Monte Verità: a choice piece in the history of utopia

About the exhibition “La scia del monte or the magnetic utopians” on view until September 15 at the Musée des beaux-arts Le Locle, in Switzerland.

“Friends of desolation, move on.” Thus concludes Paul Ardenne’s article published in the summer issue of Artpress, dedicated to the exhibition visible until September 15 at the Musée des beaux-arts Le Locle, in the Swiss Jura: “La scia del monte or the magnetic utopians”. That makes you want to go and get a good dose of optimism and vitality! This exhibition does not just honour new women forgotten by the history of art, which is already very interesting in itself: it is also an ode to life carried by the works of art created around Monte Verità, this community, precursor of the hippie movements, born in 1900 on a hill overlooking the town of Ascona and Lake Maggiore, a hundred kilometres north of Milan... but also by the works of contemporary artists invited here to resonate with their predecessors. The writer and art historian comments for the magazine of contemporary art on the itinerary imagined by Federica Chiocchetti, director of the museum and Nicoletta Mongini, director of Culture of the Fondazione Monte Verità, with the aim of setting the record straight: the history of the famous community of Monte Verità, a choice piece in the history of modern utopia, was not only written by men! So yes, to tell the story of this community established on the “hill of truth” which distinguished itself from its foundation by its alternative lifestyle nourished by naturism, vegetarianism, bodily liberation and free love, we readily cite writers like Hermann Hesse, dancers like Rudolf Laban, psychoanalysts like Carl Gustav Jung, painters and poets like Gustav Gräser, rich heirs like Henri Oedenkoven, revolutionaries like Lenin and Trotsky, anarchists like Bakunin, great art collectors like Baron Eduard von der Heydt… and yet, one of its founding principles was matriarchy! Nevertheless, as Paul Ardenne so rightly writes, "if we know Sophie Taeuber-Arp or Emmy Hennings, stars of the Dada nebula, who remembers the theosophist Constance Wachtmeister, the expressionist painter Marianne von Werefkin, the spiritualist theorist Helena Blavatsky, the pedagogue Lilly Volkart, the mystical dancer Charlotte Bara or the anarchist Frieda Schloffer"?

So many "magnetic utopians" who find on the occasion of this exhibition a right to media existence. In particular through an anthology of texts... where you will not find a single capital letter! Yes indeed... since there was no question of hierarchy on Mount Truth, equality was found even in letters.

So of course, I who have always had a weakness for expressionist painting, I was surprised to find in reality very familiar the works of art for sale of Marianne von Werefkin (1860-1938) while searching on the net. Why did I have the impression of having already seen her paintings somewhere, when in fact, as Paul Ardenne writes, I had no memory of her name? The answer was not long in coming: paintings by Marianne von Werefkin were indeed presented in the fabulous exhibition devoted to the Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) that I had the chance to visit in September 2016 at the Fondation Beyeler. They shared the walls of this museum that I adore with the famous paintings of Kandinsky testifying to his evolution towards abstraction as well as the pantheistic representations of animals by Franz Marc. Among the other artistic personalities linked to Kandinsky and Marc and whose works were presented in this exhibition, we found Gabriele Münter, August Macke, Alexej von Jawlensky… and Marianne von Werefkin. Who was obviously “quite simply” presented as the wife of the former. Enough to give us perhaps a little clue to better understand the why and how of the forgetting of this Russian-Swiss painter, herself the daughter of an icon painter, who had literally put down her brush for ten years to take care of Monsieur’s career and his salon which saw all the artistic elite of his time parade by…

The diary that the painter kept at the time explains this period of artistic deprivation. At the time, Marianne was indeed going through a period of personal, identity and artistic crisis. Not recognizing herself in realism or symbolism, she believed that art must renew itself in depth and explore sincere emotions. However, as incredible as it may seem today, in the eyes of Marianne von Werefkin, only a man can revolutionize art. And it is in her dear Alexej that she hopes for this renewal. It will be very bad for her, since he will ultimately never cease to disappoint her, as much by his art as by his infidelities. Never mind, in 1903 and 1905, while scouring the Parisian art galleries, Marianne von Werefkin discovered the art of Henri Matisse and Paul Gauguin in France, and their use of colors inspired her for the renewal and the "emotional" art to which she aspired. In 1918, she came to settle without her husband, to stay there until the end of her days, in Ascona, this small fishing village on the shores of Lake Maggiore in Switzerland, above which Monte Verità stands.

No fewer than 26 contemporary artists were invited by Le Locle to react to the spirit of Monte Verità using works from the period or from the museum’s own collection. “The spirit of Monte Verità, today, lives, beats, knows how to animate contemporary creation,” writes Paul Ardenne. “First, by the aspiration manifested for life, against the dystopian, dark spirit that prevails in current mentalities. Ingeborg Lüscher’s La Pupa Proibita (2006), a video of the folkloric celebration of a female mannequin surrounded by fireworks, immediately takes on a declarative value: life is there, intense. This vitalist proposition is taken up by the Swiss duo Maria Guta and Lauren Huret. They focus on filming the ecstatic poses of Iris, their fictional character, indulging in rituals of purification and sensual offering to the landscape (Gestures of Ecstasy, 2024). When we don’t find it yet, in a spectacular way, with Una Szeemann in her film Montewood Hollyverità (2002), a remake of theatrical or dance sequences taken from the archives of Monte Verità and replayed here in a euphoric way by artists such as Paul McCarthy, Laurence Weiner (very unexpected!) or Jason Rhoades. »

Also not to be missed in this vein of a nature adorned with all the virtues: the video made in Monte Verità during the Covid 19 pandemic by the artists Johanna Gschwend and Mortiz Hossli in which we see them playing tennis in completely deserted places where the plant world is reclaiming its rights... Utopian, really?

Article written by Valibri en Roulotte

Illustration: Ingeborg Lüscher, La Pupa Proibita, 2006. Video screen shot. © Ingeborg Lüscher / videoart.ch