Geneva’s Musée Rath displays treasures from Aarau

The latest exhibition at Geneva's Musée Rath show the Swiss art world's trends over the last 100 years Keystone Archive

In A Century of Challenges, some 100 paintings, sculptures, and other artworks are on display at Geneva's Musée Rath. From Ferdinand Hodler's 1909 Landscape of Rhythmic Forms to Adrian Schiess's Sunsets, it is a superb introduction to trends in Swiss art over the past 100 years.

“All the significant artistic movements in recent Swiss art are represented, often by major works,” says Cäsar Menz, head of Geneva’s Art and History Museums.

The exhibit actually comes from the Aarau Museum of Fine Arts, which houses one of the biggest and most complete collections of 20th Century Swiss art. While the museum is closed for refurbishment, Aarau’s treasures are being shown in Geneva. The exhibit will remain at the museum until January.

The works of celebrated artists like Giovanni Giacometti, Sophie Taueber-Arp and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner sit alongside those of more contemporary artists like Urs Lüthi, Franz Gertsch, Peter Fischli and Markus Raetz.

But the exhibition is not just a chronologically linear journey. The figurative works of the 1980s, for example, echo the expressionism of the first half of the century. Similarly, the geometric art developed by the likes of John M. Armleder harks back to the constructivism of the start of the 20th Century, which was itself reinterpreted by Zurich artists in the 1940s.

The Aarau Museum of Fine Art will be closed until 2003 to allow expansion to be carried out by the Basel-based architectural firm, Herzog & de Meuron, which designed the new Tate Modern in London.

The museum has a high international standing, remarkable when one considers that the town of Aarau has only around 16,000 inhabitants.

by Roy Probert