The story
Two small views of Paris by Henri Rousseau, the self-taught painter who earned his living at the Paris toll office and was nicknamed Le Douanier, belong to MASI, the art museum of Italian-speaking Switzerland in Lugano. Painted around 1890, they show the footbridge at Passy and the Seine seen from the Pont de Grenelle, with smoking chimneys and modest buildings drawn in his precise, careful line. Both came to the city of Lugano with the Milich-Fassbind donation in 1965.
MASI itself is young. It opened in September 2015, when the canton's art museum and the city's art museum were merged into a single institution. Its main home is LAC, Lugano Arte e Cultura, a cultural centre by the lake designed by the architect Ivano Gianola on the site of the old Grand Hotel Palace, whose historic facades were kept. A second venue, the Palazzo Reali in the town centre, has shown the collection since 2019.
That collection runs to more than 14,000 works, from the late 15th century to the present, with its weight on the 19th and 20th centuries and on artists from Ticino or with close ties to the region. Its modern and contemporary side is widened by the Giancarlo and Danna Olgiati Collection, a private collection that is part of the MASI circuit.
