category a work should be assigned.

Furthermore, she points out, values change. Greed is now cultivated by contemporary marketing strategies. We are constantly being invited to gain points, clock up miles, win a car.

 

Greed: Thomas Couture, La soif de l’or, 1844, Musée des Augustins, Toulouse

Lust is another case in point, she says, since the notion of lust being sinful was society’s attempt at limiting unwanted births and children without families. The advent of the pill in the 60s transformed the situation.

(Notice how it also ushered into art the male member in its erectile state. Various examples are on display.)

“When selecting the pieces to illustrate sin, we were careful to choose artists who had more than a single work to suit the themes,” Fabienne Eggelhöfer emphasizes, “and who showed an interest in the human condition.”

“I would be mistreating an oeuvre if I were to use it to illustrate my own ideas,” she says.

 

Sloth (laziness): Markus Muntean / Adi Rosenblum, Untitled (Everything was as it had…),
2001, Sammlung Dr. Fuchs, Wien

The three curators have succeeded in creating a harmonious ensemble that avoids a moralistic stance. “We don’t refer to homosexuality,” Eggelhöfer specifies, “because this is an exhibition on sin.”

When it came to distributing the works between the two museums, decisions came easily, she indicates.

The Kunstmuseum, with its smaller rooms was to receive the more spiritual pieces and cover the themes of pride, envy, greed and anger, whereas the Zentrum Paul Klee would expose the larger and more “carnal” works, while concentrating on lust, gluttony and sloth.

“But in some instances, we changed our minds at the last minute and transferred a selected piece from one category to another.”

Delightful fine-lined drawings by Klee are dispersed throughout, some of them decidedly naughty, others a lot of fun and they could belong anywhere.

 

Gluttony: Martin Parr, Luxury USA, Los Angeles, 2008, Galerie Nicola von Senger, Zürich

The section on lust is divided into two sections, the one with works of more overt sexuality is sectioned off with the warning:

“Lust and Vice is not suitable for adolescents under the age of 16. Some of the works on display in the Zentrum Paul Klee may be considered as pornographic and might shock them and perhaps even you. The cultural value of these works justifies their protection.”

Would such a warning not have sufficed?

Bernard Fibicher, director of the cantonal fine arts museum in Lausanne, does not understand a decision that he qualifies as “irresponsible”.

“The organisation of an exhibition implies an internal mechanism of censorship,” he says. “At each stage, you have to ask yourself what are the risks and if you can stand by your choices.”

In 2005, Fibicher organised the controversial exhibition on contemporary Chinese art at the same Bern Kunstmuseum in which the head of a human foetus grafted onto a seagull’s body was exhibited to general outcry.

“You have to think things through before, not afterwards,” he argues.

“I also find it disturbing that self-censorship in Switzerland should be the result of something that is happening elsewhere,” Fibicher points out.

In recent interviews with the Financial Times and Le Monde, Larry Clark says of the censorship of his Paris show, “I think it’s just the stupidest thing in the world . . . it’s an attack on youth and on teenagers in general,” whom, he believes, receive the message that they should be swallowing garbage from the web instead of going to art museums.

Over 18 year-olds, he suggests, should be the ones barred from the exhibition.

 

Pride: Daniela Rossell, Untitled (Itati next to her pool), from the serie “Third World Blondes“
2001, Galleria Alberto Peola, Turin

“It is true,” Fabienne Eggelhöfer concedes, “that we would probably have done a different choice of works had we known.”

“But nevertheless, we had a great time putting it together,” she says, reminding us of the many prestigious works that can be admired until February 20, including by Marina Abramovic, Marc Chagall, Otto Dix, Albrecht Dürer, Fischli / Weiss, Gilbert & George,  Paul Klee, Bruce Nauman, Martin Parr, Sigmar Polke, Peter Paul Rubens, Cindy Sherman, Yinka Shonibare, Andy Warhol and many more.

Zurich museum recreates key Picasso exhibition

Pablo Picasso, 1933, photo Man Ray © Man Ray Trust/2010 ProLitteris, Zurich

To celebrate its centenary, Kunsthaus Zurich restages the mythical 1932 retrospective that was to establish Picasso as one of the most radical artists of the 20th century. Originally curated by Picasso himself, the show offers insight into his creative genius and keys to understanding his work. The last major Picasso retrospective took place 30 years ago.

There has not been a major Picasso retrospective since the one that took place in 1980 at MoMA, the New York Museum of Modern Art.

Exhibitions with Picasso’s works are programmed continuously all over the world (see list of recent examples at end), but none of the displays can claim to illustrate the meaningful journey of an artist into his creativity through his own selection of works.

Picasso, his first museum exhibition 1932 at the Kunsthaus in Zurich until January 30, 2011 revives the show that took place at Kunsthaus Zurich in autumn 1932 and in which Picasso played a major curatorial role.

Pablo Picasso, Mandolin and Guitar (Mandoline et guitare), 1924, Oil with sand on canvas, 140,7 x 200,3 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York © 2010 ProLitteris, Zurich

A first version of the exhibition had taken place in Paris in the spring of 1932 at the private Georges Petit gallery.

Piqued by his rivalry with Matisse, who had exposed in the same venue a year before, Picasso selected emblematic pieces from 1899 onwards, which he scattered amongst the large-scale compositions that he had feverishly prepared for the show.

Discovering Picasso’s more recent works, the then director of the Kunsthaus, Wilhelm Wartmann, who had travelled to Paris to see the show, had the foresight to distinguish that Picasso “was in a league of his own” and dropped his original idea of a joint Picasso/Braque/Léger presentation.

“What we have done at the Kunsthaus is a retrospective in retrospective,” curator Tobi Bezzola says of a project that took five years to complete. Because the original catalogue contained no illustrations, he and his collaborators have painstakingly reassembled the exhibition’s puzzle.

Pablo Picasso, Pitcher and Fruit Bowl (Pichet et coupe de fruits), 1931, Oil on canvas , 130,2 x 194,9 cm
Saint Louis Art Museum, Legat Morton D. May © 2010 ProLitteris, Zurich

They were able to identify and locate the 240 works that were included in the original Zurich exhibition and have obtained the loan of more than 100 of them.

Interestingly, the largest number of works in the 1932 exhibition came from a collection in Lausanne belonging to Dr. Gottlieb Friedrich Reber (1880-1959), who was described during a visit to America in 1930 as “without any question the most important collector of modern art in Europe today”.

The timing for the first exhibition was perfect, Bezzola believes, because, coming right after the stock market crash, a number of collectors, including Reber, needed to sell, whilst gallery owners and art dealers needed to collaborate to survive. The status of the Kunsthaus allowed the sale of the works on show.

“The scientific reconstitution of a historically important show,” he indicates, “was the legitimatization to knock on important doors” and secure loans that would have been virtually impossible to obtain otherwise.

But not a single painting was obtained without lengthy negotiations, he points out. More than 40 institutions and countless private collectors have agreed to part with their works during the show, which is exclusive to Zurich and will travel nowhere else.

Installation view, photo © jpg-factory.com

“We toyed with the idea of holding it in the galleries of the Kunsthaus where it originally took place, but this proved to be impossible for reasons of flow and access of visitors and also because it would have meant emptying out our permanent collections.”

Insurance costs, which already represent two thirds of the budget, would have soared even higher.

Because this ruled out the idea of visually recreating the original show, Bezzalo decided on an installation that clearly divides Picasso’s earlier production from his conceptual breakthrough in the late 20s and early 30s. “I really wanted to preserve two distinctive parts to the show,” he indicates.

Visitors first walk into an intimate display of Picasso’s pink and blue periods and Cubist and neo-classical phase that resonate gently against walls painted in the Kunsthaus’s signature green-grey.

Another section is devoted to Picasso’s immense ability as a draughtsman, reminding us that he was not just a painter.

Loves of Jupiter and Semele, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 1930, Copperplate etching on paper, 22.5 x 17.2 cm
Kunsthaus Zürich, Collection of Prints and Drawings © 2010 ProLitteris, Zurich

The selection of paintings is an instant lesson in art history covering the beginning of the last century, whilst tossing up clues to Picasso’s evolution from one style to the next, particularly the influence of African art on subsequent Cubism.

Then suddenly a wide open space, with glaringly white walls that are fanned out diagonally, introduces visitors to Picasso’s febrile new production leading up to the 1932 exhibition. Following his encounter with the blond Marie-Thérèse Walther who was 27 years younger, the 50-year-old artist entered into a period of explosive creativity.

“I wanted these works to be visible together at a glance,” Bezzola explains, “to allow us to better understand the relationship between them.”

Installation view, photo © FBM Studio Zürich

Picasso, he points out, worked simultaneously in several styles and was constantly experimenting in different mediums. “He would work on a neo-classical composition in the morning, launch into Cubism in the afternoon and finish with Surrealism.”

“This exhibition allows people to see the elements that he chose and combined,” the curator underlines, as well as the variety of techniques in which he experimented, including adding sand to oil paint.

Shocked by the apparent chaos of the artist, the world-famous psychologist and psychotherapist C.G. Jung pronounced the painter a schizophrenic, claiming that his pictures “immediately reveal their alienation from feeling”.

“One has to remember that the flow of information was very different at that time and people were easily confused,” Bezzola points out.

“But by 1932, Picasso had developed most of his formal repertory, so this exhibition can be said to cover the important part of his oeuvre,” he suggests.

Pablo Picasso, Bathers with Beach Ball (Baigneuses au ballon), 1928, Oil on canvas, 15,9 x 21,9 cm
Private collection © 2010 ProLitteris, Zurich

It is also an exhibition of historical importance, since it “may have been one of the first times a living artist was invited to present his works in a museum environment,” the curator says, pointing out that the Zurich Kunsthaus was actually founded as an artist’s association and not a museum.

The concept of presenting contemporary art by a living artist was to lay the foundations for the creation of modern art museums, but only several decades later.

Asked if there were any pieces that he regretted not including in the exhibition, Bezzola mentions the sensuous masterpiece Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, a portrait of Walter that Picasso is said to have painted on a single day in March 1932.

Cecil Beaton, Pablo Picasso, 1933. Courtesy the Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s
(not in exhibition)

To be loaned from the Brody estate, where it has been since 1951, the painting was sold one month ago by Christies following the recent decease of Sidney Brody. It sold for more than 106 million US dollars, the highest amount ever paid for a work of art in an auction.

“Traditionally, art collectors love to be involved in the art world,” Bezzola observes, “but I am now encountering for the first time collectors who are not in the least bit interested in art. They are simply investors who are approachable only through their lawyers.”

Major works of art will predictably become more difficult to expose. Combined with mounting insurance costs, exhibitions like the current one at Kunsthaus Zurich may become a rarity.

To gain overall insight into the kaleidoscope mind of a genius, this might be your last chance.

Picasso
Until January 30, 2011

Kunsthaus Zürich
Heimplatz 1
CH–8001 Zurich

Opening times:
Sat/Sun/Tues 10am–6pm
Wed–Fri 10am–8pm
Closed Mondays

Recent examples of how Picasso keeps museums busy and publics flocking through recent partial expos: Picasso: themes and variations (MoMa, New York), Picasso: The Mediterranean Years (Gagosian, London), Klee meets Picasso (Zentrum Klee, Bern), Picasso and the masters (Grand Palais, Paris), Picasso: portrait of soul (Suntory, Tokyo), only a few examples of many more.

Landmark exhibition presents wallpaper as art

Astrid

Astrid Berglund from the Pully Museum before Andy Warhol’s Mao wallpaper, 1973

To celebrate wallpaper not as decoration, but as a new medium for artistic expression, the mudac in Lausanne and Pully museum present a landmark exhibition. Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst and Jenny Holzer are amongst the 50 international artists and designers whose wallpapers, some of them rarely seen before, are included in the show. The result is elegant, intriguing and not a little provocative.

“Covering the wall. Contemporary wallpapers” – a close collaboration between mudac, the Lausanne museum of contemporary design and applied arts, and the Pully museum – celebrates the artistic revival of wall paper.

Long abandoned in favour of white wall minimalism, wallpaper is now being revitalized and revisited.

Contemporary artists over the past ten years have become interested in a medium that offers the possibility to make a statement in a profoundly poetic manner while finding a way into people’s homes.

Inspired by Warhol’s forays into art multiplication in the 70s (his 1973 Mao wallpaper is in the exhibition), publishers have followed closely behind.

Independent curator Marco Costantini is one of the first art historians to have become interested in the use of wallpaper by contemporary artists and designers. The exhibition he has organized for Lausanne and Pully is a panorama of his research started in 2002 and includes several gems.

Studio Job, Perished, 2005 © Studio Job, one of several wallpapers that use disquieting images to remarkable decorative effect

 

Dan Graham, Two-Way Mirror Hedge Labyrinth For Korea, 2009  © Dan Graham, Courtesy Maharam (New York)

 

Jenny Holzer, Inflammatory Essays, 1979-82 and Sarah Lucas, Tits inspace, 2000
make strong statements of subtle feminism

 

“We are experiencing a revolution in wallpaper,” he says, “as it abandons its decorative purpose to become something more meaningful.”

Working on the preparation of the exhibition for the last three years, Costantini has divided the display into 13 themes, which he has organized to spectacular effect in the two museums.

Topics covered range from consumerism to political statements, but they also include colour-by number decors, effective hybridizations between different patterns and some examples that are boldly ironic or simply humoristic.

Reviewed within the context of the development of contemporary art, the show reflects a clear return to narration by many artists. These are walls that tell stories.

 

Rudolf Herz, Zugzwang, 1995, with the ironic juxtaposition of portraits of Marcel Duchamp and Adolf Hitler taken by same photographer. Custom-edited to fit a room at mudac, the work is exposed for only the third time

 

 

Virgil Marti, Beer Can Library, 1997 (left) and Claude Closky, Sans titre (Supermarché), 1996-99 (right)

It also opens a door to the democratisation of art. Although several of the wallpapers by artists can only be obtained through their galleries, others can be purchased directly through publishers. Wallpapers by artists and Maharam even provide online catalogues.

The work by the designers on the other hand has always been more readily available, although an opening frontier due to the potential of new technologies is producing interesting developments. Wallpapers that heat, absorb sound or respond to Iphones (by Nodesign.net) complete the display at mudac.

Other designers come up with novel ways to hang wallpapers. M/M (Paris), composed of Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak, consider that their wallpaper should be treated as a poster that is hung by stapling only the upper corners to the wall.

“I was really interested to work together with museums that have fundamentally different vocations,” Costantini told Swisster. The mudac covers design, whereas Pully is essentially dedicated to the fine arts.

“By showing how very contemporary artists and designers are rediscovering the medium, but how wallpapers are dissolving the frontiers between their two practices,” he believes that the joint exhibition acts something like a metaphor.

“Some happy accidents have occurred,” Costantini observes, when, for example, Damien Hirst’s butterfly wallpaper echoes the beauty of the original painting on the wooden beams of the mudac, or a fireplace in Pully interrupts a wallpapered surface that beckons old-fashioned portraits.

He admits that the exhibition is also a tribute to his own grandfather, a house painter whom he often saw papering walls.

 

Brigitte Ziegler, Shooting Wallpaper, 2008, video projection © Brigitte Ziegler
The artist highjacks the pastoral scenes of Toile de Jouy with the interruption of a blasting device like a tank

The two museums where the exhibition takes place have been stripped bare to allow the wallpapers to be plastered directly on the vertical surfaces: the 60 different examples espouse the space and are set out in a way where miraculously none rivals the other.

“Both were originally homes,” says Chantal Prod’Hom, director of mudac, “and this project, although ephemeral, allows them to regain their initial status.”

The fact that the project is purpose-built, custom-tailored and site-specific gives it a natural beauty and elegance, while being eye-arresting and intellectually engaging.

“We decided on this radical approach, accepting the fact that the exhibition cannot travel, since the wallpapers will be ripped off at the end,” which is why, Chantal Prod’Hom explains, the teams from the two museums have produced a milestone catalogue in English and French.

Damien Hirst, Pharmacy Wallpaper, 1997-2004, (c) Hirst Holdings Limited & Damien Hirst (all rights reserved, 2010) / 2010 Prolitteris Zurich

“The project grew out of a common desire to show how wallpaper is positioned at the crossroad of art and design,” says Delphine Rivier, who directs the Pully museum, highlighting the fact that the project was able to grow in size and importance due to an “exceptional partnership” that doubled the surfaces.

She believes that the project is opening a new field of research, as the many art historians who contributed to the catalogue appear to testify.

“But two museums were not enough,” she jests, so they have also teamed up with the Swiss national museum Château de Prangins that is presenting From wall to wallpaper, subtitled ‘The poetry of walls’.

A rich collection of examples from the 16th century to the contemporary are on show until May 1, 2011, with tickets that can be combined with Pully and Lausanne.

“I wasn’t at all convinced by the subject,” Jean-François Thonney, mayor of Pully, said at the opening, “but I’m delighted by the result.”

“It is the role of cultural institutions to lead us to discoveries and this team has surpassed itself,” he said.

A roundtable discussion will take place on Sunday, November 21 at the Pully Museum with the participation of Gill Saunders, Senior curator of prints, Victoria & Albert Museum, London (UK). Entrance and a brunch will be free.

Irving Penn as keen social observer at Lausanne Elysée


Benoîte Lab, Paris, 1950 @ The Irving Penn Foundation

American photographer Irving Penn, whose images of sculpted beauties transformed fashion photography in the 50s and 60s, also documented the ordinary throughout his career. “Small Trades” at the Lausanne Elysée Museum presents vintage prints of simple folk in their professional attire, revealing the deep cultural differences between London, Paris and New York where the pictures were taken.

Organized in collaboration with the Los Angeles J. Paul Getty Museum, the exhibition at the Elysée Museum in Lausanne is a rare example of art serving history.

The portraits made by Irving Penn between fashion shots for Vogue magazine in the middle of the last century capture the essence of a large scope of proletarian professions, many of which were soon to disappear.

The prestigious Elysée museum in Lausanne has selected 106 vintage prints from the large collection of ‘Small Trades’ by Irving Penn owned by the Getty museum and presents them not in chronological order, but by trade such as the chimney sweeps, shoemakers, delivery men or butchers of Paris, London and New York.

“I have seen these photographs any number of times,” says Virginia Heckert, associate curator of the Getty Museum, “but this exhibition makes me appreciate them all over again.”

In hues of silvery gray, people stand upright in their professional dignity against the walls of the stately mansion of the Elysée that have been painted over in a contrasting and enhancing powder pink for the occasion.

Irving Penn (1917-2009) first trained as an artist and graphic designer before being encouraged by the legendary art director of Vogue, Alexander Liberman, to make the photographs himself of the covers he had designed. His elegant hallmark compositions carved the pages into geometrical patterns.


Inving Penn’s British Vogue cover for June 1950 (not in exhibition), source www.vogue.co.uk

He was also known to coax the personalities of his sitters into the frame, from models Lisa Fonssagrives, the Swedish beauty with the 17-inch waist who was to become his wife, to Gisele Bundchen, as well the cultural icons Alberto Giacometti, Truman Capote, Salvador Dali, Duke Ellington, Edith Piaf, Pablo Picasso and Harold Pinter, amongst many others.

The show in Lausanne reveals another side to Penn which Sam Stourdzé, the Elysée’s director, acknowledges will be a discovery to many.

Stourdzé says that Small trades is an equally important part of Penn’s work. He has programmed the exhibition at the same time as one dedicated to Bernd and Hilla Becher who transformed architectural photography with their careful documentation of the vestiges of the industrial revolution, but of buildings, not of people.

“We are launching the season on the theme of the history of photography,” he says.

Small trades offers insight into the organisation of society in the 50s, highlighting the differences between the professions in Paris, London and New York. It also gives an amusing vantage point to national characteristics.

“You get a sense of the unique character of the trades in each of the cities,” Heckert points out, adding that a guessing game to determine the origin of the person pictured can be played.

Irving Penn ‘Small Trades’ in Lausanne: House painters, 1950 @ The Irving Penn Foundation

Irving Penn ‘Small Trades’ in Lausanne: Firefighters, 1950 @ The Irving Penn Foundation

“People in Paris were suspicious and would tend to hide behind their tools to gain confidence,” she explains.

Edmonde Charles-Roux, a young French intellectual and future editor of Vogue France, was assigned to assist Penn in Paris.

She employed the yet unknown Robert Doisneau, as well as the poet, Robert Giraud, better known for his alcohol consumption than for his verse, to “pick” people off the streets for the photo sessions.

It was Giraud who included the contortionists, muscle-builders, cabaret singers (see Benoîte Lab above) and nude models “extending the scope to include the unexpected,” Penn later explained.

Charles-Roux describes in an interview how the sitters at first could not understand why this American would be interested in them.

“But after a week’s work, they suddenly came out of there touched to the quick. All at once they realized that someone was interested in them, in their uniforms, their way of life.”

The British, on the other hand, explains Hackert, would arrive promptly at the sittings impeccably dressed and proud to represent their trades. They had a “formulaic” way of posing, she adds, adopting attitudes expected of their professions.

The most unpredictable were the Americans, she indicates. Because they were being photographed by a “famous photographer”, they were convinced “that they were on the way to Hollywood” and would arrive not in their trades clothes, but in their Sunday best.

While Penn was documenting the archetypes of disappearing trades, he was also recording what he describes as “individuality and occupational pride”, which he believed was “on the wane”.

He was showing, as Heckert, points out, that these “people had a role to play in life”.

Penn chose to extract his sitters from their own environments, as opposed to August Sanders or Eugene Atget, who had inspired him, but who pictured occupations within their context.

He employed the same make-shift studios and half-painted backdrops that he used for fashion goddesses and celebrities to document the men and women in their work apparel or uniforms, holding the tools of their trades. He only worked in natural light coming from the side in order to obtain crispness in the details.

Irving Penn’s makeshift studio as pictured in the Lausanne exhibition

“Taking people away from their natural circumstances and putting them into the studio in front of a camera did not simply isolate them, it transformed them,” Penn explained.

By the mid-60s, Penn decided that a photo on a printed page was “something of a dead end” and became disenchanted with fashion magazines.

He then turned to “the area of manipulation, of control, breakdown, and the reconstruction of the image” by adopting the platinum process of making photographic prints, instead of the classical gelatine silver process.

In the platinum process, the paper first absorbs the light-sensitive emulsion of platinum and palladium salts, before being exposed to a real-size negative under Xenon light. Small trades was one of the first series that Penn revisited to make new prints.

The result, Stourdzé points out, is a higher degree of detail, as well as greater warmth and voluptuousness in the flesh tones. Viewers can appreciate the difference by comparing several prints in both techniques side by side.

“What I call Penn’s American instincts made him go for the essentials,” Alexander Liberman, the Vogue art director said of his protégé. The exhibition in Lausanne is an opportunity to understand what he meant.

Irving Penn ‘Small Trades’ in Lausanne: Chair caner, Paris 1950 @ The Irving Penn Foundation, photo in situ Laird

Klimt and Schiele’s erotic splendour at Beyeler Basel

Egon Schiele, Two girls lying entwined, 1915, Albertina Vienna, Photo: Peter Ertl
Egon Schiele, Two girls lying entwined, 1915, Albertina Vienna, Photo: Peter Ertl

A unique opportunity to appreciate the phenomenal importance of Vienna at the turn of the last century is on show at the Beyeler Foundation in Basel. The exhibition ‘Vienna 1900, Klimt, Schiele and their times’ documents the birth of Viennese modernism. Three hundred significant works are on display, including drawings and paintings by Klimt and Schiele with a powerful erotic charge.

Vienna between 1900 and the outbreak of World War 1 was a microcosm of revolutionary ideas in art, architecture and arts and crafts.

Organized specifically for the Beyeler Foundation, the exhibition “Vienna 1900, Klimt, Schiele and their times” took more than two years to organize and presents works that have never been seen together before.

Curator, Barbara Steffen, says that her 15 years in the US with the Eli Broad Foundation in Los Angeles and the Guggenheim Museum in New York allowed her to return to Vienna with “the eyes of an American”.

“I didn’t want to mount just another exhibition on Klimt and Schiele,” Steffen tells Swisster.

A replica of Gustav Klimt’s renowned Beethoven Frieze, painted in 1902 for the Vienna Secession greats visitors in the foyer of the Beyeler Foundation, photo Laird

“I realized that what was so remarkable about Vienna at the turn of the century was the liberty and freedom that came out of a violent rejection of tradition,” she says.

“I wanted to show that modernism, as it emerged in Vienna, with no difference between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, was profoundly democratic.”

Running through the exhibition is the theme of “gesamtkunstwerk” (total art work), the idea that art can be the result of several disciplines together.

Both the Vienna Secession – founded in 1898 by painters, sculptors and painters, including Klimt – and the Wiener Werkstätte – modelled in 1903 along the lines of the British Arts and Crafts Movement and led by Koloman Moser, and Josef Hoffmann – contributed to this idea.

The cabaret Fledermaus, conceived by Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956), an outstanding example of an interdisciplinary work of art, is faithfully reproduced

“By defending the principle that there was only one art, the artists present in Vienna at that time upheld that there is no difference between the elevated art of painting and the utilitarian world of arts and crafts,” Steffen says to explain their close collaboration.

To illustrate this concept the exhibition includes 300 paintings, watercolours and drawings, a majority of them by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, but also by the young Oskar Kokoschka, Richard Gerstl, and Arnold Schoenberg, presented alongside architectural models, furniture and decorative objects, textile designs, posters and photographs.

“At the centre of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Vienna exerted a pull on people not only from Bohemia and Moravia, such as Gustav Mahler and Sigmund Freud, but also from Prague, Hungary, Croatia and Serbia,” Steffen highlights.

“Between a sense of apocalyptic doom at the end of the old century,” she continues, “and the spirit of optimism at the start of the new, the fertile soil from which modernism emerged was formed.”

Both Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) and his pupil Egon Schiele (1890-1918) were to turn convention on its head when they produced a pictorial language that was revolutionary not only in form, but also in content.

klimt beyeler klimt beyeler

Left: Gustav Klimt,  Judith  (Salome), 1909, Fondazione Musei Civici de Venzia, Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna de Ca’ Pesaro
Right: Gustav Klimt, The Dancer, ca. 1916-18, Private collection, courtesy Neue Galerie, New York


Klimt was to spearhead the gesamtkunstwerk movement in the name of the Vienna Secession, of which he was the first president.

“We define the term ‘artist’ as broadly as the term ‘work of art’. We use it not only for those who create, but also for those who enjoy those capable of reliving emotionally what has been created and of appreciating it,” Gustav Klimt, explained in a speech at the opening of the Kunstschau Vienna in 1908.

Around 50 of his paintings, not least of which the masterpieces Judith II (Salome; 1909), Water Nymphs (Silverfish; c. 1899), Goldfish (1901/02), and The Dancer (1916/18) are on view.

Gustav Klimt, Goldfische (detail), 1901-02, Kunstmuseum Soluthurn, Dübi-Müller-Stiftung


Samuel Keller, director of the Beyeler Foundation, played a key role in obtaining the loan of the works from the prestigious collections in Austria, Switzerland and the US.

He points out that Klimt’s The Dancer, on loan from Neue Galerie, New York, not only exemplifies Klimt’s artistic attitude to women, whom he treats like goddesses or ‘femmes fatales’, but it also advances art in a new direction.

Gustav Klimt, The Dance (detail), ca. 1916-18, Private collection, courtesy Neue Galerie, New York: luscious paint strokes merge the dress of the dancer with the background

“The paint strokes merge her body into the background,” he says, adding that there is “sensitivity and a tenderness that contribute to the erotic charm and appeal of Klimt’s women.”

“The eroticism of Egon Schiele’s women is very different,” Keller says of the younger artist who is more closely identified with the nascent movement of Expressionism.

The exhibition presents 20 important paintings and more than 50 of the valuable and fragile works on paper by Schiele, most of them on loan from the Leopold Museum and Albertina in Vienna and Kunsthaus Zug, the repository of the Kamm Collection, the most prominent collection of works of Viennese Modernism outside Austria.

Egon Schiele, Reclining nude on her stomach and facing right, 1910, Collection E.W.K., Bern, Peter Lauri

The 87 year-old Elisabeth Leopold was present at the opening, representing her recently deceased husband who is largely credited with having ‘discovered’ Egon Schiele.

Rudolf Leopold started collecting Schiele in the 40s when the artist was dismissed by critics as  a mere ‘local’ talent and his works were found to be pornographic or ‘degenerate’.

In recognition of his flair, the Austrian government contributed to transforming the Leopold collection in 2001 into a museum.

At the Beyeler Foundation a separate room is devoted to the sensual and explicit watercolours and drawings in which Schiele “transcends the theme of the nude to represent unprecedented aspects of sexuality”.

 

Egon Schiele, Squatting female nude, 1910, Leopold Museum, Vienna

Egon Schiele, Squatting female nude, 1910, Leopold Museum, Vienna

“His eroticism reveals deep and complex emotions, even melancholy or sadness. He wants a woman to appear in her nakedness first and foremost as a human being,” Keller says.

Schiele’s numerous self-portraits in the nude rival those of women and young girls in extreme poses (Schiele was imprisoned for three days for having used a 14-year old as a model), but whereas the women reveal their inviting vulvas, no drawing shows a man with an erection.

Egon Schiele, Self-portrait with orange cloak (detail), 1913, Albertina, Vienna

“Schiele was complicated and narcissic,” Steffen says. “Everything was about him and his psychological state of mind.”

But somehow, despite the overt explicitness of sexuality in his drawings, the impression remains movingly chaste.

Schiele died of the Spanish flu in October 1918 at the age of 27, three days after his six-month pregnant wife.

Klimt clung steadfastly to his defence of gesamtkunstwer until he died the same year. The last period of his life was dedicated essentially to producing the portraits of women for which he is so well known.

But his life could have been very different, Steffen believes. “In my view, Klimt was a political artist who failed. He became discouraged and retreated into his private world when he realized that he was not getting his message across and his paintings were being returned to him.”

Klimt and Schiele remain the magnets for the exhibition, but the story that spans twenty years of one the most ground-breaking times in the development of art is well told and covers the work of the other artists who innovated in different ways.

The reconstruction of a cabaret and a room full of timeless furniture pieces are also highlights of the show.

“What they were saying was very important,” Keller stresses. “They were true revolutionaries.”

View of works that came out of the Werkstätte

Vienna 1900 – Klimt, Schiele and their Times

September 26, 2010 – January 16, 2011

http://www.fondationbeyeler.ch/en

The exhibition is accompanied by a diverse program of films, music and literature. An authentic Viennese coffee house will welcome visitors on the museum’s lower floor. An additional Art Shop will present a special selection of Viennese products.

Key to understanding Andy Warhol on view in Basel

Warhol, Flowers [Large Flowers] 1964, Glenstone, Md © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / 2010, ProLitteris, Zurich

The 70 paintings and drawings by Andy Warhol on view at Kunstmuseum Basel cover a pivotal period in the development of an artist best remembered for his flaming silk-screened prints of American icons. But the Basel expo, covering years 1961 to 1964, aims to show that Warhol was much more than just a Pop designer.

When Warhol produced the silk-screened portraits of American icons, including Coca Cola bottles, Campbell soup cans and Liz Taylor and presented them as art, he acquired instant fame, but was he really being taken seriously?

The exhibition “Andy Warhol. The Early Sixties” at Kunstmuseum Basel until January 23, 2011 sets out to show how Warhol’s reputation as a master of Pop art should not obscure his authenticity as an artist.

The four years between 1961 and 64 represent the pivotal period during which Warhol progressively abandoned painting in favour of silk-screening and other methods of multiple production.

“It was a time during which Warhol developed his entire pictorial language,” Bernhard Mendes Bürgi, director of the Kunstmuseum and co-curator of the exhibition indicates.

  

Left: Big Torn Campbell’s Soup Can (Vegetable Beef), 1962 © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / 2010, ProLitteris, Zurich

Right: Do It Yourself (Flowers), 1962, Photo: Daros Collection, Schweiz © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / 2010, ProLitteris, Zurich

Kunstmuseum Basel has completed its own Warhol collection with loans from private collections and American museums to produce a show that contains pieces that are engagingly familiar, but that are presented in a way to cast a new light on Warhol.

Nina Zimmer, who co-curated the exhibition with Mendes Bürgi explains in an exclusive interview how the project was developed and why it only covers a short period in Warhol’s artistic life.

The starting point, she says, was the prescient acquisition of three early Warhol works at the beginning of the 70s by the then Kunstmuseum director, Franz Meyer.

“We are proud of our tradition of buying American art when it was still considered revolutionary and controversial,” Nina Zimmer points out.

The museum also purchased a large number of Warhol drawings for a 1998 retrospective.

Ginger Rogers, 1962, Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett, Karl August Burckhardt-Koechlin-Fonds, Photo: Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin P. Bühler © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / 2010, ProLitteris, Zurich

“But it wasn’t until we prepared the present show that we discovered that we own the second largest collection of Warhol drawings in the world, after the Pittsburgh Warhol Museum,” Zimmer says.

Born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1928, Andy Warhol was the son of a coalminer from Slovakia who studied pictorial design at what was to become Carnegie Mellon University before moving to New York at the age of 21.

For more than a decade he worked in illustration and advertising, successfully earning a living as a commercial artist closely associated with the fashion and record making industry. By the time he was 30, he had begun a parallel career.

In 1961, the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles presented Warhol’s first fine arts solo exhibition on the theme of Campbell’s Soup Cans, followed the same year by the Stable Gallery in New York, so named because it was located in a former livery stable in lower Manhattan.

Coca Cola, dollar bills, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley were already part of his imagery.


 

Left: Double Elvis [Ferus Type], 1963, Sammlung Froehlich, Stuttgart, Photo: Sammlung Froehlich, Stuttgart © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / 2010, ProLitteris, Zurich

Right: Liz #1 [Early Colored Liz], 1963, Private Collection © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / 2010, ProLitteris, Zurich

“He originally painted everything by hand,” Zimmer points out, “but gradually, as he starts to introduce mechanical means, he abandons painting.”

“We decided to concentrate on this precise passage from painterly expression to silk-screening, but we also wanted to show how Warhol preserves smudges and mistakes in his reproductions as if to constantly remind us of a human presence,” she reveals.

“Warhol’s gradual and deliberate detachment from painting was a truly radical gesture,” she says, adding that there is belief defended by art historians and critics that Warhol’s ‘anti-painting’ changed the course of art.

On the occasion of a 2000 exhibition in New York dedicated to the same “heyday” between 1962 and 1965, Jerry Saltz wrote in the Village Voice: “You can hear the clang of history around him. The train of American art history leaps off the track and begins a new course, the one we’re on now, with Warhol. It’s hard to imagine where we’d be without him.”

“If you think you know these most famous paintings, think again, because these works can set your mind on fire,” Saltz adds.

The years covered by the exhibition saw the assassination of Kennedy and the death of Marilyn Monroe in the US, but according to Zimmer, Warhol’s stance is always one of indifference.

Green Disaster #2, 1963, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Photo Robert Häusser © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / 2010, ProLitteris, Zurich

“When he deals with the subject of death, he empties it of meaning to retain only the shock value and use it as ornamentation, as he does is the series where he uses the images of car crashes to create a pattern.” (In the exhibition).

By 1964, according to Zimmer, Warhol had completed the trajectory of his pictorial language.

He turned to filmmaking and became a fixture of the New York nightlife before almost dying from gunshot wounds inflicted by a disgruntled female former collaborator.

When he eventually returned to painting in the 70s with his portraits of Mao, he basically used the same techniques, Nina Zimmer points out.

Warhol died unexpectedly in 1987 of complications from a gall bladder operation. But his estate was in remarkable order and is managed by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, a formidable watchdog for the authenticity of the works that spilled out of Warhol’s “Factory”.

“By concentrating on his early period, we are claiming that Warhol’s rich artistic practices were already in place by 1964,” Zimmer summarizes.

Until January 23, 2011

Andy Warhol. The Early Sixties
Paintings and Drawings 1961-1964
Curators: Bernhard Mendes Bürgi & Nina Zimmer

With works on loan from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the New York Metropolitan Museum and MoMa (Museum of Modern Art) and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh

Additional insight into showman Warhol (not in the exhibition) can be obtained by viewing a short 1981 film by Danish director Jorgen Leth in which Andy Warhol eats a Hamburger. He nibbles at a hamburger, the ultimate symbol of Americana, but instead of smothering it with Ketchup, he dips it gingerly into a tiny dollop on the side of the plate.

Hermitage opens new window on Edward Hopper

Second Story Sunlight (detail), 1960 © Whitney Museum of American Art, N.Y., Photo Steven Sloman

American painter Edward Hopper – whose spellbinding scenes of nighthawks, usherettes and New England house fronts are part of our collective consciousness – is the subject of a key exhibition at the Hermitage Foundation in Lausanne. Drawings, water colours and engravings are presented alongside several familiar paintings, offering a rare insight into an artist who used his paint brush as a camera for the invisible.

Edward Hopper (1882-1967) is one of the best known American painters on this side of the Atlantic.

His enigmatic scenes of ordinary people frozen in unfinished stories continue to strike a popular chord and are the subject of exhibitions in museums around the world.

“But we didn’t want to present yet another Hopper retrospective with a collection of his iconic pieces,” explains Juliane Cosandier, director of the Hermitage Foundation in Lausanne, where the show takes place until October.

“Our aim is to highlight the relationship between Hopper’s drawings and his painting in a way that also shows his evolution as an artist,” she adds.

Over 160 works spanning Edward Hopper’s entire artistic career are on display, from his beginnings as an illustrator in the early 1900’s to one of his later works, the potently sexual, A Woman in the Sun, 1961 (pictured below) painted when Hopper was 79.

The bulk of the exhibition is from the large Hopper estate entrusted in 1968 to the New York Whitney Museum of American Art by Hopper’s widow, Jo, who outlived her husband by only a year.

Juliane Cosandier tells Swisster that she was able to obtain additional pieces for the Hermitage from private collectors, “and not the least significant,” she promises.

Curated by Carter Foster, the Whitney’s curator of drawings, the exhibition, except for the works shown only in Lausanne, was assembled by Arthemisia, an Italian company that tours and delivers art shows. The present one was first shown in Rome and Milan before arriving Switzerland.

Divided into seven themes, the Hopper exhibition occupies the entire Fondation de l’Hermitage.

It opens with a first section dedicated to the engaging self-portraits that Hopper painted over a period of 40 years and that reflect his reserved demeanour.

Hopper Hermitage Laausanne Hopper Hermitage Laausanne

Left: Self-Portrait, 1925-1930, oil on canvas, 64,1 x 52,4 cm © Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper, licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art, N. Y., Photo Geoffrey Clements
Right: Edward Hopper in Truro, Massachusetts, 14 August 1960, with his wife Jo in the background, Photo Arnold Newman/Getty Images

His wife Jo, whom Hopper met and married when they were both past 40 years of age, was to say of her husband’s introversion that “sometimes talking to him was like throwing a pebble in a well, except that you wouldn’t hear it hit the water.”

The next three sections overview Hopper’s early works as an illustrator, his three trips to Paris and his successful career as an engraver.

During his times in Paris between 1906 and 1910, the art scene was vibrant with revolutionary shows by Picasso and Cézanne, but Hopper later confessed to not having been aware of them.

One of the few painters of the 20th century who never even flirted with abstract art, Hopper was always interested in the generation of artists who had preceded his, especially Manet and Degas.

Hopper Hermitage Laausanne

Soir bleu, 1914, oil on canvas, 91,4 × 182,9 cm
© Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper, licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art, N. Y., Photo Jerry L. Thompson

“The upright to the left that anchors the painting of Soir Bleu (pictured above) is in fact a compositional trick that Hopper borrows directly from Degas,” says Carter Foster.

Hopper continues to use the trick of visual obstacles, either vertical or horizontal, throughout his art, an intriguing characteristic to look out for in the works on display at the Hermitage.

“As in all his large paintings, simplicity is subverted by a mysterious disquiet,” Foster indicates. Soir Bleu was painted several years after Hopper returned from Paris.

“It’s a memory of France, a mental suggestion,” Foster points out, a method that Hopper was to apply to all of his paintings.

“Memory is the intangible and tacit subject of most of his works, which contributes to their impression of ambiguity,” he emphasizes.

“It took me ten years to get over Europe,” Hopper was quoted as saying. He never returned to France, although he remained a Francophile throughout his life.

Back in the United States, Hopper only started earning a living from his painting in the early 20s, when he was already 40 years old and had just met Jo.

The Sheridan Theatre, 1937, oil on canvas, 43,5 x 64,1 cm, The Newark Museum, New Jersey, Legs de Felix Fuld Fund, 1940

Although he was frequently associated by the critics to the ‘American Scene Painting’, characterized by the direct and simple illustration of Americana, Hopper declared that the movement “makes a caricature of America. I just wanted to do things my own way.”

He remained unmoved by the explosion of abstract art during his lifetime and never deviated from his line of pictorial realism infused with solitude and uncertainty. “It is the alliance between realism and illusion that gives his work its singular power,” says Cosandier.

Pennsylvania Coal Town, 1947, oil on canvas, 71,1 × 101,6 cm,
The Butler Institute of American Art Collection, Youngstown, Ohio

The fifth section of the exhibition is like a mirror into the mind of the quiet and austere man. We understand how the elaborate sketches by which he designs his large scale paintings are just a way for the artist to move away from reality.

For Morning Sun, Hopper starts by drawing his wife, who was to become his only model after their marriage.

“In the progressive sketches, Jo’s traits disappear to become a mask,” Foster observes.

Hopper Hermitage Laausanne

Hopper Hermitage Laausanne

Successively Study for Morning Sun, 1952, crayon Conté on papaer, 30,5 x 48,3 cm © Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper, licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art, N. Y., Photo Sheldan C. Collins
Morning Sun, 1952, oil on canvas, 71,4 x 101,9 cm, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio,
Acquisition Howald Fund

Hopper admitted that the human figure was not what interested him most. “All I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.”

Pointing out how Hopper’s scenes regularly represent exteriors and interiors at the same time, Foster suggests that the elaborate compositions “keep the spectator on the outside”, which in turn contributes to a disturbing impression of voyeurism.

“Although he is perceived as a hyper-realist, Hopper is not trying to paint reality. He is in fact inventing his own pictorial logic,” Foster insists.

For instance, shadows in a number of his paintings are totally incoherent, which subtly accentuates their eeriness.

A large selection of erotic paintings and drawings are also included in the show, although they too belong to Hopper’s scheme of mysterious narrative. “The lone women in his paintings also suggest urban isolation and solitude,” the curator emphasizes.

The result is less erotic than it is sexual, a surprising development for an artist so profoundly anchored in the American puritanism of the first half of the last century.

A Woman in the Sun, 1961, oil on canvas, 101,9 × 155,6 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art,
gift of Mr and Mrs Albert Hacker
© Whitney Museum of American Art, N.Y., Photo Steven Sloman

A final section concentrates on illustrating Hopper’s relationship to the key elements in his work: time, place and memory.

“My aim in painting has always been to transpose with the greatest precision my intimate impressions of nature,” Hopper explained, adding famously “If you could say it with words, there wouldn’t be any reason to paint.”

The exhibition is accompanied in Lausanne by a programme at the Swiss film archive (Cinémathèque) between June 30 and August 14 that brings to light the strong links between Hopper’s compositions and filmaking, an industry that was simultaneously coming into its own.

“Hopper’s use of light and his keen sense of framing introduced an extraordinary and novel theatricalization of pictorial spaces, which in turn inspired many filmmakers,” Cosandier suggests.

Films by Hitchcock, Antonioni, Wim Wenders, David Lynch and especially Jim Jarmusch are included in the ambitious programme.

Quotes originally in English have been translated back from their French versions in the catalogue and may be different from the originals.

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