Zurich – Sunday
Everything in Europe is closed on Sunday. Except, thankfully, museums. And, even more thankfully, a coffee shop nest to the museum. The only other thing that isn’t closed? Starbucks. Zurich has eleven, and a handy map in the train station pointing out where they all are. Things like this make me embarrassed for the brands of my home nation.
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As I had passed out quite early the night before, I couldn’t convince by body to stay in bed past 7:30, and, despite my best efforts at e-mail writing and excessive showering, ready to go out at 9:00. I’d checked the museum opening times the night before and knew that the earliest was 10:00. I figured I could scout out a few more chocolate spots on the way and then stop at a cafe. This was not to be. I’d forgotten, since my time living there as a student, that Europe shuts down on Sundays. And, since I wasn’t about to stop at a Starbucks, I was left to walk as slowly as possible towards the Kunsthaus, Zurich’s main art museum. I met, in total, three very drunk men on my way. The first two muttered at me in German and I smiled warily and mumbled back in English which seemed to get rid of them nicely. The third spoke English, so we chatted for a couple blocks before arriving at the museum. He’d lived in Australia at some point and liked my purse. I like to think I only acted moderately skeeved out.
The museum was still closed, but the cafe attached to it was open, so I ordered myself a cappuccino, one of the most universally orderable foods (it seems almost impossible to pronounce in a way that’s incomprehensible to a speaker of almost any language), and read a book on my phone till the museum opened.
The Kunsthaus is having a revival of their famous Picasso retrospective from the 30s. Half a floor of the museum is packed with paintings, sculpture and collage from all of his major periods. I’ve always considered myself something of a fan of cubism and Picasso in general. I’d loved the glass painting film of his I’d seen at an art museum in Cincinnati years ago, and I love the guitar collages. However, after seeing this exhibit, I think I may have to revise my position. I’ve always loved the fragmented, intensely point-of-view disjointedness of cubism. It seems to be simultaneously dedicated to the essence of the subject and the subjective nature of the observer in a way that other techniques don’t match.
Picasso, like many artists, painted a lot of nudes. And most of them were female nudes. Perhaps my reaction is simply due to the intense repetition that the comprehensiveness of this exhibit afforded, but I became more and more disturbed by the grotesque distortion of female bodies over and over and over again. They seemed reduced to floating breasts, noses and the occasional eye. It was violent! And the violence was committed again and again with ritual precision. Perhaps, instead of seeing essence of an instrument set free, I might see this same violence in the violin paintings were I a violin.
The Kunsthaus offers a lot more than Picasso. Luckily, not very many other people seemed to realize this. Nearly every room was deserted, save the one filled with Van Goghs. There was a decent mid-century/pop art gallery, and I spent most of my time there once I found my way past the paintings of saints being impaled on various implements.
Despite being rather tired from looking at all the art, I had more museums to get to. At the base of the park across from my hotel was the Landsmuseum, basically a history of Switzerland/culture museum. The Swiss Army knife exhibit was by far the most disappointing, although it did contain a replica of an assembly desk filled with tiny trays of the various blades and attachments. The most interesting exhibit (to me anyway, I’m sure most people would be more interested in how the museum presented Switzerland’s action during WWII…) was the giant fabric catalogue of a former textile distributor who’d gone bankrupt, and donated his collection. He was fond of rose prints, and one exhibit showed a single piece of fabric at each step of the dying process. It made me long for a giant silk screen.
That day the train station was also hosting an expo on, as near as I could tell, something in between health and weight loss. Of course, this being a train station, it was flanked on both sides by fast food restaurants. It also featured a person-scale model of a colon or intestine, which you could walk through if you were braver than me.