January drear in Bern on the day we saw the Gabriele Münter (Gabriele Münter. Pioneer of Modern Art: Zentrum Paul Klee), her photographs of a just-about-1900 America, her reproductions of drawings by children, and this still-moving still-life painting.
Our tramgoing eye is being made to rest not on face or even feet, but on a series of well-packaged items in the lap of the woman sitting just across from us. While her torso in a blue dress politely (or is it primly?) encompasses all of the shopping, she herself isn’t constricted by the canvas. This consuming body refuses to be stared at, and she’ll take up the space allotted to her, no less, very possibly more.
That same day, dashing to Basel, we saw the Georgia O’Keeffe (Georgia O’Keeffe: Fondation Beyeler). A good deal of it familiar stuff, but not her cloudscapes from airplanes, painted after she began travelling away from New Mexico in the 1950s. When on a visit to France in 1953 O’Keeffe saw Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire, her response was, “all those words piled on top of that poor little mountain seemed too much”. As for her own hills in the Bisti Badlands, they often don’t look right to me, too lumpy and crinkly, though I’m told by a little-known geologist that this is how “diffusive” hillslopes really do look, formed in that dry place without much help from water or ice.
The Swiss artist Otto Tschumi also painted flowers. Skipping past a few months, we saw these fuchsias and other, more surrealist paintings by him in June (Otto Tschumi. Surreal Worlds: Schloss Spiez).
Born in Bern in 1904, Tschumi did the illustrations for a Swiss edition of Moby Dick oder der weisse Wal (1942), only after which he went off to visit the coast of Massachusetts. If Tschumi’s delphine weisser Wal leaves something to be desired, his evening sun is lovely in its push across this Martha's Vineyard porch, making two chairs from one, and lighting a pair of unlit lanterns.
In August it was back, again, to Bern to see the Heidi Bucher (Metamorphoses I: Kunstmuseum Bern). Born in Winterthur in 1926, Bucher worked in different media, but in the 1970s she began to make her “skinnings” (Häutungen). These were latex casts of the interiors of rooms, including a cast of the “Herrenzimmer” (gentleman’s study – or, if you want, room for men) in her parents’ emptied bourgeois home.
Photographs of Herrenzimmer (1977-78) do it little justice. In the exhibition, you walked around and within the room that Bucher worked so forcefully to pull off its own walls, the skins bringing with them bits of panelling and moulding as they went. Now themselves fragile, Bucher’s hanging skins call us to think about how to get close to the past, and what to make of it.
Beyond these skins, we delighted in Wilfrid Moser’s and Varlin’s fatty offerings in the long tradition of slaughtered ox paintings (Varlin/Moser. Excessive!: Museum zu Allerheiligen Schaffhausen).
Then, still in August, we’d made it to Reading, Vermont, to see the Lois Dodd (Lois Dodd. Natural Order: Hall Art Foundation). Heidi Bucher and Lois Dodd were born only a year apart, and Lois too has an interest in abandoned houses, or at least their broken windows. But I confess I misunderstood her Tree Shadow on Snow (1995).
Not reading the label, I saw this as a scene of melting, the blue of the shadow a delta of water emptying into the stream below. Perhaps this is the result of a year of too much shouting into other rooms “another ice shelf is gone” or “they’ve found dead bodies in a retreating glacier.” Still, it did make me wonder about how we now (and will) look at snow paintings. I very much liked Claire Keegan’s book Small Things Like These (2021), its cover with a detail of Hunters in the Snow a suggestion of things we may already have lost, almost without noticing. It was an August of snow.
Returning to another September in Zurich, one Saturday we went south to Stans, to have a look at the Liselotte Moser (Liselotte Moser. Ein Künstlerinnenleben zwischen Luzern, Detroit und Stans: Nidwaldner Museum). In age, Moser falls between Münter & O’Keeffe and Dodd & Bucher. Like Heidi Bucher, she was born in Switzerland and went for a long stretch to America. In 1927, she followed her textile historian mother, Adèle Coulin Weibel, from Lucerne to Detroit. She would stay there until her mother died, painting and making her own textiles (including an embroidery of the myth of Io on what looks to be a bath towel). She was already in Detroit when she made this portrait of herself at 24.
Head in hand, her tilt allows us also to see the mountain view framed on a wall behind her. Cityscapes too interested Moser. Paintings from her windows on 70 East Palmer Street show the apartments opposite, as well as painted signs, a big yellow one still imploring us to “Drink Vernor’s Ginger Ale”. Hers was a painted city.
Moser carried on painting herself when she moved to Stans, then a town of about 5,000; to Switzerland because of its healthcare (she’d had polio as a child and continued to have difficulty walking), to Stans because she couldn't afford the rents in nearby Lucerne.
Never having exhibited or sold much, when she died in 1983 she left her whole estate to Stans. But a few Liselotte Mosers remain in Detroit, including Lights and Reflections, a painting from her days on East Palmer Street.
Moser has us look both out and in (not always easy work); in to find her painting away in the window; out and over to other lit windows across the street. It took me a while to notice the figure just behind her, and I worried for a moment that it was her mother calling her away from her easel, but of course it is another painting, this one a portrait, backing her up.
Explaining her work, Moser simply said, “I want to paint what I see”. Her best paintings make it clear that seeing “the things of light” isn’t straightforward at all.
Thank you, Beatrice, for helping us to see what you have seen last year. Like Stone, I was enthralled by the Mosers. Seeing how artists see themselves can be quite illuminating. Speaking of lighting things up, I love the title of your blog/newsletter, which has many meanings in the context of a life filled with art, like yours and ours.
Linda
Wonderful evocation of your year of looking. Especially liked your notes about Mose; you must have big eyes like hers to see so we’ll.