A visit to the Zurich Art Museum

24/01/04
In Zurich, paid a visit to the Kunsthaus.
Yes, even in these glorious days of unmade beds, pickled animal parts and multi-media performing installations etc., it is still a pleasure to take a little time to contemplate an area of canvas that has been the recipient of so much intense energy from an artist intent on creating an object of multiple meaning with an arrangement of colour.
Not that I am a tedious traditionalist or some fuddy-duddy luddite. No, I am well aware we are living in the facile, snarling, shallow, don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-the next-big-thing 21st Century of the short attention span and instant celebrity. But why are we so eager to embrace the banal? Is it that post-post-modern irony is the only possible defensive posture to assimilate in an urban chaos of conflicting or no moralities?
I blame it all on the mobile phone, more specifically the proliferation of antennae beaming high-frequency microwaves in every direction, confusing the homing pigeons and frying our brains, and from that there is no escape. But, as the German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch outlined in his magnum opus “The Principle of Hope”, we are unfinished, “not-yet conscious” and animated by dreams of a better life and by utopian longings for fulfillment. Hope. That's what keeps us going. And as the great British philosopher My Grandmother said in her daily dissertation “What can you do? There's always somebody worse off than you. Musn't grumble. Chin up and keep smiling through. Look at me, I haven't got time to feel sorry myself” She was right, she gave birth to 12 kids and never owned a washing machine.
But I digress. Art. What is it? What's it for?
The art historian Robert Hughes called his popular TV series of some not inconsiderable yore, “The Shock of the New”, pointing out that all significant developments in art history had their detractors amongst the Daily Mail reporters of the day. Even at the dawn of human history when our first artist ancestors began daubing the cave walls you can be sure that some craggy cro-magnon critic would say “what's that supposed to be, Ug? Call that a mammoth?”
Now cast your mind forward via impressionism, pointillism, dadaism, surrealism and (fill in your own ism here) to the general outrage surrounding the Tate Gallery's purchase of a nice rectangle of bricks masterfully laid out by the American artist Carl Andre, following his “Sculpture as Field” minimalist philosophy. After the media rubbished the Tate for “wasting public money” the artwork was vandalised.
I don't suppose Carl Andre deliberately set out to provoke the controversy his work caused - he might have expected it but it was not his prime motivation - but at least he was famous for 15 minutes and the huddled sceptical masses could join in the fun of the debate as they were once again asked to consider art as a springboard with which to propel themselves upwards into a higher conciousness where they could contemplate the nature of the spectator's relationship with an object designated as a work of art wherefrom one can receive new insights into one's perception of and relationship to the world and the function of the artist within it as one grapples with the initial discomfort of not knowing quite how to react when shown a pile of bricks in one of the nation's great art galleries. Well I thought it both stimulating and amusing and it certainly expanded my consciousness at least to the awareness that the ensuing media furore could be considered part of the art itself, an idea certainly developed over the following years by the young turks of the Turner prize - although I retain a suspicion that Tracy Emin's bed was really left unmade to annoy her mother. And now I remember that said bed inspired a couple of Chinese art activists to one day jump and down on it like naughty children, either as a protest or simply exercising their right to further extend the object's potential as a platform for performance art. And why not? After all, we live in the interactive age. That's what I told the police after they caught me adding a daub or two of blue ochre to that Rembrandt in the National Gallery. They were, as usual, unimpressed.
Anyway, let's get back to that old-fashioned painting lark for a minute.

As you walk up the staircase of the Zurich Kunsthaus leading to the collection you see looming large above a sizeable mural from the Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918) entitled “Die Ermutigung” - encouragement, or perhaps in this case “the instilling of courage”. We see mostly from the rear a few score men dressed in a variety of artisan's clothes – including what looks to be a contingent of trainee Spanish matadors with well formed buttocks – all thrusting their hands stiffly in the air as a result of being brought to a heightened sense of courageous solidarity by the central figure. He stands on a small platform, face on to us, and has obviously reached the high point of his encouraging oratory. His eyes staring, his mouth contorted, his hand pointing at his heart and his pelvic region thrust forth in a manner reminiscent of Michael Jackson in his heyday when he was all crotch-grabs and squeaks (not to be confused with the well-known firm of solicitors). All the large-format heroism in bright colours overlaid with testosterone left me feeling rather discouraged but I persevered up to the top of the staircase where Herr Hodler has a large, bright room all to himself where viewers may cast their own judgement on his impressive impressionist landscapes and more large-scale paintings symbolising nobility of the human spirit through female forms depicted in their natural element : sitting naked in sunlit fields of spring flowers. Hodler used a variety of models in his quest to represent the female. No-one is left out. Even the most dignified of doughty dowagers is enticed to slip on a thin blue shift and trip through the edelweiss holding hands with somewhat uncomfortable looking companions.
But you see I am merely become a victim of my own post-modern sniggering. Ferdinand Hodler deserves his place in the pantheon of great Swiss artists and, lest you think I am merely here to cock a snook, let us move on to the next room where I found myself in the presence of a painting that has become a Swiss icon, an image that has been countlessly copied, co-opted, reproduced, parodied and alluded to ever since it was created in 1873 : Rudolf Koller's “Gotthardpost”.

1878. The great creaking stage coach, laden down with letters, parcels and who knows what dry goods, thunders down the winding incline, spitting up stones and clouds of dust in its wake, three white horses to the fore, two chestnut stallions behind them all straining at the bit. As the coach lurches around yet another bend, the driver, sitting up on his bench resplendent in his blue uniform, must suddenly pull in his fistful of reins, sharply crack the whip held in his other hand and utter a stern command which breaks the horses' rhythm and sends them into a momentary whinnying flurry of confusion. The reason for this sudden interruption to the relentless momentum of the mail coach is a young calf which has strayed away from the herd of cattle peacefully grazing on the alpine meadows, and wandered onto the new-fangled road, directly into the path of the rattling six-headed monster. The calf runs forward toward us in blind panic and we, like the rest of the cows at the roadside, can only stare and wonder what on earth happens next.
This is the moment captured and depicted by the Swiss painter Rudolf Koller in his masterpiece, “Gotthardpost – La Diligence du St. Gothard”. The subtitle intimates that, thanks to the divene diligence of St Gothard, the calf will escape with mild shock and the coach driver will confidently goad his horses into regaining their rhythm and rightful place as kings of the road and the mail will get through. Which is a bit of a letdown for those who fondly imagine the horses actually collide with the calf and into each other, the coach crashing into them in a terrible mangling of bones, the driver being thrown off into a ravine as the coach overturns spewing its load of important letters, billets doux, pots, pans and assorted habadashery (for example) with a terrible scraping and banging and screeching and neighing enough to wake a dozing St Gothard. It was apparently quite a sensational painting in its day, no doubt the equivalent of an action movie today with its promise of imminent danger. In the shape of the new road carved through the mountains and the relentless pace of the coach and horses, Koller masterfully allegorises the unstoppable energy of the modern world marching inexorably across the peaceful pastoral landscape.
No such violent action is summoned up by the other painters in this room. They are more preoccupied with the pastoral and beguilingly so. The works of Robert Zund (1827-1909) may seem rather parochial by post-post-post modern standards but look again, especially at his large-scale “Eichenwald – Foret de Chenes”. It's a forest glade on a summer afternoon. Trees. Lots of trees. Ferns, grass, plants. All executed in a stunning photo-realist style before there were even cameras invented capable of creating such an image. By golly, you can hear the birds singing and the undergrowth rustling.
And then there is Segantini.
Giovanni Segantini (1858-1899) : Nature mystic; symbolist; philosopher and revolutionary prophet of a new art. So runs the headline on a website run by a descendent of the artist : www.segantini.com
And here's a potted biography I have shamelessly purloined from a website called artmagick.com :

Giovanni Segantini was born at Arco near Lake Garda, Italy, an Italian by blood but an Austrian by nationality. As a child he was delicate, imaginative, much influenced by his early surroundings. When he was five his mother died and his father, a carpenter, took him to Milan, finally leaving him in the care of a half-sister. After two years of loneliness he ran away, intending to go to France.
He was found and brought up by peasants in the Italian Alps but eventually returned to Milan, where he studied ornamental drawing at the evening school of the Brera Academy. Hardly able to maintain himself, however, he had to be put into a reformatory. There he remained for several years. He was allowed to do a certain amount of drawing, and came to work for a painter of religious banners, returning to the Brera Academy for lessons in figure drawing. In 1879 Segantini did his first oil painting, The Choir of the Church of S. Antonio.In it he used a technique, similar to Pointillism or Neo-Impressionism, that he had developed, apparently, simply by means of observing light and color at first hand.
After spending a few years in Milan painting genre subjects, Segantini moved to the Lake Como district with his young wife. The rest of his life was spent in virtual isolation as he moved higher and higher into the Alps. He was not an influential painter. Although he exhibited in his later years in various European cities, he hardly ever left the mountains and never went further than Milan.
Segantini's subject-matter was little influenced by any outside art, but after he had seen reproductions of the Dutch painter Anton Mauve, a relative and teacher of Vincent van Gogh, his style broadened and became more luminous. He worked out-of-doors and, like the Neo-Impressionists, experimented with optical mixtures, or the blending of color not on the canvas but in the eye of the beholder. For some years the subject of Segantini's oils and drawings were the life of the peasants around him, the mother-child relationship, and the Alpine scenery. He also produced, through his life, remarkably penetrating portraits.
Suddenly he developed a symbolist style and subject-matter, nurtured in him by the various influences of the writer Zola, the philosopher Neitzsche, the composer Wagner, and the German Romantic painters. Even his symbolist pictures had mountain backgrounds. His last, unfinished, work was an elaborate triptych called Life, Nature, and Death and set in the familiar Alpine landscape. While climbing the Schafberg, in the course of painting this picture, he caught a chill, developed peritonitis, and died on September 28, 1899.

Still there?
Well, yes. He was a man of the mountains. And before he succumbed to what must have been a most painful death from peritonitis he produced a series of mysterious snowy mountain landscapes with wispy female forms floating in the air - “the Punishment of Luxury” (or Lust) for example - or, in the case of “the Wicked Mother”, seemingly tangled in the branches of a tree. What does it mean? Who are these female forms? Do they represent his desires, or reflect his fear or even disgust? What do you think? What does your answer tell you about yourself?
You have 30 minutes and no conferring.

Now read a much more informative and knowledgable piece on the Turner Prize and Contemporary Art here......