Agenda

The focus of the exhibition is on Swiss painting from the first half of the 20th century. The works are from the holdings of the Aargauer Kunsthaus and the private collection of Peter Suter. Swiss cubism by Fritz Baumann (1886-1942) is presented as one of the main works of art.

The Museum illuminates the culture of the Etruscans with an extensive special exhibition. Some 250 objects will present a panorama of Etruscan culture and life, from the pleasures of banquets to trade, religion, fortune telling, and burial rites. The exhibits from the museum’s own collection will be supplemented with outstanding loans from Danish, German, and Swiss collections. Roman culture owes Etruscan art and this exhibition focuses on this accomplishment, for a long time forgotten after the Roman conquest. Etruscan cities Tarquinia, Cerveteri, Vulci, Orvieto, Chiusi or Veji and many other cities once ruled over central Italy and Triumph, Gladiators and many Gods have Etruscan roots. Etruscan culture and people may have reached the south of Switzerland as well.

Early in 1519, Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) came to Zurich as a parish priest and sparked the Reformation in Switzerland. 500 years later, the Reformation is still considered one of the most formative events in Swiss history. The exhibition at the National Museum Zurich focuses attention on the argument over which is the true faith and highlights the origin of a new denomination. Animated films produced specifically for the exhibition bring the stories and conflicts of that time to life.

The exhibition focuses on Reformation as starting point of objects becoming art. The show unites some 60 works from the 16th to the 20th centuries. At its centre is Ferdinand Hodler’s ‘Unanimity’ in the stairwell of the Moser building. Selected works by Old Masters retrace the crisis of the religious image in the Reformation, while Italian Baroque paintings offer an insight into the religious art of the Counter-Reformation. At the beginning of the 19th century Zurich offers up some of the Nazarenes – a group of artists working in Rome who looked back to
the pre-Reformation church and art. Finally, the innovators of Concrete Art sought universal truths through their pure, almost Reformation-style painting and Piet Mondriaan (1872-1944) is being examined as a reformer pur sang.

The medieval Church had a solid financial- and tax administration. The incomes originated from agriculture, estates and other properties, and also from indulgencies and other questionable moneymakers.  The exhibition focuses on the moral, financial and religious aspects of the ambivalent attitude of the Church.

Einsiedeln Abbey is one of the most significant European places of pilgrimage, drawing people from all over the world. Popes, emperors, kings and ordinary citizens have lavished privileges, gifts and donations on this abbey with its vast European network. More than 250 000 pilgrims visited the abbey in 1720 for example. Thanks to the aura of this pilgrimage destination, the abbey survived the Reformation and the consequences of the French Revolution. The exhibition tells the eventful history of the abbey and of its pilgrimage. Many of the main exhibits are on show outside the abbey walls for the very first time. Examples include a manuscript said to have belonged to Saint Meinrad, a chalice from King Carol of Romania and the splendid clothes and jewellery of the Black Madonna.Madonna.

19th-century French painting offers artists who enjoyed great recognition and the plaudits of art critics and audiences, but are little known in German-speaking countries. Although indebted to traditional painting techniques and themes, they were in some cases highly innovative. French painting at this time is mainly famous for Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, ‘plein air’ painting, Impressionism and their famous artists, such as Géricault, Delacroix, Corot, Daumier, Millet, Courbet, Manet, Sisley, Monet and Renoir (and many others). They were highly controversial in their day however, but famous nowadays. The more traditional painters, such as Delaroche, Couture, Meissonier, Cabanel, Gérôme und Bouguereau, were highly celebrated artists in the nineteenth century, sidelined today. The exhibition brings together these various and hotly debated approaches in nineteenth century French painting to create a rich and diverse panorama of the era’s genres.

The fourth and final exhibition in the 150-year jubilee series of the Collection of Graphic Art (Graphische Sammlung) takes visitors back in time through the history of draughtsmanship. Prints from four centuries shed new light on the development of aesthetic perceptions from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. They bear witness to the many different ways in which drawing skills have been developed by institutions as part and parcel of training, and illustrate the respective educational approaches involved.

The Hilti Art Foundation is showing thirty-six selected paintings and sculptures in the neighbouring museum of art. The exhibition is devoted to an exploration of the female form by Lehmbruck, Hodler, Picasso, Léger, Laurens and Alberto Giacometti, paintings by artists of classical modernism (Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann, Kandinsky, Klee, Dubuffet and Wols) and paintings from 1980 to the present day.

The exhibition pays attention to the long history and culture of bathing in lake Geneva (Lac Léman). The lake knows 121 officially recognized spots of bathing nowadays, in Vevey, Lausanne, Genève, Montreux, Nyon and many other Swiss and French (Thonon et Évian les-Bains). The show tells the (ancient) story of bathing and its culture. Fashion, tourism, architecture of buildings, quality of the water, health and many other aspects are being dealt with, including the presence of famous visitors, such as Voltaire, Hergé, Courbet, Louis XVIII, Brigitte Bardot and many others.