The 2025 season draws to a close with a thematic exhibition in which different approaches to art and its interpretation overlap and intertwine, with epoch-making situations and metamorphic policies that seek to throw light on the period around the turn of the century, as the nineteenth morphed into the twentieth. But light is thrown above all here on the early twentieth, which witnessed a lively ferment that put art itself in the very centre of attention, for its unerring ability to represent the crisis that pervaded that period in history, while also conveying all its social and political effervescence.

Despite the fact that it was marked by the outbreak of barbarism that coincided with the explosion of the Second World War, this complicated, electrifying period of time nevertheless generated a sensational surge of creativity that in part reflected – and testified to – the issues of change at work in society and politics between the late nineteenth-century ancien régime and republican movements.

The disasters of the First World War and the mechanisms of the Second tightened the choker that threatened to throttle artistic production, gradually depriving it of oxygen, of freedom and of its economic lifeblood, creating a sequence of many voids that only study and research are now attempting to fill. Two World Wars, one following just a few years after the other, certainly made a violent contribution to the intellectual pillage and physical destruction of many works of art, burying with them also their authors, who were often silenced and removed from their institutional offices, or simply deported for political or racial reasons.

The case of Henny Mannheimer (1899-1939) is emblematic: a victim of National Socialism, it has only been possible to piece her precise biographic identity together in recent months, thanks to the enormous commitment of the publisher Harald Kubiczak and his determined collaboration with the German State Archives in Mainz.

POLITICALLY INCORRECT. EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY ART (FROM SWITZERLAND). AN EXERCISE IN VISUAL GRAMMAR sets out to analyse this very period, reviving a series of artists who – as just explained – did not succeed in taking root in the fertile terrain of the arts because of the wars, which thus also weakened and jeopardised their presence in our collective memory. Despite this, cautious research among collections, archives, institutes of art and museums has managed to breathe new life into their existence and to reactivate our memory of them. In addition to the great crossroads of the avant-gardes and the illustrious names that populated them, we have discovered that these other names, forgotten by history, by the art market and by the fashions that have held sway in recent decades, also made a major and attractively “alternative” contribution to consolidating the artistic production of that period.

Without mentioning the names of the better-known among the artists in this exhibition, Switzerland is no exception to this rule. Artists of the calibre of Karl Bickel, Fritz Pauli and Paul Speck had the potential to make a very interesting impression on the research being conducted within the avant-gardes of those days, from the early years of the 1910s to the period of the Bauhaus and of Art Déco, devising and creating works whose character was exceptionally modern for the day, with a high interpretative quality. They were conscious, strong ambassadors of their moment in time.

It is also worth mentioning, by way of reflection, that the relationship between art and power is somehow and somewhere at the root of this historical exhibition (whose approach is actually up to date in some ways, or at least can be made to be so), in the sense that it sets out to revive our memory of artists and works that have gradually disappeared, because of the heedless forgetfulness of those who, instead, ought to taking care of culture and its conservation. Today’s geopolitical situation calls on us to accept a responsibility whose significance should never be estimated: that of a commitment we should make with our own consciences not to cancel culture and modify its historical physiognomy.

Mario Casanova, Bellinzona, 2025.
Translated by Pete Kercher

Paul Kleinschmidt (1883-1949), Samson and Dalila, 1920. Drypoint printed on paper, described in pencil “Drücke 1-4, N° 2” and “Platte verworfen” on the bottom right, monogrammed “P. Kl. 20” in the plate at the top right, signed and dated in pencil at the bottom right, 19.7 x 14.7 cm (40.2 x 29.3 cm). The stamp of the collector Siegbert Marzynski is visible on the back. Private collection, Switzerland.