Agenda

Around 1800, civil society as we know it today was formed. The self-confident bourgeoisie founded numerous associations and educational institutions, including the Kunstgesellschaft Luzern in 1819, in order to create a picture archive for the population. The presentation of the collection on the occasion of the anniversary addresses this revolutionary epoch.

Judy Millar (1957) is New Zealand’s most important painter. The exposition is now offering the opportunity to gain an overview of her entire oeuvre, which she has created in Auckland and Berlin over the past forty years. In addition to her well-known series of paintings and her painting installations, which the artist often created for New Zealand museums, early drawings from the 1980s will be shown as the foundation of her work.

The exhibition presents 60 masterpieces from the Ordrupgaard Museum in Copenhagen, which brings together the greatest impressionists of 19th century French painting.

In 1945, the French painter Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) discovered Switzerland as fertile ground for his collection and research: In everyday life as well as in hospitals, prisons and psychiatric clinics he encountered people who, far removed from the official art world, created gestural paintings, assemblages and sensitive drawings. He used the term “art brut” (French for  raw  or  rough art) to describe these intuitively and autodidactically developed art forms. At a time when “art brut” has gained recognition throughout the world, it makes sense to take a look at the history closely linking our country to this art form. The exhibition at the Aargauer Kunsthaus presents Swiss artists from the early twentieth century to the present from the Collection de l’Art Brut (Aloïse Corbaz, Adolf Wölfli and others) along with works from the holdings of the Aargauer Kunsthaus (Walter Arnold Steffen, Alois Wey et al.). Sometimes wildly and freely gestural, sometimes meticulous and detailed, the works focus on man, nature, architecture and emblematic imagery.

The exhibition shows works by Gaetana Zwemmer (1971). She uses various technics and mediums, such as photography, materials and collages.

 

It is through the presentation of some thirty works from the collections of the Museum of Art and History that Maison Tavel wants to illustrate the influence of Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918) on the painting of Geneva.

This exhibition shows objects found in underwater archaeology in the Rhône and on display in the Musée départemental Arles antique. These objects date from the period after 46 BC, when the Roman colony Arles was founded by Julius Caesar. Arles (Arelate) lay on the trade road from the Mediterranean to Geneva (Genava), a city ruled by the Romans since 122 B.C. and this exhibition maps the early romanisation of Geneva and its relations with Rome and the Greek world.

Helen Dahm (1878-1968) is one of the pioneers of Swiss modernism of the first half of the twentieth century. In 1906, during her stay in Munich, she took over the style of the Blaue Reiter. In 1913 she moved to the countryside in Oetwil am See, in the Oberland of Zurich. There she created a world of garden and flower paintings. The exhibition in the Kartause Ittingen shows early graphic works, the Helen Dahm Museum in Oetwil am See and the Thurgau Kunstmuseum show her familiarity with Symbolism, Art Nouveau and the Expressionism of the Brücke and Blauen Reiter.

The collection of the Gottfried Keller Foundation is one of the important collections of Swiss art. The works, collected over the course of some 130 years, are owned by the Confederation and are on permanent loan in over 70 Swiss museums and other public institutions. The National Museum Zurich and the Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana in Lugano, in collaboration with the Federal Office of Culture, are exhibiting masterpieces from this impressive federal art collection. The exhibition in Zurich chronicles the history of the foundation and showcases the collection’s diversity with precious objects from the 12th to the 20th century, including gold smithery, stained glass, drawings, paintings and sculptures. The Lugano exhibition focuses on paintings.

The 75th anniversary of the Basler puppet theatre, founded in 1944 by Richard Koelner (1904-1993), is the occasion for a small presentation. Since its move to the Zehntenkeller on the Münsterplatz in 1956, it has become the first puppet theatre in Basel with regular performances. The presentation shows puppets in the context of old performances and presents music from old performances classical or contemporary. To this day, music still plays an important role in this theatre, as it were an opera with puppets.