The OTHER Picasso Museum

Pablo Picasso
in Lucerne

WITHOUT THE CROWDS

By RICHARD CARREÑO

[WC News Service]
Lucerne, Switzerland
Many Pablo Picasso fans have already made the pilgrimage to the newly-opened Musée Picasso in Paris, and thus, surrounded by scores the artist's works, have encountered the hordes that flock to museum. Like most museums in Paris, these galleries double as tourist attractions, especially when they feature marquee artists (Picasso) or iconic paintings (Mona Lisa at the Louvre). The result are crowds. Big crowds. Sometimes, in the summer, especially, titanic crowds that can put off even the most hardy museum-goer. (Ssshh... The solution are skip-the-line tickets. Sometimes costly. But always well worth the expense).

 

Or, for true, die-hard Picasso dévotees, how does immediate access to one of the best, small collections of his works anywhere sound? And with no crowds. In fact, hardly any fellow museum-goers to contend with.

Mark Twain:

Lion and Friend
Photo: WC News Service/Joan T. Kane

LUCERNE MONUMENT LIONISED

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Lion Monument (German: Löwendenkmal), or the Lion of Lucerne, is a sculpture in Lucerne, Switzerland, designed by Bertel Thorvaldsen and hewn in 1820–21 by Lukas Ahorn. It commemorates the Swiss Guards who were massacred in 1792 during the French Revolution, when revolutionaries stormed the Tuileries Palace in Paris, France. Mark Twain praised the sculpture of a mortally-wounded lion as "the most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world."

Lausanne's Métro

Photos; WC News Service/Richard Carreño

FRENCH TECHNOLOGY,
SWISS HUMOUR
By RICHARD CARREÑO
[WC News Service]

LAUSANNE, Switzerland -- Most subway straphangers consider themselves lucky if the train they're riding foretells an upcoming station stop with a PA update (too often muffled, too heavily accented, and/or generally unintelligible), or, at best, with a visual announcement that requires a neck-straining contortion to check it out. Lausanne's Métro has such methods beat: Welcome to the world's smallest city with a full-fledged subway. And, arguably, also the world's quirkiest, where approaching stations are announced by animal sounds. As from horses and cows. And rushing water, as in a waterfall.

Forget verbal announcements or visual legends. In their place, at alternating stations, are the amplified sounds of cows mooing and the hoof beats of stampeding horses. The pattern seems random: As I approached the Line 2's Croisettes stop, it might have been the horses that I was hearing. Thirteen stops away, at Ouchy, mooing might have been cued up. Either way, be forewarned to alight if your stop were next.

COFFEE MONEY

By RICHARD CARREÑO
[WC News Service]
Le Corbusier (1887-1965), the professional name of the Swiss-French architect, who was born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, is arguably Switzerland's most famous architect, and, along with Alberto Giacometti, the Swiss-Italian sculptor, one of that country's marque-brand artists.

 

Interestingly, Le Corbusier's profile is not as high in the United States, as in other parts of the world. His only building in North America is the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, built in 1963 at Harvard. It's not very inspiring -- just a layered mass of rough-hewn, poured concrete that's equal parts Brutalism and boring.

 

There might be another reason for the architect's lacklustre popularity on this side of the Atlantic, namely Le Corbusier's little-known penchant as an admirer of the Soviet social order (one of his grandest commissions was in Russia during the 1930s) and fascist states (Mussolini's Italy and Marshal Pétain's Vichy). Also there's simply the work -- a non-humanist approach in aesthetics and scale. Like I said, mostly Brutalism and boring.

Letter from Switzerland

The author and her grandfather (1964)

Yodeling and Kvetching in the Alps

By Harriet Eser Phillips

[WritersClearinghouse News Service] Posted 19 August 2014

South Bend, Indiana

That damn it to hell Linkedin.... I was trying to look somebody up and of course without "joining" you can't do that.... and even then the info was sketchy so I am triple aggravated.  Chances of deleting myself are very good indeed.

 

I truly hate gadgets. Mme Ludite for sure.  21st Century version of Mme Lafarge, I think.  Watching the death of civilization while I dust.

 

Oh Lausanne!  Ponce de Leon threw up the pizza he swiped.  Yes, I could have told him that was a foolish heist.... I remember it well....

 

Barbara was a drunk as a witch on Halloween and descended into the potted palm.... It was Fourth of July time, 1964, we flew to Europe from Venezuela, and there was a massive patriotic themed dinner at a swanky restaurant complete with a gigantic ice carving of a goose (well swan, maybe), featuring caviar or some such between his fridgedly  frozen wings. Must be the company picked up the tab.

 

I sat next to the Swiss office comptroller, if I say Fogelsanger I'm close, could have been Feuchtwanger. Anyway, he was pointing out the wonders of the Swiss navy, and I asked him if he thought maneuvers in Lake Constanz would serve them well when there is a major invasion?  Am I wrong, or is Switzerland landlocked?

Bechtler Museum of Modern Art



Photo: WritersClearinghouse News Service

Mario Botta: Architecture and Memory

Mario Botto

Location: Fourth-floor gallery On View: January 31, 2014 - September 1, 2014 (extended)                

Charlotte, North Carolina
Mario Botta: Architecture and Memory is an exhibition spanning the 50-year career of internationally acclaimed architect Mario Botta, the designer of the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art building and one of the century's most fundamental contributors to postmodern architecture. Featured are sketches, original wood models and photographs exemplifying Botta’s use of geometric shapes that juxtapose lightness and weight. The run of the exhibition has been extended through September 1, 2014.