As a German, I have a disturbed relationship with nature images. The worst are alpine motifs. For me, they invariably have National Socialist connotations and are charged with stuffy hiking badge aesthetics and allotment club chic. It is a nature-loving homeliness that carries something unexplained, lurking, undiagnosed. Alpine painting show a taming and bourgeoisification of nature that is removed from reality. The more our surroundings are economically developed, the greater is apparently the desire for untouched, unutilized landscape.

In my great-grandmother’s living room, too, there was a picture of the Alps with a heavy frame, mounted at an angle, as if it could slay you. It was one of those typical Swiss landscapes. A print refined with oil, slightly yellowed, with a massive, carved, golden frame. As a child, I felt anxious awe toward this picture - partly because of the beautiful, exotic subject, and partly because of the danger of manslaughter that emanated from the mount.

The wall paneling in the exhibition space allows me to visually take in the parlor, the salon, and thus connect to the original place of presentation of the Alpine
paintings - the home. Initially souvenirs of the Grand Tour for aristocrats and upper classes, they later became emblematic of supposed natural harmony in general. The pretty goods are produced by craftsmen in manufactories en masse, copied and adapted to market demand, if necessary flowers, cows and the like are added. The painted nature is thus abstracted further and further from the original motif, which the master still captured on the spot.

So the Alps are simply an average decorative motif, even today, in times of glacial melt. Even in today’s postcards, wallpapers and screensavers they can be found as a symbol of the harmoniously recreational. There are never any problems, no poverty, no avalanches or natural disasters. Therefor for me personally, even in real nature, in the real Alps, it is sometimes too beautiful, too kitschy to look without being embarrassed.

Sarah Fripon