Henry Fuseli, Titania Caresses Bottom with the Donkey’s Head, 1793-94, oil on canvas.  Kunsthaus, Zurich.

On a trip to Switzerland, organized by Pro Helvetia, Sayandeb Chowdhury finds that the Alpine country is not just about clocks, wine and chocolate. But also art, music, dance, theatre and cinema. And finds them anything but neutral.

Renzo Piano is not a musician. But he plays music in glass and steel, brick and mortar. As I stood in front of the Zentrum Paul Klee, erected by the maverick Genoa-born architect on the slopes of a highway outside Bern on a sunny day in early December, I could almost hear his composition. And why couldn’t I? Piano’s mercurial rolling-terrain glass and steel monument were not in memoriam of just anybody, but to Paul Klee, German painter and iconoclast who had spent the last decade of his life in Bern, away from the Nazi monstrosities being committed under the Third Reich in neighbouring Germany. Piano called Klee a ‘poet of stillness’ and considered his work too much in-depth to be contained within the walls of an ordinary building. So the Zentrum Paul Klee was born. 

A contemporary of Modernist master Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee was like his companion, at the forefront of Modernism. Till about two years Paul Klee’s best works were scattered across the globe till renowned Swiss surgeon Dr Maurice E Müller and his wife Martha Müller-Lüthi in collaboration with Paul-Klee Foundation set up the centre and brought about 4000 of the master’s works under the expanded atrium of the Zentrum Paul Klee. 

The winding three-hill architecture not only houses the varied and masterly repertoire of Klee but also other state-of-the-art research and performance facilities. We were guided by the curator, Dr Michael Baumgartner, through such modernist gems as Lady Demon, Unsettled Weather and Death and Fire before we went to see a special exhibition called ‘melody and rhythm’. Klee brought together his accomplishment as a violinist, as a music critic and art teacher at Weimer Bauhaus to produce some brilliant evocation of what he called ‘musicality’. The structural analogies between visual and musical representations are expressed in rhythmic sequences to denote ‘harmonious, polyphonous visual structures’. 

But if you thought Zentrum Paul Klee was the only museum of repute in whole of Switzerland you need to work better on the Alpine country’s rich collection of art. 

Close to the Bern magnate comes the Foundation Beyeler in Basel. This museum of modern art is another Renzo Piano gem — approximately 127 metre-long, resembling a large vessel anchored parallel to the main road. Apart from its stellar collection that includes among others, Mondrian, Monet, van Gogh, Kandinsky, Giacometti, Cezanne, Rousseau, Picasso, Lichtenstein and Warhol, the foundation is holding an exhibition called Eros in Modern Art. The two-part series had Rodin and Picasso for the first part. The second part, which we saw, awed and astonished, has all the rest whose art has ever interrogated how and where the sexual mingled into the erotic – thereby somewhere creating the line that rescues the homo sapiens from degenerating into pure beastliness. From the impressionist Manet’s scandalous Olympia and Toulouse-Lautrec’s Le Moderne Judgement de Paris to Modernists Dali (The Grand Masterbateur), Max Ernst (Napoleon in the Wilderness) to contemporaries Tom Wesselman (Great American Nude) and Lucian Freud (Woman holding her thumb) the exhibition makes desire even more desirable. 

One must also mention the Kunsthaus Zurich, which has the best of Swiss art in its collection (including Fuseli’s rendition of scenes from Shakespeare, Zund, Hodler, and off course Giacometti) and was holding an exhibition of the master engravings of none other than Albrecht Dürer. It is planning a full Auguste Rodin exhibition in May (I wish I am invited again). Another must-see is the Reitberg Museum in Zurich which has the largest non-European collection of art in that part of the world, but most impressive was a Chola Nataraj statue in full acrobatic bloom and an exotic collection of native American art.

If you have ever liked to stand among stellar artworks, dwarfed and daunted, do give Switzerland a chance. You will come back a little more civilised.