As part of our St. Moritz Winter Season, Robilant+Voena will participate in NOMAD St. Moritz, which takes place at the former Klinik Gut, transformed from a construction site into a unique, multilayered venue specially for the fair.
R+V’s presentation will reflect the gallery’s wide areas of expertise across Old Masters, Modern, and Contemporary, with an outstanding Swiss landscape by J.M.W. Turner, alongside pioneering ceramics by Lucio Fontana, and elegant bronze sculptures by Swiss artist Harumi Klossowska de Rola. The selection will also include Mirror Works by Michelangelo Pistoletto, reflecting R+V’s recent successful exhibition by the maestro in London.
Among J.M.W. Turner’s Swiss subjects, the watercolour showing The Splügen Pass (c. 1842-42) is one of the finest, the most celebrated, and with the most fascinating history. The work shows the small village of Andeer, a destination for travelers due to its mineral baths, but also a stop along the Alpine route between Switzerland and Italy. Rendered with a refined atmospheric attention to the light and haze of the mountains, the drawing was of hailed by John Ruskin as ‘the noblest Alpine drawing Turner had ever till then made’ and ‘the best Swiss landscape yet painted by man’. Indeed, The Splügen Pass continued to be the object of Ruskin’s envy, while it was in the collection of H.A.J. Munro, a rival collector of Turner’s late watercolours. When the work was sold at the late Munro’s sale in 1878, a group of supporters and friends of Ruskin together purchased it, and gifted it to the ailing Ruskin. The critic subsequently put the work on prominent display in Brantwood, his house in the Lake District, in his study, and then in his bedroom, testifying to the writer’s deep affection for the piece. This is the first time since its execution that The Splügen Pass will return to Switzerland, the country where it was made, over 180 years ago.
Watch our video on Turner's The Splügen Pass.
