# Esposizioni

Krieg und (falscher) Frieden

Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Werkhofstrasse 30, 4500 Solothurn
From the collection: Swiss art from the war years 1939-1945
In mid-May 2021, a musical performance by the distinguished Orion Ensemble will take place in the Great Oberlichtsaal. The programme will feature the string sextet from the opera Capriccio by Richard Strauss (1864-1949), first performed in 1942. During the atrocities of the Nazi regime, the German composer created a work that, with its recourse to the euphony of the Rococo, is diametrically opposed to the reality of the time.
How did artists in Switzerland react to the threat of war at the time? Are their paintings a reflection of fear and anxiety - or did they imagine a counter-world? The collection of the Kunstmuseum Solothurn contains many paintings from the war years 1939-45, many of them from the foundations of Josef Müller, Gertrud Dübi-Müller and Walter Schnyder, who supported their friends Ernst Morgenthaler (1887-1962), Max Gubler (1898-1973) or Maurice Barraud (1889-1954) in times of need. Their pictorial worlds could not be more different: Barraud's peaceful scenes contrast with the palpable melancholy of Morgenthaler and Gubler. Speaking are some paintings from 1945 that comment on the end of the horror.