Centurion United Kingdom Winter 2023

|Reſlections| resort,

|Reſlections| resort, St Moritz.) Nor why artists have long been drawn by its beauty, the vivid blues and greens of its lakes and mountains and, more specifically, its glittering light. Nietzsche first came here in 1881, craving “a sky that was eternally cheerful” (St Moritz claims an incredible 322 days of sunshine a year) and went on to write much of Thus Spake Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil in a handsome 18th-century villa – now a museum – in the nearby municipality of Sils over the course of seven summers. Sils was, he wrote, “the loveliest corner of the Earth […] Here my muses live.” More than a century on, the artist Gerhard Richter concurred: “Yes, that’s exactly what it is: the light,” he has said of the extraordinary confluence of northern and southern light. “Nietzsche described it so well.” Of course, Richter wasn’t the first artist to be charmed by Sils, whose name he gave to an exhibition and artist’s book he published in 1992. Marc Chagall namechecks the village in at least half a dozen important paintings he made in the village, most featuring sledges or sunflowers, one of them more abstractly entitled A meeting of colours in the snow at Sils. He stayed, as many well-heeled visitors continue to, at the resolutely oldschool hotel Waldhaus Sils (waldhaus-sils.ch), which is still owned and run by the family who opened it in 1908. (Bar the addition of sufficient bathrooms for every room to have one, not much has changed design-wise, though a pool was added in 1970 and a spa in 2017.) Artists as diverse as Joseph Beuys, Max Ernst, Andreas Gursky, Ferdinand Hodler, Oskar Kokoschka, Max Liebermann and Emil Nolde have signed its guestbook over time. It was on the recommendation of the eminent Swiss art curator Dieter Schwarz that Richter checked in for the first time in 1989. “He is an artist who does not like to travel,” Schwarz tells me. But that year, “He asked me if I knew a place for a winter vacation, and I suggested the Upper Engadin and a hotel there I loved.” Richter took him at his word and went. “And to my surprise, he was very enthusiastic about it and kept returning with his young family. He was fascinated by the mountain landscape. And for decades he was a regular guest until he felt too old. [He is now 91.] He loved the walking and skiing and the nature, the beautiful lakes and the sublime mountains, which reminded him of his early youth in the remote, hilly landscape of Lusatia in East Germany.” This winter, Richter will be the subject of a major exhibition curated by Schwarz and held across three institutions in the Engadin, the first to focus on art he made in response to its magnificent landscape. The bestknown works are probably his Sils series of overpainted, chromogenic prints of the mountains Piz Lunghin, Piz Surlej and Piz Corvatsch, the Fex Valley and the Silsersee lake, on which he has, in effect, imposed a kind of abstracted weather, drips of pigment or oil paint, left to dry as they fell to evoke a kind of colourful blizzard or smeared, swirled or scraped across the image to blur it into something less overtly figurative than a photograph and more painterly. “But we also have a whole category of paintings that relate to the Engadin and a three-part sculptural work named after mountains in the valley,” says Giorgia von Albertini, director of Hauser & Wirth St Moritz (hauserwirth.com), which has organised the show in collaboration with the Nietzsche-Haus (nietzschehaus.ch) in Sils, where a series of neverbefore-exhibited photographs will be displayed; and the PHOTOS FROM TOP: © HOTEL CASTELL, PETER ROBERT BERRY II (1864–1942), © BERRY MUSEUM, ST. MORITZ 66 CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM

PHOTOS FROM TOP: GABRIELA ACKLIN, COURTESY THE ARTIST AND ART MUSEUM OF ESTONIA Segantini Museum (segantini-museum.ch) in St Moritz, which commemorates the Italian neo-impressionist painter of Alpine landscapes Giovanni Segantini, another artist who found inspiration in the Engadin and settled in Maloja. If monumental mountainscapes are your passion, St Moritz also has the Berry Museum (berrymuseum. com), which is dedicated to Segantini’s friend and contemporary Peter Robert Berry II. Born in the village, he trained as a doctor, married into the family of Johannes Badrutt, the de facto inventor of winter-sports tourism and proprietor of the resort’s most famous palace hotel (also incidentally home to Hauser & Wirth’s gallery), and was eventually inspired to take up painting by Giovanni Giacometti, another native of the Engadin, and father of the more famous Alberto Giacometti. There may not be a conventional museum of the Giacomettis’ work here, but the Pensiun Aldier ( aldier.ch), a chalet hotel in the village of Sent, exhibits 200 or so works (mostly graphic though there are a few bronzes) by Alberto, his brother Diego and their friend, the photographer Ernst Scheidegger (hence the name Al-di-er), amassed by the collector and hotelier Carlos Gross. Indeed, several hotels in the valley are rich repositories of art. Just as Richter gifted two small paintings to the Waldhaus, so Julian Schnabel has favoured Villa Flor ( villaflor.ch) with a number of canvases, an unassuming but enchanting seven-room hotel in S-chanf, whose proprietor, Ladina Florineth, reportedly taught him to ski (she is a qualified ski instructor). And the artist, collector and entrepreneur Ruedi Bechtler has filled Castell (hotelcastell.ch) in Zuoz with works by the likes of Carsten Höller, Martin Kippenberger, Gabriel Orozco, Pipilotti Rist, David Shrigley, Lawrence Weiner, Erwin Wurm and Fischli/Weiss. It even has a James Turrell Skyspace on its grounds. Twenty minutes from St Moritz, on the branch of the picture-book Rhaetian Railway that connects most of the villages mentioned here, Zuoz is also the home of the usually starry Engadin Art Talks (engadin-art-talks. ch), held over the last weekend of January. (The 2024 programme was yet to be announced at the time of writing, but the last edition’s line-up of speakers included Ai Weiwei, Camille Henrot, Ernesto Neto and Uli Sigg.) The next stop, La Punt-Chamues-ch, is worth alighting at, too, not least for a meal at Krone – Säumerei am Inn (krone-lapunt.ch), an outstanding Michelinstarred restaurant with comparatively inexpensive rooms, which opened last year and belongs to the investor and art collector Beat Curti. Stay or dine here, and you’ll encounter a variety of works from his collection, notably those by the Swiss artist Not Vital, who was also born in Sent and Above: Before Performance (1981) by late Estonian artist Anu Põder, whose work will be the subject of a exhibition at Muzeum Susch next year; top: inside James Turrell’s Skyspace Piz Utèr (2005) beside Hotel Castell in Zuoz Opposite page, from top: Roman Signer’s Wasserfenster (2011), which frames views of Piz Mezzaun through a curtain of water on the grounds of Hotel Castell; an undated painting depicting a horse race in St Moritz by local painter Peter Robert Berry II CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM 67