Sunday in Zurich

Sundays are sacred here, so apart from at the train station and some restaurants and cafes, everything is closed. I'm staying quite near the funicular that takes you to perhaps the highest point in Zurich and had noticed it before when I went to Migros (now that's what I call a tourist highlight), so I decided to check it out today, in the slight drizzle.


On the way up, I shared the little car with an elderly man with tons of shopping bags, and an elderly woman sitting on the heating vent. Before she got off, she wished us a schönen Sonntag, and I regretted not being able to respond with anything but a smile.



After a little look on the top of what I've discovered is a typical vista from a Swiss hill - of lake, sky, picturesque dotting of houses on the hill, and, of course, snow-capped mountains - I headed back down and to the Kunsthaus Zurich.

I'd read a bit about its collection, supposedly impressive for a museum that size, and it did, indeed, turn out to be so. The obvious draw was the temporary exhibition of big-name Impressionists with the usual suspects: Monet's (I almost wrote Money there) lilies, Gauguin's bare-breasted Tahitian women, Degas' bathing women, Renoir's portraits, Picasso's Cubism. Actually the most impressive thing about this was that it belonged to a Swiss man who built up his collection during and after the war, including returning and re-buying paintings looted from Jewish dealers in Paris.

As beautiful as some of these pieces are, my museum-going life has been so saturated by the same groups of images that it's hard to find something fresh. But a few things stood out, mostly from the permanent collection, which is the real jewel of the museum.

First was Cezanne's portrait of a gardener, which I studied in university. I came across it with a start, almost as if I'd bumped into the professor. Then Giacometti's paintings, which were made up of large blobs of paint, thickly textured into a sort of pointillism of figures and flowers. It was so beautiful and light, and seemed a piece with Warhol's silk screening and Lichtenstein's pop art. No idea if they came before or after the bronze sculptures of tall, thin figures that he's so well-known for, but they showed a totally different and unexpected side to him.

I also saw quite a lot of Munch, mostly portraits, though, again, nothing that intimated at his famous Scream painting.

Almost the last thing I stopped at was a Bacon triptych. His paintings are so relentlessly despairing in the faces, colours and puddles of darkness below the figures, even before you find out that they tend to be of his lover before he killed himself.

That was a good few hours in the museum, which is a lot for me, so it was nice to walk by the river in the temperamental afternoon to finish my first real outing in the city.