An exhibition on Swiss Expressionism at the Archaeological Museum in Aosta

From June 25 to October 23, 2022, the Regional Archaeological Museum of Aosta presents, for the first time in Italy, the exhibition Swiss Expressionism, dedicated to the Swiss branches of the movement, and the result of a scientific collaboration with one of the most important Swiss art museums, the Kunst Museum Winterthur. The exhibition aims to recount an extraordinary but still little-known season of twentieth-century art: promoted by the Department of Cultural Heritage of the Autonomous Region of Valle d’Aosta, it is directed by the curator of the Kunst Museum Winterthur, David Schmidhauser, in collaboration with Daria Jorioz, director of the Struttura Attività espositive e promozione identità culturale della Valle d’Aosta.

Thanks to loans from the Kunst Museum Winterthur and a number of important Swiss museum and private collector nuclei, the review brings together for the first time masterpieces from the entire Helvetic geographical area, including both Ticino and the area of French-speaking Switzerland, which until now have been little known to the general public. In the early twentieth century, there were many artists of Swiss origin who found in the raw aesthetic and strong, symbolic colors typical of Expressionism full expression of themselves and the times in which they lived. The movement developed gradually, from its beginnings to the first half of the twentieth century, in different geographical areas of the country, so much so that it defined very different expressive approaches and stylistic tendencies that led to the definition of numerous groups of artists, for which one can speak of ’Helvetic Plurilinguism’.

While on the one hand the influence of neighboring French Fauvism was manifested in the works of the Solothurn artist Cuno Amiet, forerunner of Swiss Expressionism, and in Geneva in the intense color ranges of the Le Falot group interested in the ’color aesthetics; on the other hand, the German experience of Die Brücke was reflected in the Lucerne group Der Moderne Bund and the Basel group Rot-Blau, which were more interested in the symbolic value of color. In Ascona, moreover, the Ursa Maggiore group was formed, aimed at the representation of the idyllic Ticino landscape. However, there were also numerous those artists who pursued individual research without joining any group and dealing with the most varied themes: from politics to social issues, from the suffering of war to landscape representation. There is no shortage of extraordinary female figures such as that of Alice Bailly, who will be highlighted in the exhibition itinerary by once again showing a little-explored aspect of the 20th-century European avant-garde. Some of the works have never before left Switzerland.

The public will have the opportunity to admire masterpieces such as Louis Moilliet’s The Big Carousel, Hermann Scherer’s Landscape in Mendrisiotto, and works with the unmistakable raw strokes typical of the Expressionist season such as Albert Muller’s Interior with Three Women or Hans Berger’s The Reader and Alice Bailly’s famous Gray Spring. The exhibition aims to bring together the extraordinary variety of stylistic trends and forms of expression associated with early 20th-century Swiss Expressionism.

The exhibition, produced by Expona in Bolzano, is accompanied by a bilingual Italian/French catalog published by Silvana Editoriale that, in addition to the curators’ essays, includes images of all the works on display.

Tickets: Full 6 euros, reduced 4 euros. Free admission for those under 25. Opening hours: daily, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. The exhibition is included in the Abbonamento Musei circuit.

Image: Albert Müller, Interior with Three Women (1924; oil on canvas, 127x134.5 cm; Winterthur, Kunst Museum)

An exhibition on Swiss Expressionism at the Archaeological Museum in Aosta

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