A lazy Friday afternoon in a graceful 19th century house set in a wooded park by the lake, with views looking out towards Notre Dame Cathedral and Lake Geneva. A perfect day for enjoying great art.
The current exhibition, The Bührle Collection, is a prestigious collection of 19th and 20th century art featuring Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masters.
Monet's "Poppies near Vétheuil" reminded me of Mommy. She once asked me, Alice, what do poppies look like?
She was working on one of her "counterfeit" Monets and wanted to make sure she was painting the poppies correctly. So I brought her a poppy I had picked from a field in France and dried between the pages of a book. She liked that. I miss her.
Above photo shows Swiss industrialist Emil Georg Bührle seated among his favorite pieces in his collection.
Also shown in the exhibition are two "masterworks" that initially managed to find their way into this masterful collection, and were subsequently discovered to be fakes.
Proof positive that even art experts and brilliant collectors are not foolproof.
2. PALAIS de RUMINE
We went in to get out of the rain.
It's a lavish neo-Renaissance building housing a University library and museums of fine arts, history, geology, archeology, and zoology on several floors accessed by grand stone staircases. It also has installations demonstrating theories of evolution.
The zoology museum's stuffed animals, taxidermy mounts of wild animals and birds, made me somehow sad, so we left.
3. COLLECTION de l'ART BRUT
This is a unique museum, one dedicated to "outsider art," a range of art forms outside the conventional dictates of the art world. Art that is spontaneous, free, unbiased, anti-intellectual, and raw.
In 1945, artist Jean Dubuffet started collecting various art forms created by self-taught artists, mainly social outcasts. He found them everywhere- in folk art, in the streets, in prisons, in psychiatric clinics. In 1971, he donated his vast collection, which he called Art Brut, to the city of Lausanne. It forms the core of this extraordinary museum, now seen as a focus for "artistic communication with another world."
Among the numerous creators of this art form are recognized artists. Several are unknown; some are anonymous.
I was particularly intrigued by the strange world of Michael Golz. Since their childhood in the 60s, Michael and his brother Wulf have been creating non-stop, and still continue to elaborate on, a fantastical land they've named "Althosland," an imaginary country of lush hills, mountains, rivers, and all manner of infrastructures for a utopian community.
They have accumulated a vast archive of pictures, topographical maps, intricate grids, even a made-up language, for this land inhabited by only long-haired people who enjoy absolute freedom to do whatever they wish. Legal tender includes jacket buttons, blades of grass, and tree leaves.