At the Foundation
Permanent galleries at the Musée Jenisch
Opening dates according to the Musée Jenisch website www.museejenisch.ch
Vevey, Musée Jenisch, Espace Kokoschka
The Musée Jenisch has several exhibition rooms devoted to Oskar Kokoschka. A biographical room offers an insight into the artist’s eventful life, while a cabinet of curiosities reconstructs the surroundings in which he worked in Villeneuve, Switzerland, where he settled in 1953. Painting, drawing and lithographic materials, items from the artist’s personal collection and works from his library are shown alongside his large tapestry Cupid and Psyche. Masterpieces from the collection of paintings that are especially representative of Kokoschka’s work are also exhibited regularly when there is no temporary exhibition.
Oskar Kokoschka. Animaux totems
21 June 2023 – 29 October 2023
Opening on 20 June 2023, 18:30, Musée Jenisch Vevey
The Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka (1886 Pöchlarn/AT – 1980 Montreux/CH) loved depicting animals. Mammals, fish, birds, amphibians and reptiles are everywhere in his work. They are already a substantial presence in his youthful creations, in which he conjured up a fairy-tale world that was soon to be engulfed by the great disillusion of the First World War. The exhibition devotes much attention to what the British art historian Kenneth Clark, who was close to Kokoschka, called totemism: elevating the animal to the status of a social, moral or political symbol. Kokoschka admires cave painting’s rendition of movement and is enthralled by its masterly concision, but is also captivated by its dynamism and vitality. And what better subject to prompt a full investigation of the theme than animals, in all their diversity?