Switzerland: the land that brought you the cuckoo clock, the army knife, chocolates and singing nuns.

But behind the clichéd image, there is a fabulous country awash with style, sophistication, culture and lots and lots of other people’s money.

And if it’s the arts you’re after, you are so in the right place.

Basel is the country’s third largest city, tucked neatly and tidily in a very Swiss manner in the Toblerone triangle between Germany and France.

Immaculate litter-free streets, beautifully manicured gardens and a free public transport network of trams and buses that runs, well, like clockwork.

They say in Switzerland, if you’re on time, you’re already late.

It’s also home to many galleries and museums, notably the Kunstmuseum which is hosting an impressive Sculpture on the Move exhibition until September.

The museum is split over three sites and each is dealing with separate eras of post-war sculpture.

All the big hitters and chippers are represented there, from Henry Moore to Carl Andre, Andy Warhol to Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst to Sarah Lucas.

It’s such a vast complex which allows each exhibit space to breathe, so much so that turning a corner in the gallery to be confronted face to liver-spotted face by Duane Hanson’s super-realistic Man With a Trolley is most alarming.

It’s typical of the clever but quirky Swiss to have anarchic kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely as a national hero.

It’s a remarkable body of work on show at the Museum Tinguely on the banks the fast-moving Rhine, including a vast rotating sculpture of a crashing racing car (He was an F1 nut) with five shrouded widows weeping alongside, and a wall of scaffolding, pulleys, ropes, weights and wheels which grind out a torturous tune by crushing a child’s keyboard and a random series of bashes on drums, cymbals, gongs and car horns (reminded me of Bjork, to be honest).

Take the super-efficient tram to the last stop before the German border and you will arrive at the Fondation Beyeler, a quite incredible collection of paintings and sculptures housed in a beautiful building designed by Renzo Piano, architect of London’s Shard and the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

It really is like Gombrich’s A History of Modern Art brought to life with works collected by Hildy and Ernst Beyeler over many decades.

Cezanne, Mondrian, Matisse, Rothko, van Gogh, Monet: yes, all present and correct on the roll call of the most important artists of the last century or so.

See if you can stand in the room devoted to Picasso, with 20 or so of his pieces surrounding you and not gasp at the power of his vision.

Pride of place for me however goes to Francis Bacon’s In Memory of George Dyer, painted after the artist’s lover took his own life in a hotel room as Bacon attended the opening of a major retrospective of his work in Paris in 1971. It’s painful and also strangely beautiful to view.

The train journey to Geneva takes just over an hour and a half, with stunning vistas across Lake Geneva and the Alps and the towering Mont Blanc as a backdrop.

Geneva itself is mostly French-speaking and the almost Parisienne bustle contrasts sharply with the Germanic orderliness of Basel.

The country’s second largest city, after the banking might of Zurich, is home to around 20 multi-national organisations, including Medecins Sans Frontieres, the Red Cross and, of course, the United Nations.

The Red Cross Museum is well worth a visit and is uplifting and harrowing in equal measure.

Tales of the Red Cross humanitarian efforts during natural disasters such as Japanese earthquakes or Central American hurricanes sit alongside gruesome and horrific missions during the Rwanda civil war and the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, Serbia, Bosnia and the like after the implosion of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.

The museum is just across the road from the United Nations organisation building. That, I think, is what you call irony.

Art lovers and collectors with an eye on the next big thing would be well advised to spend some time in Quartier des Baines, a collection of back streets and lanes and home to a series of galleries featuring the work of new artists.

It was a lovely atmosphere, strolling from show to show, meeting talented artists and listening to them enthuse about their work.

We met rising Swiss painter Mathieu Dafflon and listened intently as he explained his thinking behind his large triptych portraying his art idols of Marcel Duchamps, Picasso, Max Ernst at al as bruised and bloodied boxers.

“I love them but I hate them, because they got there first,” he explained.

We also shared his joy when he was told he had sold all three of his major pieces for the princely sum of, well, let’s just say he could afford to get a round in later that night.

A lovely hop in a water taxi takes you across the crystal clear waters of Lake Geneva, evading the spray from the 140m Jet d’Eau, to the district of Cologny and home of the Fondation Martin Bodmer.

This charming and extensive museum is devoted to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein which was written in the neighbouring Villa Deodati in the summer of 1816 while the 18-year-old (and two months’ pregnant) authoress holidayed with her married lover Percy Shelley and the mad, bad and dangerous to know Lord Byron.

Thanks to a volcanic eruption in Java which spread a cloud of ash across the globe, there was no summer in Europe that year so the party amused themselves by writing ghost stories, thus leading to the creation of Victor Frankenstein and his ‘hideous phantasm of a man’.

Mary’s handwritten drafts, with corrections and suggestion from the more experienced writer Percy, are on display along with several first editions from around the world.

It’s a must for all lovers of literature and, like the country itself, lovingly presented.

Nick travelled as a guest of Swiss Tourism. More details at myswitzerland.com