Picasso in Luzern

Many years ago, in Luzern, Switzerland, I walked over a wooden foot bridge depicting a dance of death in its ceiling and soon after, arrived at my destination, a Picasso House. There were about 15 prime Picassos on two small floors, and the only other tourists were a group of camera-wielding Japanese. For each painting, each Japanese tourist would photograph all of the others standing by the painting. You can imagine it took some time for them to work their way through the museum. If I'm not mistaken I was saving money by staying in a youth hostel in Zug, forty minutes away by train, and reading V by Thomas Pynchon. This was in the fall of 1989, and soon after, the Berlin Wall would fall.

As the French would say, if they were to say it, "La vie est tres dur, mais il y a toujours des Japonais."

(On March 8, 2014, when I searched online, I could not easily find the house I visited; rather, it appears there is a much larger museum that holds some of Picasso's art, but I'm not sure if these would have been the same paintings that were once literally housed in a house.)

UPDATE: On February 15, 2025, I learned from a Swiss German Joycean that the lost Picasso House's collection was merged in 2008 with Luzern's Rosengart Collection. The Picasso's are still in Luzern.)

The Shchukin Gallery

"As one climbs the stairs [of the Shchukin Gallery], frozen through and through, one glimpses at the top of the stairwell the famous Matisse murals, naked figures rhythmically arranged against a background of concentrated red as warm and as luminous as as that of Russian icons. Matisse, Gauguin, and Picasso were the major passions of this collector. One room has twenty-nine Gauguins crammed on its walls . . . There is probably no other place in the world that provides one with such an overview of Picasso's development, from the early paintings of his twenties through 1914."

~~ from Moscow Diary by Walter Benjamin

Picasso update

On February 15, 2025, I learned from a Swiss German Joycean that Luzern's lost Picasso House's collection was returned in 2008 to the Rosengart Collection. I am in the process of learning where they may be on display.

McMurtry on Hemingway

"Hemingway's reputation is now so encrusted with a seventy-five-year accumulation of biographical lore--most of it unfavorable to him--that it is easy to forget how well he wrote at the beginning of his career. Picasso said somewhere that no one had looked at Matisse as hard as he had. Hemingway, as a young man, had the same ability to look hard, as hard as a painter, at a place and at the often destructive human emotions operating within a place that was seemingly as lovely as northern Michigan."

~~ from Roads by Larry McMurtry