Forget France and Italy: Where to see masterpieces without the queues

I am impatient for Goya in Madrid and Turner in London. I must return to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in Florence and what about the Mona Lisa in Paris?

The Tate Modern is packed, the Prado is heaving and there’s no way around the queues at the Louvre. My art lover’s list is getting longer, almost as long as the line for Rembrandt’s Night Watch at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, but I won’t despair because I’ve found a shortcut to Europe’s artistic masterpieces.

Switzerland’s largest art museum, the Kunsthaus, feeds the soul.

It’s Switzerland.

The snow-capped alpine country stereotypically defined by clocks, chocolate and cheese is unheralded for a rich cultural heritage, with world-class museums that are blissfully free of crowds. My mission for masterpieces will start with the gold standard in the picturesque banking hub of Zurich, where Switzerland’s largest art museum, the Kunsthaus, feeds the soul.

Like going to church… aerial view of Kunsthaus Zurich.

It feels a little like going to church, ascending the monumental staircase in the Pritzker Prize-winning building designed by architect David Chipperfield, to discover a high-calibre collection that spans more than a millennium of art from the Middle Ages to the present.

Van Gogh at Kunsthaus Zurich.

I’m sitting in the front pew with Monet, Picasso, Munch, van Gogh, Chagall, Giacometti, Warhol, Richter and others when I spot an old friend. It’s just the two of us now. Renoir and me. Actually, three of us, if you include The Girl with the Blue Ribbon (c. 1880), as familiar as the tiny gold-framed print that hung on my bedroom wall throughout childhood. The real painting, a breathtaking testament to youth and purity, has a much less romantic story. Renoir’s masterpiece is one in a collection of French Impressionist works amassed by a Zurich businessman, Emil Georg Buehrle, a German arms dealer who became Switzerland’s wealthiest man during World War II by selling weapons to the Nazis.

“It’s the story of Switzerland,” says my guide, recalling details of works thought to have been looted from their original Jewish owners or bought cheaply from desperate sellers fleeing persecution. You cannot avoid being sucked into the vortex of sorrow where art is contextualised with conflict, but Buehrle’s collection provides a future for the past. The artworks are not guilty.

Time is short. There’s a labyrinth of pastel-painted medieval buildings graced with stately beauty in the old town, but they must wait. Cosmopolitan Basel lies about an hour away by train. This lively, compact city on the mighty Rhine River carries serious artistic clout as the site of the world’s most important art festival, Art Basel, yet it remains untouched by mass tourism.

Art Basel has grown to become the cornerstone of the contemporary art world.Credit: Basel Tourism

I could venture from the city centre into France or Germany, but there are close to 40 museums in Basel. The Kunstmuseum is a private art cabinet that opened in the 17th century – available to the public even before the Louvre – and it is spellbinding as one of the world’s finest collections of works on paper without queues.

Much is made of the Picasso works (including one of his Seated Harlequin). In 1967, the museum was about to lose two of them because they were on loan from a debt-ridden private collector who needed to sell. Local art lovers spearheaded passage of a referendum that would enable the city to buy them at a prince’s sum of just over eight million francs. Picasso was so moved by this display of civic pride that he gave the museum four more artworks.

One of the world’s finest collections of works on paper without queues… Kunstmuseum.

A tram trundles northwards, away from the city towards the foothills of the Black Forest, to the spectacular Renzo Piano-designed Fondation Beyeler. When I arrive at the “most popular art gallery in all of Switzerland”, another fine example of civic pride, it is almost entirely obscured by the first-of-its-kind fog installation by artist Fujiko Nakaya.

More delightful surprises materialise inside the building, where Miro and de Kooning jostle with Klee and Bourgeois in a kaleidoscopic explosion of top-notch modern and contemporary art. Who knew Giacometti would fit so neatly in front of Bacon, with so little space between them that visitors can only admire the sculptures from behind? It’s a new perspective on a country so unfairly derided as “boring”.

The alps are as intrinsic to the Swiss national brand as the Matterhorn on a box of Caran d’Ache crayons, and mountains are easily reachable from Geneva, under three hours by train from Basel.

The park of the Fondation Beyeler in spring.Credit: Mark Niedermann

Geneva is the city of diplomats, the richest in Europe, a last gasp of art on my three-city tour.

Through a hard-to-find doorway, the lively Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMCO) has the genial air of artistic anarchy in an abandoned factory, yet it handles an astonishing collection of more than 6000 works. It is the largest contemporary art museum in Switzerland and a thrillingly raw space for art that will not fail to stimulate dinner conversation.

I won’t find pickled shark (Damien Hirst) or rumpled bed (Tracey Emin) but challenging works by American artist Tishan Hsu are every bit as inconvenient for framing with huge, oozy-looking, fleshy-toned magnifications of body bits welded into computer parts.

Sometimes there’s a whiff of superiority in Switzerland – arguably the best at everything from watchmaking to mountain scenery – but you won’t find elitism in the engrossing International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum near the Palais des Nations.

International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum.Credit: Getty Images

This place cuts deep in a different way. The museum melds the work of humanitarians with artists to highlight the role of the Red Cross in assisting endangered people around the world. Many rooms are filled with startling works that inspire the pressing human need for dignity and survival against the odds.

And this is one queue – where unity is a force for good on the global stage – I’m happy to join.

THE DETAILS

Switzerland

Visit
Exceptional art collections under the banner of Art Museums of Switzerland. See myswitzerland.com/en-au

Travel
An easy, comfortable network by bus/tram/train with Swiss Travel Pass. See swisstravelpass.com

Zurich

Stay
A hotel with running shoes borrowed from the reception desk deserves extra points. Rooms from CH360 ($627) a night (in April). See 25hours-hotels.com

Eat
Two-Michelin star IGNIV is an unmissable experience if you can get a table. See marktgassehotel.ch/en

Basel

Stay
Dorint Basel is close to the airport, within easy reach of the centre, next to the Messe Basel fairgrounds. Rooms from CH162 ($282) a night. See https://hotel-basel.dorint.com/de 

Eat
Restaurant Kunsthalle is an institution, with a classic menu and a lovely summer terrace. The incredible ceiling artwork of regular patron and designer Verner Panton was donated to the restaurant after his death. See restaurant-kunsthalle.ch

Geneva

Stay
Hotel Ruby-Claire draws inspiration from the city’s long-standing role as a global centre of peace and co-operation, with design notes from across the world. Rooms from CH168 ($292) a night in April. See ruby-hotels.com/en

Eat
Le Cafe Lyrique is a classically good French brasserie with Italian influences next to the Grand Theatre. See cafe-lyrique.ch

More
switzerland.com

The writer was a guest of Switzerland Tourism.