Past exhibitions

In Spring 2025, the Fondation de l’Hermitage has been hosting a particularly unusual collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces from the Petit Palais Geneva.
In the 1950s Oscar Ghez, an industrialist of Tunisian origin, began acquiring works that reflect his remarkably free approach to collecting, with an interest in late-19th and early 20th century painting that was not confined to the great masters.

In 2024, the Fondation de l’Hermitage celebrated its 40th anniversary and presented an exceptional exhibition, in partnership with the Museum Langmatt in Baden. Made up of treasures – mostly Impressionist – collected mainly between 1908 and 1919 by Jenny and Sidney Brown, this sumptuous collection, usually shown at the Villa Langmatt, stopped off at L’Hermitage for its first off-site presentation.

The Fondation de l’Hermitage has been partnering with the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris / Paris Musées to stage a major retrospective of Nicolas de Staël (1914-1955), a key figure in post-war art. The exhibition featured a selection of around a hundred paintings, drawings and sketchbooks from many public and private collections in Switzerland and the wider world. The iconic Parc des Princes (1952) was shown alongside a large group of works that are seldom, if ever, put on public display, offering a new perspective on Staël’s work that highlighted certain little-known aspects of his career.

In the summer of 2023, the Fondation de l’Hermitage has been revisiting the work of Nabi master Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940), seen through the lens of Japonism that took Paris by storm at the turn of the 20^th century. Centred on the delicate landscape held at the Hermitage, La Maison de Roussel à La Montagne (1900), the exhibition showed the crucial influence of Japanese art on Vuillard’s work. Around a hundred paintings and engravings of scenes of everyday life and nature, created by Vuillard between the 1890s and the First World War, were shown here in dialogue with some fifty Japanese masterpieces.

The Fondation de l’Hermitage has been hosting a major retrospective of Léon Spilliaert (Ostend 1881 – Brussels 1946), one of the most important representatives of Belgian art in the early 20^th century. Convinced that he was destined to be an artist, Spilliaert was self-taught, his thinking shaped by the literature of his time. He created his profoundly original work almost entirely on paper, combining different graphic techniques in images imbued with metaphysical questioning and Flemish culture.

The Fondation de l’Hermitage has been hosting Switzerland’s first major retrospective of the French painter Achille Laugé (1861-1944). This fascinating artist followed his own unique path within the Neo-Impressionist movement, always remaining deeply attached to his native region of Occitania. The exhibition included almost eighty works from every period in his career, highlighting the profound originality and extraordinary sensibility of this painter of everyday life.

In early 2022 the Fondation de l’Hermitage will be privileged to host Switzerland’s first exhibition featuring a selection of the greatest masterpieces from the Fondation des Treilles, based in the southern French village of Tourtour. Created by the visionary patron Anne Gruner Schlumberger (1905-1993), this collection includes works by Hans Arp, Georges Braque, Victor Brauner, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee, François-Xavier Lalanne, Henri Laurens, Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso and Takis. The Lausanne exhibition will feature around a hundred paintings, drawings, engraving, sculptures and objects, offering visitors a unique opportunity to admire these treasures outside their usual setting and to explore the taste, personality and artistic friendships of one of the 20^th century’s most illustrious collectors.

In a first for French-speaking Switzerland, the Fondation de l’Hermitage hosted a major retrospective of Lucerne-based painter Hans Emmenegger (1866-1940). An artist of great originality in both his choice of subjects and the boldness of his compositions, Emmenegger is now regarded as one of the most important Swiss painters of his day.

The Fondation de l’Hermitage was privileged to show a selection of the greatest masterpieces from the prestigious private collection of Georges Bemberg (1915-2011). Bemberg was an illustrious collector and man of letters, born into a family of German origin who had settled in Argentina in the mid-19th century. In the course of his lifetime he built up one of his period’s most important collections of paintings, drawings and objets d’art.

The Fondation de l’Hermitage joined forces with the Cinémathèque Française and Réunion des Musées Métropolitains Rouen Normandie to open a new chapter in its exploration of modern art, looking at the links between fine art and the great visual revolution of the 20th century brought about by cinema.

This exhibition, staged in collaboration with the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, shows how Canadian painters discovered the Impressionist revolution in France in the late 19^th century, and how it influenced their style and subjects. When the artists returned to their home country, the inspiration many had found in Impressionism proved key to the emergence of modern Canadian painting.

Following its Windows exhibition of 2013, the Fondation de l’Hermitage pursued its exploration of major themes of western iconography by inviting its visitors to discover the many facets of shadow. The exhibition featured an entirely new selection of some 140 works embracing 500 years of art history and a very diverse range of artistic forms, including painting, installation, sculpture, prints, drawings, cut-outs, photography and video.

The Fondation de l’Hermitage staged a major exhibition on painting in the Victorian period (1837-1901), illustrating the variety and fascinating originality of 19th-century English art through a selection of nearly 60 works, most of which had not previously been shown in Switzerland.

La Fondation de l’Hermitage presented a major exhibition on the work of Henri Manguin (1874-1949), an artist who loved colour and whom the poet Apollinaire called the “voluptuous painter”. The focus was on Manguin’s Fauvist period, when he shared the audacity of his fellow artists in the group and sometimes surpassed them in the quest for new means of expression through the use of colour. With their sumptuous chromatic harmonies, the paintings from this period reflect Manguin’s rare talent and creativity.

The Fondation de l’Hermitage showcased the fascinating medium of pastel, in which painting and drawing meet. Inspired by Dancers Resting, the famous pastel by Degas donated to the Fondation de l’Hermitage twenty years earlier, this exhibition featured 150 masterpieces from public and private collections in Switzerland. Works covering five centuries, from the early Renaissance masters to contemporary artists, provided a historical overview of this singular technique.

The Fondation de l’Hermitage was privileged to show the Impressionist and post-Impressionist treasures of one of the world’s most prestigious private collections. The Bührle collection features masterpieces by key artists of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, including Monet’s Poppies near Vétheuil (c. 1879), Cézanne’s Boy in a Red Waistcoat (c. 1888) and Van Gogh’s Sower with Setting Sun (1888).

In the summer of 2016, the Fondation de l’Hermitage’s large exhibition showcased one of the finest private collections in Europe, exclusively shown in Lausanne. Comprising over a hundred paintings, sculptures and installations, it gave visitors an unprecedented insight into western art of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. This extraordinary collection, at once coherent and remarkably diverse, had been assembled since the 1950s by an impassioned connoisseur and had never before been shown to the public.

In 2016, 29 January–22 May, the Fondation de l’Hermitage showed a very prestigious selection of works by Paul Signac (1863-1935), illustrating the prolific career of this Neo-Impressionist master in nearly 140 paintings, watercolours and drawings.

La Fondation de l’Hermitage presented a major retrospective of the work of Marius Borgeaud, one of the most important figures in early 20^th century art in the canton of Vaud. Active mainly in France, Borgeaud was born in Lausanne in 1861 and remains very popular in Switzerland.

The Fondation de l’Hermitage had the rare privilege to exhibit the private collection of Genevan Jean Bonna. This exceptional and highly coherent group of works, mostly on paper, was assembled over time to be viewed and enjoyed, and was not intended to be exhaustive.

In the summer of 2014, to mark it’s 30^th anniversary, the Fondation de l’Hermitage presented an exceptional exhibition of 19^th-century American painting, with a focus on landscape, portraits and still lifes from the period 1830–1900, most of which had not previously been shown in Europe.

As part of the celebrations marking the 300^th anniversary of the birth of Denis Diderot (1713-1784), the Fondation de l’Hermitage had the pleasure of presenting an exhibition focusing on the famous French philosopher and his relationship to art. The event was organised jointly with the Musée Fabre in Montpellier and featured an exceptional selection of the paintings, engravings and drawings that Diderot had admired at the temporary exhibitions of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, known as the Salons and held at the Louvre, and which he discussed in reviews written in the years 1759–1781.

The Fondation de l’Hermitage hosted an exceptional collection of 80 works by Joan Miró (1893-1983) from the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, Palma de Mallorca, which holds a major part of the legacy of the artist and his wife. The exhibition focused on Miró’s mature works, painted in the last thirty years of his life in the studio in Mallorca, where he lived from 1956 until his death.

Artists have always been fascinated by windows. With the exhibition Fenêtres, de la Renaissance à nos jours. Dürer, Monet, Magritte…, the Fondation de l’Hermitage invited visitors to explore the primordial place of windows in western iconography, from the 15^th century to the present day. The event was organised jointly with the Museo Cantonale d’Arte and Museo d’Arte, Lugano, and featured over 150 works from institutions in Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe, and also from prestigious private collections.

This exhibition exclusively hosted by the Fondation de l’Hermitage featured works from the culturally important BCV (Banque Cantonale Vaudoise) collection, which foregrounds contemporary art. Visitors were given the opportunity to discover around a hundred works by artists linked to the canton of Vaud, from the 20^th century to the present day.

Following its exhibitions on Alberto Giacometti (2002), André Derain (2003) and Edward Hopper (2010), in the summer of 2012 the Fondation de l’Hermitage offered insights into another major modern artist, with the first exhibition in French-speaking Switzerland on the painter Asger Jorn (1914-1973), regarded as the greatest Danish artist of the 20^th century. This event also marked a return to the theme of the 2005 exhibition Impressions of the North. Scandinavian Painting 1800-1915, which had enabled the Fondation’s visitors to explore the extraordinary vitality of 19^th -century nordic painting.

Through a selection of some 100 works, the exhibition Exploring Collections, from Tiepolo to Degas offered visitors a new approach to the seldom shown collection of the Fondation de l’Hermitage. The museum’s masterpieces (Tiepolo, Bocion, Sisley, Degas, Vuillard, Vallotton, Valadon, Braque, Magritte, etc.) were displayed alongside other, often largely unseen treasures of Swiss public and private collections, in a new and novel dialogue.

The major summer exhibition of 2011 at the Fondation de l’Hermitage showcased the Hahnloser collection, one of Europe’s most prestigious private collections and exceptional in many respects. Arthur Hahnloser (1870-1936) and his wife Hedy Hahnloser-Bühler (1873-1952) collected the works in Winterthour in the period 1905–1936, through their meetings and friendships with many artists, including Ferdinand Hodler, Giovanni Giacometti, Félix Vallotton and Pierre Bonnard, who introduced the Hahnlosers to the Paris art scene, helping and guiding them in their purchases.

The Fondation de l’Hermitage hosted a major exhibition on Spanish art at the dawn of the 20^th century. The central focus was on painters of the “generation of 1898” that emerged out of the extremely turbulent events experienced by Spain throughout the 19^th century, and the development of their artistic careers. Their works combine modernity with a respect for tradition, reflecting the new openness of the Spanish avant garde at that time.

The exceptional pianist and conductor Christian Zacharias has been artistic director and principal conductor of the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra since 2000. He will be sixty this year and the Fondation de l’Hermitage is joining tributes paid to him on this special occasion by entrusting its galleries to the great musician for several weeks.

An incomparable observer of American society and the social transformations it underwent in the 20th century, Edward Hopper is the quintessential representative of the American painting of his period. Learning from the great masters of light, such as Vermeer, he soon stood out within the American avant garde by working in the realist tradition. A painter of small towns and apparently everyday scenes, Hopper favoured quiet, familiar and often empty places. His strangely silent paintings have an indefinable air of mystery.

This exhibition opened with Tischbein’s famous 1787 portrait of the poet Goethe, an iconic work of German Romantic painting, before moving on to celebrate French 19th century art, from realist landscapes by Corot and Courbet to Renoir’s Impressionist portraits, with their vibrant light, and Degas’ boldly arranged Musicians in the Orchestra. The exhibition’s highpoints included the visions of the Symbolist artists (Böcklin, Ensor, Moreau, Munch, Redon), with their mystical echoes, resonating with a selection of intimist paintings by the Nabis (Bonnard, Vallotton, Vuillard).

Bacon, Baselitz, Braque, Bonnard, Calder, Cézanne, Dalí, Sonia Delaunay, Derain, Dubuffet, Ernst, Francis, Giacometti, Hodler, Kiefer, Klee, Klein, Léger, Magritte, Matisse, Miró, Monet, Picasso, Renoir, Richter, Rothko, Rouault, Signac, Soulages, Vallotton, Van Velde, Vlaminck, Warhol… All these artists and many more were featured in this wonderful exhibition that led visitors on a tour of the high peaks of modern art, from Impressionism to abstract expressionism.

The Fondation de l’Hermitage was privileged to host an exceptional exhibition on Over The River, a work in progress by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. This project to cover a discontinuous 64.5 km section of the Arkansas river in Colorado (USA) with canvas panels had been underway since 1992, with the final stage scheduled for 2012, but ultimately remained unrealised The extraordinary exhibition was part of the Fondation’s strand on the great figures of contemporary art.

The Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, in the Italian region of Lombardy, is important both as an art school and as a museum, with a huge display of art dating from the 15^th to the 19^th centuries. This impressive collection of over 1800 works was enhanced by several famous collectors, including Count Guglielmo Lochis and the great art historian and connoisseur Giovanni Morelli.

This exhibition of an extraordinary collection of some 90 drawings presented at the Fondation de l’Hermitage revealed the astounding modernity of the graphic art by the Romantic genius Victor Hugo (1802-1885) who, in addition to producing one of the 19^th century’s greatest literary oeuvres, also made a very great number of drawings throughout his life.

In a first for Switzerland, the Fondation de l’Hermitage showcased the work of the French painter Henri Fantin-Latour, one of the most eminent artists of the second half of the 19^th century. Fantin-Latour moved away from the mid-century realism exemplified by his former teacher Courbet, and, like his Impressionist contemporaries, sought to develop a painting style in which formal aspects were more important than the motif. However, rather than finding subjects in nature and paint outdoors, he preferred to work in the privacy of his Paris studio.

This exhibition at the Fondation de l’Hermitage offered an overview of late-19^th-century Belgian art, the first of its kind in Switzerland. It showcased the groups Les XX and Libre Esthétique, which, in the course of thirty years, nurtured some of the most innovative painters of the European avant garde. The exhibition comprised around a hundred paintings and drawings, showing the major artists of the period in the context of the main artistic movements that marked these crucial years: Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism and Expressionism.

The German painter Georg Baselitz is a major contemporary artist who was showcased at the Fondation de l’Hermitage in the summer of 2006. Around a hundred oils, drawings, engravings and sculptures, mostly from the artist’s personal collection, offered a more fundamental, personal view of his intense art, and its parallels with the work of great artists from Picasso to Bacon.

Pursuing its explorations of great collections, the Fondation de l’Hermitage was privileged to host more than 130 works from the Musée Fabre in the Communauté d’Agglomération de Montpellier. This museum was founded in 1828 and, through many donations and a dynamic acquisition policy, has built up one of the largest public collections in France.

This retrospective featuring around a hundred paintings, pastels and drawings showcased the fundamental contribution to Impressionism made by Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894). A painter – he took part in the Impressionist group’s exhibitions 1876–1882 – collector and patron, Caillebotte played a key role within the movement. He gave unfailing support to his friends Renoir and Monet and was actively involved in the emergence of the “new painting”.

This exhibition featuring over a hundred works by Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish artists shed new light on nordic painting. In the 19^th century the region’s art developed in fascinatingly original directions, in tandem with its literature, through Ibsen and Strindberg, and its music, with Grieg and Sibelius.

In the summer of 2004 the Fondation de l’Hermitage presented around a hundred pre-Colombian ceramics from the prestigious collection of the Museo Barbier-Mueller, Barcelona. The exhibition reflected the key role played by ceramics in pre-Hispanic cultures, enabling visitors to discover objects from all over the Americas, from the southern United States to Peru, most of which had never before been shown and the oldest among them dating back to 1500 BCE.

After hosting treasures from museums in Barcelona (1986), Liège (1988), Lyon (1989) and Grenoble (1992), the Fondation de l’Hermitage pursued its exploration of great public art collections with a selection of around a hundred paintings and drawings from the National Gallery-Alexandros Soutzos Museum, Athens. A dynamic acquisitions policy and many donations have ensured that the National Gallery (Athens), founded in 1900, now has over 10,000 works.

In 2003 the Fondation de l’Hermitage presented an exhibition on Czech painter and draughtsman František Kupka (1871-1957). Fascinated by light and movement, Kupka was one of the original founders of Fauvism, and later of cubism, before turning to pure painting and non-figuration in 1910. The exhibition provided a unique opportunity to discover a remarkable selection of Kupka’s works – over a hundred paintings, pastels, drawings and engravings – held at the Pompidou Centre, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris.

Organised jointly with the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern in Valencia, Spain, this exhibition shed new light on the work of André Derain. It presented the four most important aspects of the French artist’s vast and varied output: Fauvism, early analytic cubism, neoclassicism and primitivism.

Twenty years after its creation, the Fondation de l’Hermitage collection included nearly 800 works. A selection of these were presented to the public to mark the opening of the Fondation’s new conservation and exhibition spaces.

Since its inaugural exhibition of 1984, Impressionism in the Collections of French-Speaking Switzerland, the Fondation de l’Hermitage has repeatedly focused on the revolution that transformed the arts in the late 19^th century. With American Impressionism 1880-1915, it updated approaches to the Impressionist movement that emerged in France, by showing how it developed in the Americas.

As the highpoint of events celebrating the centenary of the birth of Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), the Fondation de l’Hermitage presented an exhibition centring on the prestigious collection of Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, on its first outing outside the UK.

In the summer of 2001 the Fondation de l’Hermitage hosted the first public exhibition of the Jean Planque (1910-1998) collection, one of the most important private collections in Switzerland. A painter himself, with many painter friends, Planque was also an adviser to the Beyeler gallery in Basel for over fifteen years and built up his collection gradually over time.

This exhibition focused on the years 1914–1921, when the Russian artist Alexej von Jawlensky (1864-1941) was in Switzerland. This was a key period for the painter, during which he moved away from the expressive style of his early works and adopted a form of figuration in which interiority plays a major part.

Eugène Boudin (1824 -1898) was a painter of skies and water, known for his Normandy landscapes, seascapes and beach scenes. This exhibition, the first of its kind in Switzerland, was jointly organised with the Langmatt Foundation, Baden.

This exhibition featuring nearly 100 paintings and over 50 drawings provided a retrospective overview of the work of Auguste Chabaud, born in Nîmes in 1882. In 1899 Chabaud went to Paris, where he was fascinated by city’s bustle and aggressive modernity, while remaining deeply attached to his native Provence, with its slow, immutable rhythms of rural life. This tension between the extremes of Paris and the South of France, where he settled for good after the First World War, gave rise to a highly original and powerful body of work.

Designed by the Fondation de l’Hermitage and exclusively shown in Lausanne, this exhibition provided a retrospective overview of the work of Victor Brauner (1903-1966). It featured important loans from French public collections, including that of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, and also from Swiss and French private collections.

This exhibition on the subtle, intimate world of English watercolour offered a vast panorama ranging from innovative 18^th-century artists to the Victorian period’s virtuosi of a technique much valued in Britain.

This exhibition shed light on the history of futurism, an avant garde movement that emerged in 1909 with the publication of the Futurist Manifesto by the Italian poet Marinetti and spearheaded by the painters Balla, Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo and Severini, all of whom promoted a new aesthetics based on progress, machines and speed.