About two and a half weeks ago I saw the announcement
and review of the opening of a new exhibition in the Vitra Design Museum in Weil, close to Basel in Switzerland
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| Verner Panton's Swimmingpool (1969) for the Hamburg publishing house of Spiegel magazine illustrated the report in the paper that caught my attention. |
Despite the fact that I have been to Weil pretty
regularly as one of my best friends lives there and I try to visit her
frequently, I had never actually found my way into that museum. Usually I had
been more tempted by the exhibitions in the Fondation Beyeler, which is just
across the Swiss border, about a 10 minutes’ walk from my friends’ house. Last
week, however, I took the chance and went to the Vitra.
The building already is an impressive sight:
Outside, Vitra elephants are asking not to be fed:
And you could already get a first good look at Andy
Warhol’s Floating Clouds:
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| Andy Warhol, Floating Clouds |
The mural of "Leonardo Studio 65" from 1963 leads you into the exhibit, which does not attempt to give the overall view
– historic, sociological and aesthetic aspects of the times of Pop Art.
Instead, it concentrates on the fact that many of the Pop Art Artists first
worked as designers before they became recognized as artists. That lowered the
psychological barriers. Consequently, no other art movement was influenced by
“design” as much as Pop Art was. The artists wanted to get art out of those
high and mighty spheres, make it an element of every-day life. So they turned
to advertising – ad-slogans, packaging and objects of everyday life were turned
into and suddenly qualified as art.
Photography was not allowed inside the museum, so I
took these photos of my favorite items on display from the internet.
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| Andy Warhol, Brillo Box (1964) |
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| Andy Warhol, Close Cover before striking (1962) |
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| Oyvind Fahlström, Esso LSD (1967) |
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| George Nelson, Marshmallow (1956) |
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| Gaetano Pesce, Moloch (1970) - not sure that I would want to receive my reading light from this one... |
An exhibition well worth seeing. Unfortunately, the
catalogue is rather expensive - € 69,90 for a paperback is in my opinion an
outrageously high price.
Next door to the museum is the Vitra House, where you
can spend hours looking at wonderful furniture and dreaming about how you want
to decorate your house if you had lots of room and money.
Lots of nice stuff in the shop, too, but I resisted
completely, went into total comsumer-boycot, just looking.
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