![\"Zentrum](\"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/20250711_130122.jpg\")
<\/a>\nThis is the Zentrum Paul Klee, a museum dedicated to the iconoclastic artist who lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.\u00a0 The building itself is pretty interesting, and was designed by the same architect who did two other buildings I encountered on this trip, the Centre Georges Pompideau in Paris and the modern art museum in Istanbul.<\/p>\n
Klee was a fascinating character.\u00a0 The primary gallery shows some of his early drawings from as young as 11 years old.\u00a0 And in his youth, he was perfectly capable of doing both highly realistic work and impressionism.\u00a0 But then he decided that wasn’t really his thing.<\/p>\n
After our morning at the museum, we headed back into town to check out two smaller museums before continuing our travels.\u00a0 The first was the apartment where Einstein lived during his\u00a0annus mirabilis <\/em>of 1905, when he wrote five papers that would each have been a career-defining masterpiece for any other scientist.<\/p>\n We almost noped out of the second museum, but it turns out that would have been a mistake.\u00a0 The museum in question was the wind instrument museum, and it’s a basement room that you walk into and think – “Oh, there’s not that much here, and it’s quite expensive.”<\/p>\n BUT – your admission gets you the use of a tablet and a pair of headphones, and there’s a LOT of extremely well executed video to go with the exhibits on display.\u00a0 This is pretty cool when you’re listening to it at the same time.<\/p>\n Also, there’s this bicycle.<\/p>\n Why indeed.<\/a><\/p>\n We also wandered over to the Bern Cathedral which is impressive, although we opted NOT to climb to the top of two cathedrals in three days.<\/p>\n The Interlaken area is one of the places you go to get your Alp on – hikes, views, gondolas, all that fun stuff.\u00a0 We had chosen to stay in the small town of Wilderswill, outside of the relatively touristy Interlaken city proper.\u00a0 And we did not regret this choice, at all.<\/p>\n I have been avoiding punny titles for these posts, but… come on. At any rate, we did indeed start our first full day away from Geneva in Bern, the “de facto” capital of Switzerland. (Switzerland has no officially designated capital, … Continue reading <\/a>
\nKlee’s work is fun, and it’s the sort of thing you can stare at for hours.\u00a0 Leigh and I tend to divide works we see in galleries into two categories: “I’d have that on the wall” and “Nah.”\u00a0 Klee has a lot more of the former.
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\nOne interesting feature of the exhibit is that they have an entire room full of textbooks that have used Klee on the cover, including in some cases, over a dozen books with the same artwork.
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\nAnd in many cases, the\u00a0actual<\/em> artwork is hung on the wall just a few feet away.\u00a0 Very cool.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nThe papers were a lot more miraculous than the apartment, which was basically just an apartment.\u00a0 Still, it was cool to be in the room where it happened. Also, there were some exhibits about how Einstein was a jerk to his first wife.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>
\nWhy is there a bicycle in a wind instrument museum?<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nAnd it’s cool for another reason in that we had just watched a whole video at the instrument museum about the building and playing of an experimental modern organ, which we could then go gawp at in person.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nAnd at this point, it was time to bring our time in Bern to a close and head to our next destination, the Interlaken region.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nOur evening walk made clear that we had made an excellent choice for our home base for the next two nights.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nYowza.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"