The Worshipful Company of Engineers The Swordsman Newsletter ...

The Swordsman Issue 29
Many of us had seen the Tinguely Fountain at the
city’s theatre close to the hotel. All manner of gently
manic water-agitating machines reside therein. It is
wonderful fun and makes one smile but does little to
prepare the mind for the collected works of Jean
Tinguely. The first impression as one walked into the
museum was that Tinguely must have suffered some
tortured nightmares inspired by Hieronymus Bosch in
his wildest-eyed moments and by Salvidor Dali in his
last, creaking arthritic days.
One of the Internal Exhibits
The exhibits, not to damn with faint praise, consist of
an eclectic collection and mish-mash of wildly
disparate , generally metallic objects interspersed with
such items as bovine and ovine skulls atop, plus
various inane pieces of flotsam and jetsam. All these
are strung, clamped, chained, belted or otherwise set
up to create an assortment of perfectly crazy exhibits
of all sizes, many of which are powered. The
clankings and screechings of metal rubbing and
scraping on metal, when the powered exhibits are
switched on, made one wonder if it would not be fun
to smuggle in a can of WD40 to silence the ear-curling
racket.
There is no practical point to any of the exhibits nor
anything to touch the aesthetic heart-strings and many
thought the whole collection to be a load of old junk
(which, of course, it is).
Exhibits in the Gardens
And yet, and yet .... several of us nose-in-the-air types
were soon to be seen pressing many red buttons to
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crank up the daft whirly-gigs, nodders and jumpers;
and when they did their stuff, we were reluctantly
drawn in to enjoy and laugh at the sheer dilly, off-thewall,
exuberant genius of their creator.
The exhibits of Vladimir Yevgraphovich Tatlin – a
Russian and Soviet painter and architect – being
hosted by the Tinguely Museum, were so much easier
to appreciate - lovely lines and delicious curves.
All in all a very interesting and enjoyable visit to the
Tinguely Museum : thank you!
Mike Inkson
National Automobile Museum of France
This museum was created simply as the private
collection of the Swiss brothers Hans and Fritz
Schlumpf who owned a textile business at
Malmerspach about 30 km west from Mulhouse. They
accumulated the collection mainly over the twenty
years beginning in around 1950, buying individual cars
and whole collections on a grand scale. The Schlumpfs
bought a disused mill to house their collection. The
museum reflects the interests of the brothers who had
to please nobody but themselves when building their
collection
There is a very fine and comprehensive collection of
French cars from the very earliest days through to
around 1970 and a very good representation of other
European makes.
1902 De Dion Bouton
The section containing the very earliest cars is
especially interesting. These really are ‘horseless
carriages’ with a great variety of layouts. There was no
standardised set of controls in those early times. Some
cars had a steering wheel, some had a tiller to steer and
all of the other controls were individual to that make.
These early cars are reminiscent of the great variety of
animal forms in the earliest days before evolution
found the fittest and eliminated the others.