Werner and Gabrielle Merzbacher’s art collection is full of bright, primary colors. Boats are orange and pink, trees are purple and people are blue. It’s a medley of paintings from the Fauve and German Expressionist art movements. Major painters make up the collection: Maurice de Vlaminck, Othon Friesz, Georges Braque, André Derain, Wassily Kandinsky, Sonia Delaunay, Henri Matisse, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc, but also Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Alfred Sisley, among others who painted in very bright hues.

Wassily Kandinsky, Fragment of Composition II, 1910, oil on cardboard, 57 x 48 cm

An exhibit entitled, “The Merzbacher Collection: Van Gogh, Picasso, Kandinsky…” just opened at the Pierre Gianadda Foundation in Martigny, Switzerland. As written in the Foundation’s pamphlet on the show, “Each of these paintings seems to be an antidote to sadness and depression, [they are] a hymn to the joy of living.” Werner Merzbacher himself at the opening on 29 June said his desire is that the exhibition help to escape “from the gray of reality, to feel exuberance and to understand all that art can bring that’s positive.”

Alexei von Jawlensky, Lady with Yellow Straw Hat, circa 1910, 87 x 74 cm