Agenda

When Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque pioneered Cubism in the early years of the twentieth century, they set off a revolution in visual art. The new style’s fragmented forms signal a fundamental change in how painting relates to the visible world. The Cubists rank as one of the most influential movements in art history; their works are adventures for the eyes even today, challenging our habits of perception.  The show traces Cubism’s evolution from 1908 to the years after World War I, surveying its enormous stylistic range and highlighting the revolutionary energy it imparted to later tendencies in twentieth-century art. Combining chronology with thematic foci, the exhibition opens with a section that throws the growing influence of folk art and archaic sculpture as well as Paul Cézanne’s oeuvre in Picasso’s and Braque’s paintings into relief.

Shortly after the end of the Second World War, 374 young adults and children from the liberated concentration camp at Buchenwald were invited to come and recuperate in Switzerland. The group became known as the “children of Buchenwald”. In the summer of 1945 the Felsenegg youth residential home on Zugerberg mountain served as a convalescent home for 107 of them. Their drawings are a special historical record of the Holocaust. The childlike drawings are in stark contrast to the inhumane living conditions depicted and the daily struggle for survival at the camp. The pictures created by Kalman Landau and by Thomas Geve illustrate this particularly well. The museum shows for the first time more than 150 such drawings and other documents from the estates of the carers.

The exhibition examines collective violence of groups against individuals, from antiquity to the present day. It explores prehistoric human sacrifices, lynching (including burning at the stake) and violence in our times. At the same time, the exhibition looks at the forces that have attempted to oppose violence, such as Religion and Enlightenment.

When the St Gallen merchant Emil Alpiger  (1841-1905) returned to Zurich in 1896, after more than twenty years in Teheran. He had founded one of the world’s biggest Persian textile trading companies and carpet manufacturers. His luggage included a treasure of Persian clothes and fabrics.. The collection was carefully looked after by his family across generations. Now, more than a hundred years later, the precious pieces are the focus of a special exhibition.

Although colour is becoming increasingly popular in architecture as a design, specific knowledge is diminishing. The exhibition (Farbgeschichten) focuses on colour in all its aspects and traces it as a means of design in and on houses and buildings. Which pigments are particularly valuable and where do they come from? Which colours characterize the richly painted Villa Patumbah and which houses of the city of Zurich? And why have cities like Magdeburg and Tirana changed their colour? The theme of colour offers an infinite representation of issues, which everyone usually has to deal with, most of the time unconsciously.

In 1851, Carl Franz Bally (1821-1899), who owned a small shoemakers workshop in Schönenwerd (Canton of Aargau), decided to divided his shoe production into individual steps and to carry these out using machines. This was revolutionary and the beginning of the multinational Bally, nowadays represented in 64 countries, and shops in the high streets of France, London en New York. The exhibition looks at the company’s history and traces the development of shoe design, marketing, advertising and production to the present day. Bally has alyways stood for quality, aesthetically the highest standards and comfort and permanently looks for new opportunities, for example fashionable, casual and functional shoes (for the army and (wintersport for example).

The exhibition also shows the first stores in France and the true cooperate image of the Bally-stores, designed by the architect Robert Mallett-Stevens (1886-1945) in the 1930’s, the first stores in Uruguay (Montevideo) and Argentina already in the nineteenth century, due to the large German-speaking communities, and the first store in China, 1986, as first western multinational. The exhibition presents the materials of shoes, machines, design, posters, one of the first women shoes (1860) and the famous Bally proof-labor, although the manual input is still an integral part of the production process. The famous original Bally-letters, which adorned the ‘Capitol’ store building, which opened in Zurich in 1968, are also on show.

The exhibition (Joan Miró – Alles ist Poesie)  primarily shows graphics from the artist’s late work. The works of the artist illustrate the artistic and technical diversity of the artist, who saw himself as a “peintre-poète” (painter-poet). Joan Miró (1893-1983), along with his contemporaries Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí and André Masson, is one of the well-known representatives of Surrealism. His aesthetic, which is determined by abstraction, is characterized by symbolic forms and clear colors and possesses a high recognition value in its characteristic and very own pictorial language.

In fairy tales, the mirror often symbolizes a door to another world. Dutch artist Viviane Sassen (1972) sees her photographic work as a mirror, a means of evoking the world of dreams and exploring the subconscious in everyday moments. The exhibition Hot Mirror, which includes pieces from the past ten years, weaves an astonishing narrative from the work of this internationally acclaimed artist: a sort of self-portrait. The works act as mirrors, reflecting viewers’ questions back at them rather than providing answers.

The exhibition Tosa Shoji focuses on the engraving of Alois Lichtsteiner (1950) and presents the result of a decade of his work. The artist constantly explores new paths and uses contemporary materials and technologies by combining them with old methods.

The Hermitage Foundation devotes a major exhibition to English painting from the Victorian period (1837-1901). Through a selection of nearly 60 works, the project illustrates the richness and fascinating originality of 19th century English art. The exhibition highlights three generations of painters who were active during the Victorian era, J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851), John Everett Millais (1829-1896) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898), Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912), James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) and John Singer Sargent (1856-1925).