Rosengart Museum

 

 Today I visited the Rosengart Museum, funded by Angela Rosengart and her father, Siegfried's foundation and given to the city of Lucerne. It is housed in a building formerly occupied by a Swiss Bank.

 

The galleries are quite spare and laid out in a way to emphasize the art: 

The museum has an extensive collection of Picasso, Klee and other modern artists. Picasso was a friend of the Rosengarts, so he painted/drew Angela on many occasions:

 

 Once when Siegfried was with Chagall, Chagall asked if Siegfried thought his painting was finished. Siegfried said, "Yes! If you continue, you will ruin it." So Chagall stopped and gave Siegfried his palette to prove he was truly finished:

Other paintings/drawings:

Picasso used acid for this sculpture to get the "burnt" effect he was looking for.

These notes were excellent as there is very little English translation of anything in Lucerne (maybe all of Switzerland?). But maybe this is hard to read?

The museum also featured Paul Klee who I didn't realize created art in the early 20th century. 

 

The Natural History Museum

  The flow of the River Reuss is controlled by locks, maybe similar to the Erie Canal? 

There was a special exhibit on Legends of the Alpine Region at both the Natural History Museum and the History Museum in Lucerne. Below is from the History Museum, which (despite what the guidebook said) was far superior. The History Museum had items displayed in locked cages with no labels. Visitors are given an iPad to scan barcodes for information in English. But each iron cage has 10-25+ bar codes, so scanning the appropriate bar code is very difficult. 

The Natural History Museum had captions in English which was much more helpful.

Johann Jakob Scheuchzer

The Brothers Grimm

As you can see, the translation of German to English seems quite cumbersome. I've been reading the children's book,"Heidi," and the translation I'm reading is more on the level of a college textbook. Perhaps translating from German to English for the masses is very difficult. I've also noticed very little or no (most common) English translation is available for menus, city signs, museum captions, etc.

Wall plate with a view over Lake Thun.

 

The Natural History Museum also had a fascinating display of bugs and butterflies. To access the exhibit, you had to walk into a giant safe like those used in the States for safe deposit boxes:

 

 

 

And, you had to insert this card into the slot in order to open the display windows of the exhibit. 

Again, unfortunately, no captions of any kind explaining/identifying the items. Still, the exhibit was well done and very interesting.

There was a 15 minute film in English!

 

The museum is located along the banks of the River Reuss.

 

On the way home, I came upon a tour group entering the Jesuit Church, so I followed them in. The fresco on the ceiling was magnificent.

The outside of the church has those familiar onion spires.

 And then there was this sculpture of a shepherd with his goats. I searched for the artist (why isn't public art labeled around the world?) but didn't find any attribution.