Niki de Saint Phalle's Guardian Angel at Zurich's Main Station

In 1847 the first rail connection opened in Switzerland, running from Baden to Zurich. And in 1871 a  new main station opened in Zurich. It still stands, like a Prussian neo-renaissance palace, astride the prestigious (and world's most expensive) main street, the Bahnhofstrasse.

But let us step inside the Hauptbahnhof, and discover the treasure that hangs from its ceiling, protecting the travellers.

In 1997, in order to commerorate 150 years of Swiss railroads, one of the world's leading artists was commissioned to produce one of her easily recognisable gigantic and powerful women.  Over 11 metres long, and weighing 1.2 tons, it was made in the USA, shipped to Rotterdam in three pieces, brought by boat up the Rhine to Basel, then transported by low roader to Zurich and reassembled. And here it hangs, Niki de Saint Phalle's Guardian Angel.

It is, of course, wild and daring in its madness. She sweeps above the tiny, busy commuters, heavy but wonderfully nimble, a gloriously overdressed female Sumo wrestler (which might explain de Saint Phalle's incredible popularity in Japan.)

I was first introduced to the work of Niki de Saint Phalle by a girlfriend during a trip to Paris in 1985.  We sat in a cafe near the Pompidou Centre, at the Place Igor Stravinsky, listening to the rain and laughing at de Saint Phalle's wonderfully cheery fountain. I fell in love and married the girl.

Today de Saint Phalle's angel of the station still casts her protection over us.

Winter Tales

Paris, 2012

I've certainly noticed some weirding of the weather in recent months.  First there was Europe's seemingly endless mild autumn, with balmy temperatures that ran right into December. Even Switzerland experienced a drought - seven weeks without precipitation. Then, suddenly the great freeze descended on most of northern Europe, enveloping the continent in sub-zero temperatures for seven or eight weeks - literally, a cold that killed. I don't think I ever experienced such a prolonged period of sub-zero temperatures in my life. It was followed by what seemed like an early summer in March.  For weeks we dined on our patio every evening, enjoying temperatures of over 20 degrees. Spring had been skipped.  And then, along came now - a reversion to early spring - in late April!  Some sunny spells, lots of scattered showers, and I'm wearing my overcoat again. Of course Chaucer had written of this over 600 years ago:

                                   Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
                                   The droghte of march hath perced to the roote

And T.S.Eliot, writing in the shadow of the 20th century's Great War, had warned us that:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

But neither  mentioned that March is hot, and late April is cold.

In February, during the great freeze, I took the train to Paris for a history conference.  It was so cold, they even had to cancel the Ireland-France rugby match because the pitch was frozen - no joke for the 10,000 Irish fans who had made the journey.  But what struck me were the homeless in Paris and the soup kitchens on the street.  The Canal Saint Martin looks pretty when it is frozen, but the homeless huddled in blankets in doorways showed how brutal urban life can be. On a Saturday night I mixed with the revelers on the Place de la Bastille and noticed an entire family, mother, father and two children, huddled inside a telephone box, wrapped in sleeping bags.. As I returned to my hotel that night I shuffled past a couple of dozen muffled and silent men and women eating soup that had been handed out by volunteers; the temperature was around ten degrees below zero.

Paris, 2012

A couple of days after returning to Zurich I visited the exhibition in the Kunsthaus "Winter Tales". The exhibtion has been organized in collaboration with Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum. I enjoyed it immensely.  Not only can the exhibition boast of a number of startling and surprising works, but it possesses a great narrative power that carried me along.  Winter was once a time to be feared, with freezing temperatures and food supplies imperiled, but this exhibition lets us see how the dark season was tamed and, especially among the democratic Dutch, how the winter became a time for all, rich and poor, high and low, adult and child, to hit the ice and enjoy skating, either as a participant or just as an observer enjoying the spectacle.

Pieter Brueghel the Younger, 1601

During the Enlightenment the act of skating had become a symbol of freedom. The bourgeois citizen could enjoy his leisure time, but it is with the onset of the French Revolution (that brings the middle class burgher to power), that he can really swing his arms in freedom as he skates away on the thin ice of a new age, like a living, dynamic and daring statue of liberty, top hat and all.

Pierre Maximilien Delafonteine, 1798

Of course the spectacular ferocity of the Russian winter that ravaged Napoleon's army ignited the interest and retained the attention of the romantics for some decades.

Boissard de Boisdenier, 1835

However, by the end of the 19th century winter seemed to have been tamed, providing Monet simply with an excuse to challenge himself and create a study in white, a study of the act of painting itself - white on white, with the single black object, "The Magpie".

Monet, 1869

And winter provided Munch with the opportunity to paint, well, what else, but Munch (did he ever paint anything else?); the gnarled Norwegian winter landscape as a self portrait, a mirror of the anguished state of mind of the self-obsessed artist.

Munch, 1900

Of course history is never linear. No true narrative travels in a straight line. Winter had not been tamed for everyone. Winter had not become simply a playground, or or an excuse to experiment in painting or to indulge in self-analysis.  As always, they still had the poor.

Fritz von Uhde, 1890

In Fritz von Uhde's painting "A Difficult Walk (Walking Towards Bethlehem"), we are reminded that in late 19th century Europe, after decades of industrial progress, Mary and Joseph still walked the streets of winter looking for a place at the inn. 

And the poor are still in our midst in the glitzy, consumerist and technologically smart 21st century. In many of Europe's large urban areas this winter, like on the streets of Paris, places at the inn were limited.

Heroic Africans in Zurich

Last week I took a couple of hours and enjoyed the current exhibtion at the Rietberg Museum in Zurich, "Heroic Africans: Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures".

The exhibtion was orginally in New York, at the Metropolitan Museum.  It was reviewed in The New Yorker by Peter Schjeldahl.  In the New York Times Holland Cotter wrote:

"If you still think that African art is not your thing, there’s an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum that may change your mind (...) it’s as beautiful to look at as a show can possibly be."

I can verify, he was not exaggerating. Cotter goes on to say:

"It’s a perception changer in other ways too, as it argues, through demonstration, against basic misunderstandings surrounding this art. African art has no history? No independent tradition of realism? No portraiture? All African sculpture looks basically alike, meaning “primitive”? African and Western art are fundamentally different in content and purpose? Wrong across the board."

Entrance to the Rietberg Exhibition

It certainly threw a new light on African art for me. The works in this show range from the 12th to the 20th centuries and, for the most part, are sculptures that memorialise eminent  leaders and other heroic figures in African history or mythology. One of the pieces, a wooden sculpture of a dancing priestess, caused a sensataion when it was first exhibited in 1930s Europe and was photographed by Man Ray.

Photograph by Man Ray

The pieces are beautifully displayed in the new exhibition space that lies below the 19th century villa where Richard Wagner once carried out his love affair with Mathilde Wesendonk.

These works were inevitably made as part of a complex system of collective  memory, closely linked with religion and death rituals, providing an essential  bridge between the living and the dead. But they stand today behind glass vitrines, far from home, to be enjoyed for their purely aesthetic pleasure alone, by New Yorkers and Swiss. The works come from the Rietberg's own collection, as well as from collections in Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Portugal and the United States. None, of course, have a home in Africa anymore. That ravaged continent long ago lost its most precious works to the predatory colonizers of Berlin, Brussels, Lisbon, London and Paris. If anyone, African or otherwise, wants to contemplate some of the finest sulptures created in Africa, they will have to travel to Zurich.

I was particularly moved by a small number of Yoruba terracotta faces, from Ife in Nigeria, made some time between the 12th and 15th centuries.  They looked incredibly fragile but lifelike; their remarkable individualism and naturalism predates any contact with Europeans.

Ife, Nigeria: 12th to 15th century

Ife, Nigeria: 12th to 15th Century

Some sculptures from the 17th century onward border on the abstract. It is easy to see how such works would entice and excite the likes of Picasso and Kirchner.

Ghana: 19th century

We don't know the names of the artists who created these great works. Thanks to the destruction wrought by colonialism, we have lost a great deal of the stories that provide the context of what these works originally meant. Most of all, perhaps, for ages Europe's sense of superiority blinded us to the individuality and beauty of African art. Even those, like the artists of the European avant-garde, who were truly inspired by African art, could only find in it a dynamic form of primitivism - it provided an escape from the industrialised and mechanised landscape that surrounded modernity.  This exhibition reveals the manifold brilliance of African art.  We may not know the stories, but we can stand in awe.

D. R. Congo: 19th Century