ZURICH – Switzerland (Thurs 3 Sept)

We woke up today with a plan, today we are going to catch the #11 tram to the city, and then the S10 train to Uetliberg, walk the two hour track along the hills (with the reported fantastic views of the city), catch the cable car back down to Adliswil, and the S4 back to the city again. The rain that has been forecast isn’t happening, we have beautiful blue sky, so it will be perfect. A simple plan … or so we thought. As we progressed into town, the further we went, the more the weather deteriorated. By the time we got off the train at Uetliberg, the weather was wild, windy and pouring with rain. We thought we would wait for half an hour to see what the weather would do. We then joined the others that obviously shared our intentions, and got back on the train we had arrived on and went back to the city. We went to the art gallery instead.

As it transpired this was a great choice. There are many art galleries in this city and by all accounts the ‘Kunsthaus Zurich’ is the one to see. We can’t speak for the others, but this one is well worth the visit. We ended up spending five hours here perusing through works by Remembrant, Cezanne, Dali, Kandinsky, Lichtenstein, Miro, Monet, Picasso, Rodin, Van Gogh, Warhol, and some strange offerings in a current exhibition of Albert von Keller works. He seemed to go through a period where he had an obsession for the occult. The scope of this gallery is impressive with old masters, impressionism, expressionism, abstracts, sculpture, surrealism, pop art, photo realism, etc, etc. Amazing artworks. This gallery offers far more than we expected. It is very cool to be able to go into these galleries and see the work of these artists time and time again, work by artists that we have never had the opportunity of seeing before.

What we have in our artistic naivety come to realize, is that many of the works that we have thought of as created by an artist, are actually completed by several understudies with the named artist doing the finishing touches or certain portions. Looking back on what we have seen, this makes Michelangelo’s ‘David’, that much more impressive, starting with one single block of marble, ‘David’ was completely created by Michelangelo alone, whilst at a young age. We were told, that if he had done nothing else he would have carved a name for himself with that one piece.