Then comes a series of extremely significant and rarely-exhibited abstract works that show how his works developed during the thirties. In 1936, he painted an abstract fresco for the Swiss section of the Milan Triennial. He then worked in London where he met artists such as Alexander Calder, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. Until then, he had been recognised only by a select circle of avant-garde connoisseurs but now he was starting to make a name for himself with the general public. D uring the forties and fifties he turned out a mass of more or less well-known works.
More recent works are also on exhibition.
T his retrospective also includes a number of self-portraits and, in the new Bellvedere Room, there are drawings, various works on paper and notebooks of sketches done on ethnographic expeditions. T he exhibition is rounded out by an historical and documentary section which, inter alia, refers to a recently revealed side of Swiss history. During the Cold War, Hans Erni was placed under surveillance as a supposed member of the Communist Party and he was refused a number of public commissions. T he exhibition, designed by Andres Furger, the Curator of the Swiss National Museum, and Marco Obrist, an art historian, includes a richly illustrated, bi-lingual catalogue jointly written by several authors.