When the Lucerne Art Museum opened its doors for “degenerate” Kunst – Mondo – Arte.it

World – Almost a century of the historical exhibition from 1935, the Art Museum di Lucerna The great masters of the avant -garde of the twentieth -century reports on stage with the exhibition Kandinsky, Picasso, Miró et al. Back in LucernePlanned from 5 July to 2 November 2025. The initiative reminds us of a crucial moment in the history of modern art, when the newborn Lucenese museum dared to challenge the dark wind of totalitarianism by exhibiting stamped artists as “degenerate” from Nazi Germany. The 1935 exhibition, entitled “This, Antithesi, Synthesis”, was an act of cultural courage and a fundamental reference for the international avant -garde, to confirm a symbolic and political alternative to the spread of European authoritarian regimes.

The current exhibition, the result of more than five years of research, conducted, despite a scarce historical documentation, has countless works that are actually exposed or selected in 1935 as plausible replacements. The result is an exceptional overview of modern art between the 1920s and 1930s, with paintings, sculptures and drawings of international museums and private collections. In a narrow dialogue between memory and current affairs, the Lucerne art museum proposes a reflection for the past, across the borders and omissions of the original exhibition: at the time, only Sophie Taeuber-Arp represented the female world, while artists such as Barbara Hepworth were explicitly excluded. Exactly for this reason, the 2025 edition devotes a wide space to the pioneer of modern art, with a core of works by Hepworth itself, in addition to Taeuber-Arp works, to give the view to figures marginalized by official history.

In addition to the masterpieces of Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo PicassoJoan Miró and Paul Klee, the audience will be able to admire work by Fernand Léger, Hans Arp, Alexander Calder, Georges Braque, Giorgio de ChiricoPiet Mondrian, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Hélion, Max Ernst and many other protagonists of the Avant -Garde. Among the works exhibited: “Peinture” (1925) by Miró, preserved in the Pinakothek of modern in Monaco; “Durchenender Strich” (1923) by Kandinsky of the Kunstsammmlung Nordrhein-Westfalen; “Head: Study for a Monument” (1929) from Picasso; Giacometti’s “Tête-Crâne” (1934); and “large and small shape” (1934) by Hepworth. There are also masterpieces from the Rosengart collection, such as the painting “Boîte à Lait et Citron” (1879–80) by Paul Cézanne.

Edited by Fanni FetzerThe exhibition is configured as an event of a high museum profile, but also as an opportunity for critical consciousness. The aesthetic story is combined with a political and cultural reflection on the role of art in times of crisis, the construction of the canons and the systemic exclusion of alternative voices. A rich program of tours, public meetings and didactic agreements accompanies the exhibition, while an illustrated catalog published by Skira helps in documenting and extending the value of the exhibition outside the temporary limits of the event. “Kandinsky, Picasso, Miró et al. Back in Lucerne” therefore not only presents itself as a tribute to an irreparable season of European art, but as an active platform of comparison between past and present.

An exhibition that follows in a kind of distance dialogue the other extraordinary exhibition ‘Degenerate’ art. Modern art on trial among the Nazis That between 18 February and 25 May 2025 remembered the dark shadows of Nazism in Europe and the persecution that many extraordinary artists had to undergo in those years in the Picasso Musée in Paris.