Cézanne to Richter
Masterpieces from the Kunstmuseum Basel
February 14, 2015 — February 21, 2016
The Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel is a world-class collection
­especially for art of the late nineteenth century and the early modernist period. On show in the large skylighted gallery space and
­adjoining rooms of the Museum für Gegenwartskunst is a selection
of masterpieces from Paul Cézanne to Gerhard Richter. It is a panoramic overview that allows all the major artistic developments that
took place in European painting up to and including the 1970s to be
reconstructed with the utmost immediacy. The guiding principle
­behind the hanging of the some seventy works was chronology, our
aim being less to present a didactic succession of -isms than to
­expose the simultaneity of the other that is a defining characteristic
of modernism.
The show opens with those French artists who in their quest
for a new pictorial language broke free of the academic tradition. The
works of Paul Cézanne are an especially good example of the path
of dogged artistic inquiry, he having been among the first to render
transparent the individual brushstrokes and dabs of color that all
paintings ultimately consist of. This visible acknowledgment that a
painting is bound to be an intellectual construct would later become
a fundamental criterion of modern art. Camille Pissarro, Claude
Monet, and Edgar Degas were friends of Cézanne, who encouraged
each other along the very different paths each had elected to pursue.
Vincent van Gogh made the acquaintance of this circle of Impressionists who organized exhibitions of their own during a stay in Paris.
His radicalization of many of their ideas inspired several generations
of twentieth-century painters, not least among them the German
­Expressionists Paula Modersohn-Becker, Franz Marc, Ernst Ludwig
Kirchner, and Emil Nolde.
For Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque as the early twentiethcentury inventors of Cubism, however, the great father figure remained Cézanne; for it was his ponderous exploration of artistic
form that confirmed them in their fragmentation of the traditional
composition into countless different facets. Picasso’s Le poète (The
Poet) shows all the standard elements of a classical portrait, but
shattered and reassembled at odd angles so that the head becomes a
composite of abstract parts. One of twentieth-century painting’s
most revolutionary and influential breakthroughs was abstraction
Selcted Works with Texts
which, whether colorfully exuberant as in Wassily Kandinsky, austerely constructivist as in Piet Mondrian, or shot through with lyrical
associations with the figurative as in Paul Klee and Joan Miró, resolutely turned its back on visible reality.
Lucio Fontana’s Concetto spaziale (Spatial Concept) of the 1950s
marks another turning point in the history of painting; for it was
then that the artist began literally slashing open the canvas as a
bearer of painterly illusion and in doing so opened up the space behind it. The 1960s and 1970s saw more and more artists engaging
critically with painting, in some cases becoming so disillusioned that
they took to painting without paint, which is what Blinky Palermo
did in his fabric paintings.
The figurative tradition was not defunct, however, and clung on
parallel to the development of abstract painting throughout the twentieth century. In our exhibition it begins with the works of two Swiss
painters, Arnold Böcklin and Ferdinand Hodler, of whom the former
prepared the ground for the kind of whimsical, even fantastical,
­figural painting that inspired Surrealists like Yves Tanguy—to name
but one example. The show closes with the recently acquired cycle
Verkündigung nach Tizian (Annunciation after Titian) by Gerhard
Richter, whose painterly appropriation of a famous work by Titian
visibly blurs from one canvas to the next into abstract expanses of
color. Richter’s reflection on the history of painting and on what,
in the twentieth century, was the prevailing dialectic of abstraction
versus figuration leads him to a new synthesis.
Cat. 4
Cat. 23
Cat. 50
Paul Cézanne
Cinq baigneuses, 1885/1887
Henri Matisse
La berge, 1907
Max Ernst
La grande forêt, 1927
Cat. 14
Cat. 24
Cat. 53
Vincent van Gogh
Marguerite Gachet au
piano, 1890
Henri Rousseau
La muse inspirant le poète
1909
Henri Matisse
Femme au divan, 1920 /1921
Cat. 15
Cat. 34
Vincent van Gogh
Portrait de lui-même à
l’estampe japonaise, 1887
Wassily Kandinsky
Improvisation 35, 1914
Lucio Fontana
Concetto Spaziale, Attese
1967
Cat. 38
Cat. 63– 66
Franz Marc
Zwei Katzen, blau und
gelb, 1912
Gerhard Richter
Verkündigung nach Tizian
1973
Cat. 57
Cat. 22
Henri Rousseau
Forêt vierge au soleil
couchant, ca. 1910
Cat. 41
Oskar Schlemmer
Frauentreppe, 1925
38
34
41
24
57
50
53
66
23
65
22
15
14
64
63
Bernhard Mendes Bürgi
4
cat. 3
cat. 2
cat. 1
Camille Pissarro
Un coin de l’Hermitage, Pontoise
1878
cat. 4
Camille Pissarro
Effet de neige à l’Hermitage, 1875
cat. 6
Paul Cézanne
Le pigeonnier de Bellevue, 1888 /1892
Paul Cézanne
Cinq baigneuses, 1885/1887
Many of the early works of Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) evince a wild
and violent eroticism for which he used a dark, somber palette. His
style of painting changed when he first came into contact with the
Impressionists in the early 1870s. He became especially close to the
somewhat older Camille Pissarro and took part in the Impressionists’
now near legendary first exhibition of 1874 as well as in one of the
other exhibitions organized by the group. Unlike Claude Monet or
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, for example, Cézanne sold scarcely any paintings during his lifetime. Not until the next generation and the emergence of the Cubists and Fauves was his oeuvre at last appreciated
and the painter himself hailed as a precursor.
The Cinq baigneuses (Five Bathers) CAT. 4 is one of his greatest
works. It belongs to a large group of nudes that occupies a central
place in his oeuvre—and not just by force of numbers alone, despite
comprising more than 200 paintings. For what this body of work also
represents is in fact the leitmotif of Cézanne’s entire output as an artist. This makes it all the more surprising that Cézanne, for whom
painting en plein air and sur le motif was the highest form of art,
should have chosen to depart from this principle when his subject was
the nude, which he painted not from life, but rather on the basis of
photographs and prints or his own studies made after paintings or
sculptures of the Old Masters.
cat. 5
cat. 4
Paul Cézanne
Cinq baigneuses, 1885 /1887
Paul Cézanne
Bords d’une rivière, ca. 1904
Arnold Böcklin
Die Toteninsel, 1880
Cézanne sometimes borrowed from himself with poses, gestures, or
compositional patterns that paraphrase figures from his own works,
even if the grouping of these elements is new. Art historians in the
past have tried to find elements of Christian iconography in the Cinq
baigneuses, interpreting it as a baptismal scene—as the standing
woman with outstretched arms at right might imply—or as a rendering of the Fountain of Youth. But such interpretations underestimate
just how radically Cézanne had already broken with traditional patterns. Only on closer scrutiny does this become apparent, for only then
do we notice how contrived and unnatural the women’s bodies are,
how awkward-looking their poses; nor is there any allegory or any
overtly Christian iconography present to bind them into a larger narrative context.
The bodies of the five bathers seem not to epitomize any ideal of
beauty, ancient or modern. But then Cézanne never set out to paint
“beautiful” nudes in the classical sense of the term. Here in this painting, rhythmic structure takes the place of anatomical accuracy. As the
painter himself remarked: “On ne devrait pas dire modeler, on devrait
dire moduler”—the talk, in other words, should no longer be of modeling, but of modulation. These are no artificial beauties assembled
out of freely organized bodies and body parts; Cézanne’s achievement
lies rather in his composition of an overall pictorial effect.
And just how pleased he was with his Cinq baigneuses is evident
from the fact that this is one of the rare instances in which Cézanne
transferred his composition onto the canvas from a squared-up drawing.
cat. 7
cat. 12
Arnold Böcklin
Kentaurenkampf, 1872 /1873
cat. 11
cat. 10
cat. 8
cat. 9
Odilon Redon
Saint Sébastien, 1910
Edgar Degas
Jockey blessé, ca. 1896/1898
The pencil lines that in places are still visible through the paint, moreover, tell us that he did not make any changes, but rather retained the
structure of the drawing in the finished painting.
Cat. 15
Vincent van Gogh
Portrait de lui-même à l’estampe japonaise, 1887
Marguerite Gachet au piano, 1890
Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890) painted his Portrait de lui-même à
l’estampe japonaise (Self-Portrait with a Japanese Print) CAT. 15 towards
the end of a two-year stay in Paris from 1886 to 1888. It was during this
brief but crucial phase in his development that he embarked on his
critical engagement with both Impressionism and various Post-Impressionist currents. Discovering in his own likeness an ideal field for
experimentation and adopting a fresh and radiant palette with which
to explore the new idioms, he produced a number of self-portraits
while in the French capital. He explained his method in a letter to his
brother Theo dated September 16, 1888: “I purposely bought a mirror
good enough to enable me to work from my image in default of a model,
because if I can manage to paint the coloring of my own head, which is
not to be done without some difficulty, I shall likewise be able to paint
the heads of other good souls, men and women.” The three-quarter
profile is composed entirely of individual brushstrokes in contrasting,
complementary colors, each clearly distinguishable from the next.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Paysage aux environs d’Essoyes
(Paysage avec deux figures sur
l’herbe), 1892
Claude Monet
Les falaises d’Aval avec la Porte et
l’Aiguille, 1884
Claude Monet
La passerelle sur le bassin aux
nymphéas, 1919
Thus the artist’s bright orange beard is pitted against his blue smock,
his emerald green eyes answer the reddish hues of his beard and face,
and his pale yellow hair contrasts sharply with the purple shades of
his jacket. The background is checkered with alternating squares of
horizontal and vertical stripes, one of which contains a sketchily
drawn female figure suggestive of a Japanese woodcut. Like the Impressionists, van Gogh was thrilled with this art form and for as long
as he was in Paris was a passionate collector of such prints, his limited
budget notwithstanding.
Marguerite Gachet au piano (Marguerite Gachet at the Piano)
CAT. 14 dates from van Gogh’s last period of creativity before his suicide
in July 1890. The subject is the daughter of his doctor, Paul Gachet,
who lived in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise northwest of Paris. Already
in a desperate state, van Gogh had left Saint-Rémy for Auvers in May
1890, believing that Gachet, who himself liked to paint and etch besides being an art collector well-disposed towards artists, might be
able to cure him. While in Auvers, van Gogh painted two portraits of
the doctor himself as well as two of his daughter, nineteen-year-old
Marguerite, who was still living with him at the time. The motif, a
young woman playing the piano, was a popular topos for portraits of
young women in the nineteenth century and was used by painters
such as Renoir, Degas, and Cézanne as well. The immediate stimulus
for the composition, however, was a little etching that the widowed
Gachet had made of his late wife playing the piano in 1873.
cat. 14
cat. 18
Félix Vallotton
La mare (Honfleur), 1909
cat. 13
cat. 14
cat. 15
cat. 16
cat. 17
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Femme dans un jardin
(La femme à la mouette), 1868
Vincent van Gogh
Marguerite Gachet au piano, 1890
Vincent van Gogh
Portrait de lui-même à l’estampe
japonaise, 1887
Arnold Böcklin
Selbstbildnis im Atelier, 1893
Ferdinand Hodler
Selbstbildnis, 1912
The painting lives from its exceptionally narrow frame and the interaction of bold hues and dynamic brushwork. Van Gogh, who for several years had been studying modern color theory and the effect of
mutually enhancing complementary colors, makes extensive use of
contrasting reds and greens in this painting. He explained his method
in an undated letter to his brother Theo: “Yesterday and the day before I painted Mlle. Gachet’s portrait, which I hope you will see soon;
the dress is red, the wall in the background green with orange spots,
the carpet red with green spots, the piano dark violet.” He gave the
finished portrait to Marguerite, for whom he is thought to have had
tender feelings that were probably not reciprocated. She kept the
painting in her room until her brother Paul offered to sell it to the
Kunstmuseum Basel in 1934.
Henri Rousseau
La muse inspirant le poète, 1909
Forêt vierge au soleil couchant, ca. 1910
The self-taught Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) began painting while still
a customs officer for the French state in the 1870s. The artistic quality
of his somewhat bizarre brand of magic realism was later applauded
by the Surrealists, although the first to recognize his originality were
artists such as Constantin Brancusi and Pablo Picasso, and the poets
Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire. Rousseau was admitted to
their circle, which while reveling in his naïve style of painting found
the combination of this and his highly conventional notions of art to
be an inexhaustible wellspring of grotesquerie.
Acting on just such a facetious whim, Apollinaire commissioned
Rousseau with a double portrait of himself and his lover, the painter
Marie Laurencin. On finishing La muse inspirant le poète (The Muse
Inspiring the Poet) CAT. 24 in the spring of 1909, Rousseau submitted it to
the Salon des Indépendants. The painting shows the pair standing on
a grassy bank framed by two trees. The statuesque Apollinaire is portrayed holding a quill pen and scroll—the insignia of his craft—while
the matronly Laurencin, clad in a pleated dress to his right, is pointing
heavenward. When the petite Laurencin, appalled by what she saw,
complained of her treatment to Rousseau, he retorted that a great poet
needed a great muse. Apollinaire himself was more troubled by the
fact that while tout Paris assured him that his own portrait was but a
poor likeness, no one seemed to have any trouble recognizing him as
the subject, despite the anonymizing title of the work.
After a brief imprisonment for petty theft in 1864, Henri Rousseau returned to the French army unit in which he was serving as a
volunteer and remained there until 1868. He later tried to paste over
this awkward gap in his biography by claiming to have fought in a
French military intervention in the jungles of Mexico. His friends and
early biographers never doubted the veracity of this yarn, and the poet
Guillaume Apollinaire even alluded to it in a poem composed in the
artist’s honor in 1908: “Do you remember, Rousseau, the Land of the
cat. 24
cat. 19
cat. 22
Ferdinand Hodler
Genfersee mit Jura und Wolkenkette
1911
cat. 20
cat. 21
Ferdinand Hodler
Der Genfersee von Chexbres aus, 1905
André Derain
Les vignes au printemps
ca. 1904 /1905
Henri Rousseau
Forêt vierge au soleil couchant
ca. 1910
cat. 23
cat. 24
Henri Matisse
La berge, 1907
cat. 22
Aztecs / The forests where mangos and pineapples grow … A red sun
adorning the front of banana trees …” Perhaps it was Apollinaire’s
“red sun” that inspired Rousseau to paint this picture.
Forêt vierge au soleil couchant (Jungle with Setting Sun) CAT. 22
dates from 1910, the year of Rousseau’s death, and belongs to his last
group of jungle paintings. The improbably huge plants in these works
have little to do with any first-hand experience on the part of the artist. They are much more likely to have been inspired by a visit to the
Paris World’s Fair of 1889 at the Jardin des Plantes and Rousseau’s
perusal of popular magazines.
cat. 23
Henri Matisse
La berge, 1907
Femme au divan, 1920/1921
La berge (The River Bank) CAT. 23 was painted in 1907 near Collioure, a
fishing village at the foot of the Pyrenees in the northwest corner of
the Mediterranean, where Henri Matisse (1869–1954) frequently spent
several weeks of the year between 1905 and 1914. It was there, together with fellow painter André Derain, that he began his inquiry
into the painterly expressiveness of unmixed colors. The paintings resulting from the two artists’ first stay in Collioure in the summer of
1905 were exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in Paris that same year
alongside those of their mutual friend, Maurice Vlaminck. It was their
Henri Rousseau
La muse inspirant le poète, 1909
“orgies of pure color” that led the art critic Louis Vauxcelles to describe
the three artists as “fauves,” meaning wild animals. The name stuck,
whereupon Matisse, as one of the movement’s chief exponents, formulated the Fauvist creed as follows: “Beautiful blues, beautiful reds,
beautiful yellows—matter to stir the sensual depths in men. This is
the starting point of Fauvism: the courage to return to the purity of
the means.”
At least at first, landscapes such as La berge, which are actually
quite a rarity in Matisse’s oeuvre, seemed a fitting genre for his painterly experiments. For what better inspiration to use a bold palette
could there be than nature itself and the Mediterranean region in
particular? His aim was to use these colors to recreate an “experience
of the senses”: “The expressive aspect of colors imposes itself on me in
a purely instinctive way,” he wrote, adding, “I simply try to put down
colors which render my sensation.”
Most striking of all to anyone viewing La berge for the first time
is the intensity of the colors and the contrasts between them. Partitioned into flat, colored segments, the canvas takes on the two-dimensional character of a brightly colored carpet. The blocks of color are
not systematically outlined, however; they are rather just sketched in
so that the unpainted canvas actually shines through in places. As the
eye roams over each part of the painting in turn, only gradually does
it begin to identify this pattern of interlocking colored shapes as a
light-flooded, overgrown riverscape with an expanse of water flanked
by riverbanks tapering to a point at its center.
cat. 25
cat. 26
cat. 27
cat. 28
cat. 29
cat. 30
Pablo Picasso
Le poète, 1912
Georges Braque
Le Portugais (L’émigrant)
1911–1912
Fernand Léger
Les maisons dans les arbres.
Paysage No 3, 1914
Juan Gris
La guitare (Nature morte à
la guitare), 1916
André Derain
Nature morte au Calvaire, 1912
Amedeo Modigliani
Marie (Marie, fille du peuple), 1918
cat. 53
From 1917 to the end of his life Henri Matisse spent at least the winter
months in Nice and the surrounding countryside. After a phase of
abstraction, he now returned to figurative painting and in the years
up to 1930 created a large series of brightly colored, light-filled, and
often elaborately decorated interiors, many of which feature a seated
or recumbent woman reading, sleeping, or looking seductive in the
middle. While in the first few years Matisse used his various hotel
rooms for such scenes, he was later able to paint his own apartment.
Femme au divan (Woman on a Divan) CAT. 53, a typical topos of those
years, contrasts the cool, soothing shade of a room with balcony
blinds half-closed with a glimpse of the dazzlingly bright Côte d’Azur
beyond it. The work was painted between late 1920 and the spring of
1921 in the Hôtel Méditerranée.
cat. 34
Wassily Kandinsky
Improvisation 35, 1914
Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) made the decisive breakthrough from
a figurative to an abstract mode of expression between 1908 and the
outbreak of World War I in 1914. At the time, the artist liked to borrow
musical terminology for the titles of his works—hence the numbered
series of “Improvisations” created between 1909 and 1914, the last
of which, Improvisation 35 CAT. 34, was painted on May 29, 1914. We know
from his famous essay Concerning the Spiritual in Art that Kandinsky
understood an “improvisation” to be “a largely unconscious, spontaneous expression of processes of inner character, that is, impressions
of inner ‘nature.’”
The dissolution of individual forms in this last Improvisation is
so far advanced that they are scarcely legible at all. The work thus has
the look of a miniature cosmos containing both very agitated zones
and others that are much calmer. The composition is made up of all
manner of shapes, lines, and spaces, some of which are clearly circumscribed, while others appear to continue ad infinitum. Bright, luminous colors are juxtaposed with darker hues. The outline of a horse
and rider, a recurrent motif in Kandinsky’s work, has to be intuited
rather than seen, and perhaps the diagonal lines pointing into the
busy bottom right corner could be read as lances warding off evil.
Kandinsky strove to express emotional, inner states in a pictorial
idiom befitting such immaterial subject matter. His aim was not to
reproduce the visible world, but to enable the viewer to follow him,
through his painting, into the world of the spiritual.
When, at the outbreak of the war and just a few months after
finishing work on his last Improvisation, Kandinsky was forced to
leave Germany, where he had been living since 1896, he left almost all
his works behind. Two years later, Improvisation 35 went on show at
the Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin. It was purchased on the art market
by the artist Jean Arp some time after 1920. When Arp died in 1966,
the painting passed into the collection of the Kunstmuseum as a “donation of Jean Arp.” Twenty years his junior, Arp had met Kandinsky
cat. 35
Marc Chagall
Le marchand de bestiaux, 1912
cat. 32
Fernand Léger
La femme et l’enfant (La mère et
l’enfant), 1922
cat. 34
cat. 31
Wassily Kandinsky
Improvisation 35, 1914
Juan Gris
Guitare, livre et journal, 1920
cat. 33
cat. 36
Georges Braque
Café-Bar, 1919
Egon Schiele
Bildnis Erich Lederer, 1912–1913
in 1911 at the time of the avant-garde Blue Rider exhibitions and was
thrilled by his ideas.
Kandinsky must have realized that paintings like Improvisation 35 marked the breakthrough he had long been waiting for. Until
then, he had always signed the front of his larger canvases with his
full name. From now on, however, he preferred to initial them.
Franz Marc
Zwei Katzen, blau und gelb, 1912
Animals take center stage in the works of Franz Marc (1880–1916). For
him they epitomized instinct and intuition, two qualities that he felt
humanity had lost as a result of its enslavement to “progress” and
consequent estrangement from nature. Art, to his mind, was a vehicle
for reviving this aboriginality and therefore crucial to our ability to
reconnect with our animal selves. His paintings of animals were thus
an attempt “to enhance a feeling for the organic rhythm of all things,
a pantheistic empathizing with the trembling and flow of blood in nature, in trees, in animals, and in the air,” he wrote, adding, “I see no
more conducive means of ‘animalizing’ art, as I prefer to call it, than
the animal painting.” The animal, in other words, was his model: “Is
there any more mysterious idea for an artist than that reflected by
nature in the eye of an animal?” he once asked. “How does a horse see
the world? Or an eagle, a deer, or a dog? How paltry and soulless is
our convention of placing animals in the landscape belonging to our
eyes instead of putting ourselves into the minds of animals in order to
divine the pictures they see.” Traditional animal painting did not do
justice to its subject matter, Marc felt; hence his belief in the need for
a new approach.
The canvas of Zwei Katzen, blau und gelb (Two Cats, Blue and
Yellow) CAT. 38 is dominated by the two animals of the title. The legs of the
blue cat busy cleaning itself in front are so far outstretched that one of
them extends into the top left-hand corner. The yellow cat poised behind it, by contrast, is fixated on a mouse hole with the back end of a
red mouse poking out of it. Being no longer bound to naturalism, the
artist selected the contrasting colors blue and yellow to lend expression to the two cats’ antithetical natures. While the blue of the animal
in the foreground underscores the serene self-absorption of the act of
grooming, the huntress’s yellow coat greatly adds to the tension implicit in her pose. Not only do the animals penetrate the landscape
spatially, but they are bound to their surroundings by the rhythm of
their forms. The bodies of the cats are so far abstracted as to have
become geometrical shapes. Their rounded silhouettes, circular joints,
and curled-up tails in particular are taken up by the landscape itself.
Thus embedded, they merge with their surroundings to form a harmonious whole.
Long after he fell in World War I, Marc was among the artists
most vilified by the Nazis, who decried his works as “degenerate.” Zwei
Katzen, blau und gelb was seized from the collection of the Barmen
cat. 38
cat. 38
cat. 39
Franz Marc
Zwei Katzen, blau und gelb, 1912
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Amselfluh, 1922
cat. 37
cat. 40
Paula Modersohn-Becker
Selbstbildnis als Halbakt mit
Bernsteinkette II, 1906
Emil Nolde
Blaue Iris I, 1915
cat. 42
cat. 41
Oskar Schlemmer
Blaues Bild, 1928
Oskar Schlemmer
Frauentreppe, 1925
Kunstverein in 1937 and displayed alongside countless other confiscated works in the now infamous “Entartete Kunst” exhibition later
that same year. When it came under the hammer at the notorious
auction at Galerie Fischer in Lucerne in 1939, it was purchased by
Kunstmuseum Basel along with seven other early modernist masterpieces.
Oskar Schlemmer
Frauentreppe, 1925
Oskar Schlemmer (1888–1943), the German painter, sculptor, choreographer, and set designer, studied art at the Stuttgart academy, where
he was taught by Adolf Hölzel, among others. As a pioneer of abstraction, Hölzel had attracted a wide circle of students, including Willi
Baumeister and the Swiss painters Otto Meyer-Amden and Johannes
Itten, all of whom would count among Schlemmer’s friends and fellowtravelers.
Schlemmer volunteered for service in the First World War and
in 1916 returned home wounded from the front. While convalescing in
Stuttgart, he took up painting again with flat, schematically simplified
renderings of the human figure. With Paul Klee, he was among the
first to be invited by Walter Gropius to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar
in 1920. There, he was placed in charge of the department of mural
painting and gave lessons in nude drawing. The early twenties saw
him preparing what is perhaps his best known work, the Triadische
Ballett (Triadic Ballet) that premiered in 1922. Besides designing the
set, he also created the masks and costumes, which he referred to collectively as “spatial sculptures” on the grounds that they were like
polychrome sculptures moved around in space by the dancers.
The experience gained from his work with bodies, costumes,
and dance soon percolated through to Schlemmer’s painting. During
this phase, he tended to apprehend the figure as a three-dimensional
body in space. His diary of 1925 contains the following entry: “Theater!
Music! My passion! But not only that: the sheer breadth of the field. The
theoretical possibilities strike a chord in me, because it comes naturally to me. Free rein for the imagination. Here I can be old, with success. Here there is not the dilemma of painting, the risk of relapsing
into an artistic genre in which, deep down, I have lost faith. Here what
I want matches what suits me best and what is in tune with the times.
Here I am myself and I am new.”
Among the many different works that Schlemmer submitted to
the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar were entries in the sections
for mural design, painting, sculpture, prints, commercial art, and
theater. The most important of these with regard to the Frauentreppe
(Women on Stairway) CAT. 41 are almost certainly the mural designs, for
which he used various stylized female figures to add color accents to
the walls, floors, stairwells, and niches of Henry van de Velde’s building in Weimar. Figures moving through architecturally defined spaces
was a key theme of Schlemmer’s paintings of the 1920s and 1930s, in
cat. 41
cat. 43
Piet Mondrian
Composition: Bright Color Planes
with Gray Lines (Composition
with Grid 7), 1919
cat. 44
cat. 45
cat. 46
cat. 47
Jean Arp
Relief Dada, 1916
Theo van Doesburg
Komposition mit Dissonanzen, 1919
Paul Klee
Villa R, 1919
Paul Klee
Ad marginem, 1930 / 1935–1936
cat. 48
Georges Vantongerloo
Fonction de formes, 1939
many of which the Bauhaus architecture itself is central to the composition and can be interpreted programmatically as an affirmation of
his faith in the Bauhaus project. The artist coined the term “gallery
pictures” for the group of works to which the Frauentreppe belongs.
They all show him striving for a composition based on a carefully calibrated balance of forms. The five women thus represent five different
female types—characterized as short-haired, long-haired, curly-haired
etc.—even if in terms of form Schlemmer always aspired to the same,
geometrically perfect ideal. The distance between figure and viewer is
different for each of the five women on the stairway; hence the drastic
differences in size. Also remarkable is the way the artist choreographed the bodies so that they would interact within the painting,
eventually coalescing into a single composite figure.
Max Ernst
La grande forêt, 1927
The German painter Max Ernst (1891–1976) moved to Paris in 1922,
where before long he had joined the circle of Surrealists. Their guiding principles were articulated by André Breton, the chief protagonist of what had originally been a literary group, in the Manifeste du
surréalisme published two years later: “SURREALISM, noun. Psychic
automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the
actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought in the absence of
any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral
concern.”
The writers’ quest for an “écriture automatique” that would allow them to express words, images, and feelings without any conscious
intervention on the part of the intellect ushered in a new experimental
phase in Ernst’s work. Starting in 1925, he produced several drawings
using frottage technique. In practice, this entailed laying sheets of
drawing paper over assorted materials—wood, wire, string, leaves
etc.—and then rubbing them with a pencil to produce an imprint of
what was underneath. The structures thus produced could then be
reworked as desired and gave rise to a fantastical idiom.
In La grande forêt (The Large Forest) CAT. 50, Ernst used the related
method of grattage. After placing boards and string underneath a still
damp canvas, he brought their surface structures to the fore by rubbing off the top layer of paint. He then integrated the rubbed drawing
into a forest landscape made up of trees and undergrowth. Looking
closely, the viewer can make out a bird, which is a kind of alter ego or
signature that Ernst incorporated into many of his paintings. The natural grain of the objects lends the forest an organic, but at the same
time alienating aspect. Behind the forest motif, a ring-shaped moon
rising up into the night sky emanates a cold light.
Nature is the common thread running through all of Ernst’s
works. Starting in the mid-1920s, he produced several, often mysterious-looking forest paintings. The painter himself described the
Cat. 50
cat. 49
cat. 50
cat. 53
cat. 54
Joan Miró
Peinture (Composition), 1925
Max Ernst
La grande forêt, 1927
Henri Matisse
Femme au divan, 1920 / 1921
Henri Matisse
Nature morte aux huîtres, 1940
cat. 51
cat. 52
Joan Miró
Le gentleman, 1924
Yves Tanguy
La splendeur semblable
(El fulgor semejante), 1930
ambivalent feelings that he himself had associated with the forest
since childhood in his “Biographical Notes”: “What is a forest? Mixed
feelings the first time he entered a forest—delight and consternation.
And what the Romantics term ‘the nature feeling.’ The wonderful
sense of breathing free in the great outdoors, and yet the oppressive
sense of being surrounded on all sides by hostile trees. Of being simultaneously outside and in, free and imprisoned.”
The forest in La grande forêt stands for the mysterious, the
elusive, the unconscious, and in this respect can be read as taking up
the tradition of early Romantic poetry and painting. Far from being a
realistic reproduction of nature, the forest is rather an expression of
Ernst’s dream vision in which the dividing line between real and unconscious, inner and outer, becomes irredeemably blurred.
Lucio Fontana
Concetto Spaziale, Attese, 1967
Lucio Fontana (1899–1968) moved from Argentina to Milan together
with his parents in 1905. For many years thereafter, he shuttled back
and forth between Italy and Argentina, completing his education in
Italy, where he had his first taste of success with exhibitions. In 1934
he joined the Paris-based group Abstraction-Création, an international movement of exponents of concrete, constructivist, and geometric
art. Fontana’s Manifesto bianco (White Manifesto) of 1946 proposed a
synthesis of painting, sculpture, music, and poetry, and called for a
departure from the use of conventional materials. The manifestos of
the Movimento spaziale (Spatial Movement) launched in 1947 were
premised on the impending demise of all static genres in art, whose
place would be taken by dynamic art. According to Fontana, the work
should generate its full potential solely through the imaginative powers of the beholder: “Spazialismo artists enable the individual to unleash his imaginative powers,” he wrote, “thus liberating him from all
painterly and propagandistic rhetoric.”
Fontana implemented the new concept by literally perforating
the traditional canvas, thus turning the two-dimensional painting
into a three-dimensional object. Painting, he argued, should not create an illusion of space, but should rather open up space. Most of the
artist’s perforated patterns were made on monochrome canvases
without any obvious boundaries. The idea was that space should be
perceptible as a “freely developing, limitless continuum” in painting,
as in sculpture. Fontana henceforth called his work Concetto spaziale
(Spatial Concept).
Concetto Spaziale, Attese (Spatial Concept, Expectations) CAT. 57
from the collection of the Kunstmuseum belongs to the group of tagli
(cuts) begun in 1958. Here, the artist proceeded by slashing the canvas
and then applying a gauze backing to enhance the slashes’ spatial
impact. The gauze used for this purpose in the Concetto shown here is
black, so that for the viewer standing in front of this light-colored canvas it is difficult to judge the depth of the space glimpsed behind it.
Cat. 57
cat. 58
Jean Dubuffet
Histologie du sol, 1957
cat. 55
cat. 56
cat. 57
Alberto Giacometti
Caroline, 1962
Alberto Giacometti
Annette (Nu debout), 1957
Lucio Fontana
Concetto Spaziale, Attese, 1967
The impression is more that of a mysterious abyss lurking behind the
visible surface. The slashing was done spontaneously at first; only
later did Fontana ply his knife systematically whether from front or
back of the canvas. His creation of a new pictorial mystery also entailed the destruction of the canvas as support and with it one of the
essential prerequisites of the traditional painting.
These days Fontana is associated mainly with the works in the
tagli group, even though he experimented with countless other materials, motifs, forms, colors, and genres. He was a sculptor, painter,
inventor, ceramicist, light artist, and a precursor of installation art.
His work inspired the ZERO group, the Nouveaux Réalistes, and Arte
Povera.
Gerhard Richter
Verkündigung nach Tizian, 1973
Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932 and studied painting at
the Dresden Art Academy. He left East Germany in 1961, moving to
Düsseldorf to enroll at the art academy there shortly before the Berlin
Wall was built. No longer defined by the dogmas of Socialist Realism,
his artistic milieu was henceforth shaped by the political happenings
and performances of Fluxus artists and the much broader understanding of art being taught by Joseph Beuys at the Düsseldorf Academy. It was against this backdrop that Richter and fellow students
cat. 59
cat. 60
Pablo Picasso
Femme couchée sur un divan, 1961
Maria Lassnig
Böse und Gut, 1961
Blinky Palermo cat. 61 and Sigmar Polke cat. 62 began taking an interest in
the question of how painting, with its illustrious history, might be
perpetuated into the present, even in defiance of the ideological critique to which it was now subjected. How were they to paint now that
painting had been “overcome”? Richter had been working with found
materials ever since the early 1960s, especially with photographs and
photographs reproduced in newspapers and magazines. This had
enabled him to circumvent many of the subjective decisions that had
traditionally determined artistic production. Around the middle of
the decade, he began experimenting with the blurred look of a poorly
focused photograph, which for him served as a way of lending his
motifs an abstract quality.
While taking part in the Venice Biennale of 1972, he visited
the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, where he was especially taken with
Titian’s L’Annunciazione of 1540, or thereabouts. The Renaissance
painting so fascinated the modern German painter that he resolved
to copy it so as to have “a piece of this period, this possibility of beauty and sublimity” in his own home. Richter purchased a postcard of
the motif, which back in Germany would serve him as the model for
his own version.
The painter once described the ensuing process of appropriation
as follows: “The copy turned out badly, however, and if the pictures
proved anything at all, then only the impossibility of such a work, even
as a copy. All I could do was dissolve the whole thing to show that it
was no longer possible.” Richter’s admiration for Titian thus went
Cat.
63– 66
cat. 63
cat. 64
cat. 65
cat. 66
Gerhard Richter
Verkündigung nach Tizian, 1973
Gerhard Richter
Verkündigung nach Tizian, 1973
Gerhard Richter
Verkündigung nach Tizian, 1973
Gerhard Richter
Verkündigung nach Tizian, 1973
cat. 61
cat. 62
Blinky Palermo
Ohne Titel, 1968
Sigmar Polke
Reiherbild III, 1968
hand in hand with fundamental doubts about painting in general and
his desire to expose, through his fascination with this one work, an
experience of relevance to the present.
As the word of God made flesh, the angel in Titian’s painting
stands at left, while the praying Virgin kneels at right. Having decided to depict the scene naturalistically, in an interior space, Titian
sought to convey the unreal nature of the angel by having him float
on a little cloud. It is this that lends the Renaissance masterpiece the
abstract quality that must have so astonished Richter. His first version of the work, now in the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C.,
retains Titian’s composition, but translates the motif by smearing it
to such an extent that the composition itself dissolves, even though
certain clouds of color can be linked to Titian’s original—at least by
those familiar with it.
The four versions that followed, all of which belong to the Kunstmuseum Basel, visualize a process of appropriation in which the artist
now adheres to, now drifts away from the original Old Master, all the
while focusing on the core of Titian’s painting, if not painting per se.
Color, as one of the central themes of Titian’s oeuvre, is paraded in all
its powerfully abstract immediacy. Whereas at the hands of Titian it
could embody an angel, at the hands of Richter it becomes pure painting—and painting in its turn pure color.
List of Exhibited Works
Jean Arp
(1886–1966)
Paul Cézanne
(1839–1906)
Edgar Degas
(1834–1917)
Max Ernst
(1891–1976)
Juan Gris
(1887–1927)
Wassily Kandinsky
(1866–1944)
Maria Lassnig
(1919–2014)
Henri Matisse
(1869–1954)
cat. 44
Cat. 3
Cat. 9
Cat. 50
Cat. 28
Cat. 34
Cat. 60
Cat. 23
Relief Dada, 1916
Painted wood relief
with screws
24 x 17.5 x 8.9 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
donated by Marguerite
Arp-Hagenbach, 1968
Le pigeonnier de Bellevue
(The Dovecote at Bellevue)
1888 /1892
Oil on canvas
54.2 x 81.2 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
donated by Martha and
Robert von Hirsch, 1977
Jockey blessé (Injured
Jockey), ca. 1896/1898
Oil on canvas
180.6 x 150.9 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired with special
funding from the City of
Basel, 1963
La grande forêt (The Large
Forest), 1927
Oil on canvas
113.8 x 145.9 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired with a donation
from Dr. Emanuel
Hoffmann-Stehlin, 1932
La guitare (Nature morte
à la guitare) (The Guitar
[Still Life with Guitar])
1916 (August)
Oil on canvas
73 x 54 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
donated by Dr. h.c. Raoul
La Roche, 1963
Improvisation 35, 1914
Oil on canvas
110.3 x 120.3 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
donation of Jean Arp, 1966
Böse und Gut
(Evil and Good), 1961
Oil on canvas
100 x 120 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired with funding
from the Arnold Rüdlinger
Fund of the
Freiwillige Akademische
Gesellschaft, 2013
La berge (The River Bank)
spring 1907 (Collioure)
Oil on canvas
73.2 x 60.3 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired 1953
Cat. 31
Cat. 39
Guitare, livre et
journal (Guitar, Book and
Newspaper)
1920 (January)
Oil on canvas
92 x 73 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
donated by Dr. h.c. Raoul
La Roche, 1956
Amselfluh, 1922
Oil on canvas
120 x 170.5 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired with donations
from Dr. h.c. Richard
Doetsch-Benziger and
Max Ras, 1944
Arnold Böcklin
(1827–1901)
Cat. 6
Die Toteninsel (erste
Fassung) (Island of the
Dead [First Version]), 1880
Oil on canvas
110.9 x 156.4 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
permanent loan of the
Gottfried Keller
Foundation, 1920
Cat. 7
Kentaurenkampf (Battle of
the Centaurs), 1872 /1873
Oil on canvas
104.2 x 194.3 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
Birmann Fund, 1876
Cat. 4
Cinq baigneuses (Five
Bathers), 1885 /1887
Oil on canvas
65.3 x 65.3 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired with donations
from the City of Basel, the
Max Geldner Foundation,
and private patrons, 1960
Cat. 5
Bords d’une rivière (Banks
of a River), ca. 1904
Oil on canvas
65 x 81 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel, on
permanent loan, 2001
Marc Chagall
(1887–1985)
Cat. 16
Selbstbildnis im Atelier
(Self-Portrait in the
Studio), 1893
Tempera (?) on canvas
120 x 80.8 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
Birmann Fund, 1893
Georges Braque
(1882–1963)
Cat. 26
Le Portugais (L’émigrant)
(The Portuguese [The
Emigrant]), 1911–1912
Oil on canvas
116.7 x 81.5 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
donated by Dr. h.c. Raoul
La Roche, 1952
Cat. 33
Café-Bar, 1919
Oil on canvas
159.7 x 81.5 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
donated by Dr. h.c. Raoul
La Roche, 1952
Ernst Ludwig
Kirchner (1880–1938)
Cat. 35
Le marchand de bestiaux
(The Cattle Dealer), 1912
Oil on canvas
97.1 x 202.5 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired with a donation
from Dr. h.c. Richard
Doetsch-Benziger, 1948
André Derain
(1880–1954)
Lucio Fontana
(1899–1968)
Cat. 21
Cat. 57
Les vignes au printemps
(Vineyard in Spring)
ca. 1904/1905
Oil on canvas
89.2 x 116.3 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired with special
funding from the City of
Basel, 1939
Concetto Spaziale, Attese
(Spatial Concept,
Expectations), 1967
Water-soluble paint
(idropittura) on canvas,
slashes with black gauze
backing
81.7 x 65.2 x 2.8 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
legacy of Anne-Marie and
Ernst Vischer-Wadler,
1995
Cat. 29
Nature morte au Calvaire
(Still Life with Calvary)
1912 (in Vers/Lot)
Oil on canvas
65.3 x 57.3 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired with special
funding from the City of
Basel, 1939
Jean Dubuffet
(1901–1985)
Alberto Giacometti
(1901–1966)
Cat. 55
Caroline, 1962
Oil on canvas
100 x 81 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
Birmann Fund, 1963
Cat. 56
Cat. 58
Histologie du sol
(Histology of the Soil), 1957
Oil on collaged paper
on canvas
66.7 x 92.6 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
donated by the Dr. Georg
and Josi Guggenheim
Foundation, 2004
Annette (Nu debout)
(Annette [Standing Nude])
1957
Oil on canvas
92 x 73 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
donated by the Max
Geldner Foundation, 2001
Ferdinand Hodler
(1853–1918)
Paul Klee
(1879–1940)
Cat. 46
Cat. 17
Selbstbildnis (Self-Portrait), 1912
Oil on canvas
38.4 x 29.5 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
bequest of Max Geldner,
Basel, 1958
Villa R, 1919, 153
Oil on cardboard
26.5 x 22.4 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired with special
funding from the City of
Basel, 1939
Cat. 47
Cat. 19
Genfersee mit Jura und
Wolkenkette (Lake
Geneva with Jura Hills
and Clouds), 1911
Oil on canvas
68 x 90.5 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
donated by the Arthur
Stoll Collection, 1993
Cat. 20
Der Genfersee von
Chexbres aus
(Lake Geneva, seen from
Chexbres), 1905
Oil on canvas
82.1 x 104.2 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
Birmann Fund, 1905
Ad marginem, 1930
210 (E 10)/1935–1936
(revised)
Watercolor and quill pen
on lacquered cardboard
43.5 x 33 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
bequest of Dr. h.c. Richard
Doetsch-Benziger, Basel,
1960
Fernand Léger
(1881–1955)
Cat. 27
Les maisons dans les
arbres. Paysage No 3
(Houses among Trees.
Landscape No. 3), 1914
Oil on canvas
130.4 x 96.9 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
donated by Dr. h.c. Raoul
La Roche, 1952
Cat. 32
La femme et l’enfant (La
mère et l’enfant)
(Woman and Child [Mother
and Child]), 1922
Oil on canvas
171.2 x 240.9 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
donated by Dr. h.c. Raoul
La Roche, 1956
Franz Marc
(1880–1916)
Cat. 38
Zwei Katzen, blau und
gelb (Two Cats, Blue and
Yellow), 1912
Oil on canvas
74.1 x 98.2 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired with special
funding from the City of
Basel, 1939
Cat. 53
Femme au divan (Woman
on a Divan), late 1920 /
spring 1921
(Nice, Hôtel Méditerranée)
Oil on canvas
60.2 x 73.4 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
bequest of Dr. h.c. Richard
Doetsch-Benziger, Basel,
1960
Cat. 54
Nature morte aux huîtres
(Still Life with Oysters)
1940 (December,
Nice-Cimiez, Hôtel Régina)
Oil on canvas
65.2 x 80.9 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired 1942
Joan Miró
(1893–1983)
Cat. 49
Peinture (Composition)
(Painting [Composition])
1925
Oil and charcoal on cotton
114.5 x 146.3 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired with a donation
from Dr. h.c. Richard
Doetsch-Benziger, 1953
Cat. 51
Le gentleman (The
Gentleman), 1924
Oil on canvas
52.5 x 46.5 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
donated by Marguerite
Arp-Hagenbach, 1968
Paula
Modersohn-Becker
(1876–1907)
Cat. 37
Selbstbildnis als Halbakt
mit Bernsteinkette II
(Self-Portrait Semi-Nude
with Amber Necklace II)
summer 1906
Oil on canvas
61.1 x 50 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired with special
funding from the City of
Basel, 1939
Amedeo Modigliani
(1884–1920)
Cat. 30
Marie (Marie, fille du
peuple) (Marie [Marie,
Daughter of the People])
1918
Oil on canvas
61.2 x 49.8 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
bequest of Dr. Walther
Hanhart, Riehen, 1975
Piet Mondrian
(1872–1944)
Cat. 43
Composition: Bright Color
Planes with Gray Lines
(Composition with Grid 7)
1919
Oil on canvas
49.1 x 49.2 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
donated by Marguerite
Arp-Hagenbach, 1968
Not illustrated
Composition with Double
Line and Yellow and Blue
1933
Oil on canvas
41 x 33.5 cm
Private collection
Claude Monet
(1840–1926)
Pablo Picasso
(1881–1973)
Sigmar Polke
(1941– 2010)
Gerhard Richter
(born 1932)
Cat. 11
Cat. 25
Cat. 62
Cat. 63
Les falaises d’Aval avec la
Porte et l’Aiguille (The
Rock Needle and the Porte
d'Aval), 1884
Oil on canvas
60.2 x 81.5 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
permanent loan of
the Dr. h.c. Emile Dreyfus
Foundation, 1970
Le poète (The Poet)
1912 (Sorgues)
Oil on canvas
59.9 x 47.9 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
donated to the City of Basel
by Maja Sacher-Stehlin;
permanent loan of the
residents of the City of
Basel, 1967
Reiherbild III (Heron
Picture III), 1968
Acrylic on beaver-cloth
185.6 x 150.7 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
donated by the Max
Geldner Foundation, 2008
Verkündigung nach Tizian
(Annunciation after
Titian), 1973
Oil on canvas
125 x 200 cm
Ref. No. 343/2
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired with a donation
to the Öffentliche
Kunstsammlung Basel
from Dr. h.c. Maja Oeri on
May 9, 2014
Cat. 12
Cat. 59
La passerelle sur le
bassin aux nymphéas
(The Footbridge over the
Water-Lily Pond), 1919
Oil on canvas
65.6 x 106.4 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired with special
funding from the City of
Basel and a donation
from the Max Geldner
Foundation, 1986
Femme couchée sur un
divan (Woman Reclining
on a Divan), 1961
Oil on canvas
81 x 100 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired 1964
Camille Pissarro
(1830–1903)
Odilon Redon
(1840–1916)
Cat. 8
Saint Sébastien
(Saint Sebastian), 1910
Oil on canvas
92.3 x 59.3 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired 1954
Pierre-Auguste
Renoir
(1841–1919)
Cat. 1
Emil Nolde
(1867–1956)
Cat. 40
Blaue Iris I (Blue Iris I)
1915
Oil on canvas
89.1 x 73.8 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired 1930
Un coin de l’Hermitage,
Pontoise (A Corner of
L'Hermitage, Pontoise)
1878
Oil on canvas
54.6 x 65 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
donated by several
patrons and acquired with
a donation from the City of
Basel, 1912
Cat. 2
Blinky Palermo
(1919–2014)
Cat. 61
Ohne Titel (Untitled), 1968
Cotton and linen
200 x 200 x 2.8 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired with funding
from the Arnold Rüdlinger
Fund of the
Freiwillige Akademische
Gesellschaft, Basel, 2010
Effet de neige à l’Hermitage
(Snowy Landscape near
the Hermitage), 1875
Oil on canvas
54.2 x 73 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired out of the
acquisitions budget with a
contribution from the Max
Geldner Foundation, 1991
Cat. 10
Paysage aux environs
d’Essoyes (Paysage avec
deux figures sur l’herbe)
(Landscape near Essoyes
[Landscape with Two
Figures on the Grass]), 1892
Oil on canvas
46.6 x 55.2 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired with a
contribution “in
memoriam Paul Joerin,”
2000
Cat. 13
Femme dans un jardin
(La femme à la mouette)
(Woman in a Garden
[Woman with a Seagull
Hat]), 1868
Oil on canvas
105.5 x 73.4 cm
Kunstmusuem Basel,
acquired with special
funding from the City of
Basel and numerous
private donations, 1988
Cat. 64
Verkündigung nach
Tizian (Annunciation after
Titian), 1973
Oil on canvas
150 x 250 cm
Ref. No. 344/1
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired with a donation
to the Öffentliche
Kunstsammlung Basel
from a society founded
by leading Basel
personalities, 2014
Henri Rousseau
(le Douanier)
(1844–1910)
Oskar Schlemmer
(1888–1943)
Theo van Doesburg
(1883–1931)
Cat. 41
Cat. 45
Forêt vierge au soleil
couchant (Jungle with
Setting Sun), ca. 1910
Oil on canvas
113.6 x 162.3 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired 1948
Frauentreppe (Women on
Stairway), 1925
Oil on canvas
120.6 x 68.9 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired with special
funding from the City of
Basel, 1939
Komposition mit
Dissonanzen (Composition
in Dissonances), 1919
Oil on canvas
64.9 x 59.6 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
donated by Marguerite
Arp-Hagenbach, 1968
Cat. 24
Cat. 42
La muse inspirant le
poète (The Muse Inspiring
the Poet), 1909
Oil on canvas
146.2 x 96.9 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired with donations
from Dr. h.c. Richard
Doetsch-Benziger, Karl Im
Obersteg, René
Guggenheim, and a patron
who wished to remain
anonymous, 1940
Blaues Bild (Blue
Painting), 1928
Oil and tempera on canvas
125.5 x 117.5 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel, on
permanent loan from a
private collection, 1955
Cat. 22
Egon Schiele
(1890–1918)
Cat. 65
Cat. 36
Verkündigung nach
Tizian (Annunciation after
Titian), 1973
Oil on canvas
150 x 250 cm
Ref. No. 344/2
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired with a donation
to the Öffentliche
Kunstsammlung Basel
from a society founded
by leading Basel
personalities, 2014
Bildnis Erich Lederer
(Portrait of Erich Lederer),
1912–1913
Oil and gouache on canvas
140 x 55.4 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
donated by Mrs Erich
Lederer-von Jacobs in
memory of her deceased
husband, 1986
Cat. 66
Verkündigung nach
Tizian (Annunciation after
Titian), 1973
Oil on canvas
150 x 250 cm
Ref. No. 344/3
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired with a donation
to the Öffentliche
Kunstsammlung Basel
from a society founded
by leading Basel
personalities, 2014
Yves Tanguy
(1900–1955)
Vincent van Gogh
(1853–1890)
Cat. 14
Marguerite Gachet au
piano (Marguerite Gachet
at the Piano)
1890 (June 26–27)
Oil on canvas
102.5 x 50 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
acquired 1934
Cat. 52
La splendeur semblable (El
fulgor semejante) (Similar
Resplendence), 1930
Oil on canvas
91.5 x 73 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
donated by Dr. Charles F.
Leuthardt, Riehen, 1980
Félix Vallotton
(1865–1925)
Cat. 18
La mare (Honfleur)
(The Pond [Honfleur]), 1909
Oil on canvas
73.2 x 100.2 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
permanent loan of the
Friends of the
Kunstmuseum Basel and
the Museum für
Gegenwartskunst, 1995
Cat. 15
Portrait de lui-même à
l’estampe japonaise (SelfPortrait with a Japanese
Print), December 1887
Oil on canvas
43.2 x 33.9 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
permanent loan of
the Dr. h.c. Emile Dreyfus
Foundation, 1970
Georges
Vantongerloo
(1886–1965)
Cat. 48
Fonction de formes
(The Function of Forms)
1939 (Paris)
Tempera on white,
polished priming on
fiberboard
61.5 x 30 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel,
donated by Marguerite
Arp-Hagenbach 1968
This brochure was published
for the exhibition
Cézanne to Richter
Masterpieces
of the Kunstmuseum Basel
Museum für Gegenwartskunst
February 14, 2015 – February 21,
2016
Editor:
Bernhard Mendes Bürgi,
Kunst­museum Basel
Copy-editing:
Maren Stotz
English translation and
copy-editing:
Bronwen Saunders
Texts:
Katharina Katz: Wassily Kandinsky
Maren Stotz: Max Ernst
Anne-Christine Strobel: Franz Marc,
Henri Matisse, Vincent van Gogh
Nina Zimmer: Paul Cézanne,
Lucio Fontana, Gerhard Richter,
Henri Rousseau, Oskar Schlemmer
For information on sources
and further reading, please see
the “Collection Online” at:
www.kunstmuseumbasel.ch and
the book: Kunstmuseum Basel.
The Masterpieces, Hatje Cantz
Verlag, 405 pages, 160 color ill.
CHF 65.-. Available at:
www.shop.kunstmuseumbasel.ch
Design:
sofie’s Kommunikationsdesign,
Zürich
Typeface: Centennial
Paper: Lessebo Smooth White FSC®
Reproduction and Printing:
Gremper AG, Basel/Pratteln
Photos:
For all photos: Kunstmuseum Basel,
Martin P. Bühler, except cat. 63–66:
Marco Blessano Fotografie, Uster
ISBN 978-3-7204-0218-7
German edition:
978-3-7204-0217-0
French edition:
978-3-7204-0219-4
Kunstmuseum Basel
Director:
Bernhard Mendes Bürgi
Managing Director:
Stefan Charles
Curator:
Bernhard Mendes Bürgi
Assistant Curator:
Maren Stotz
Registrars:
Charlotte Gutzwiller, Maya Urich
Restoration and Conservation:
Werner Müller, Amelie Jensen,
Carole Joos
Exhibition Installation:
Claude Bosch, Bruno Liechti,
Urs Nachbur, Stefano Schaller,
Andreas Schweizer, Muriel Utinger,
Michael Wenger
Photography:
Martin P. Bühler
Press and Public Relations:
Michael Mathis, Christian Selz,
Alain Hollfelder
Art Education:
Simone Moser, Andrea Saladin
Museum für Gegenwartskunst
with the Emanuel Hoffmann
Foundation
St. Alban-Rheinweg 60
CH-4010 Basel
www.kunstmuseumbasel.ch
Opening times:
Tue.–Sun. 10 am–6 pm
Open: Dec. 25, 26 and 31, 2015
and Jan. 1, 2016
Closed: Christmas Eve and
Feb. 15–17, 2016 (Fasnacht)
© 2015 Kunstmuseum Basel and
the authors
© 2015 for the reproduced works
by Jean Arp, Georges Braque, Marc
Chagall, André Derain, Jean
Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Lucio Fontana,
Wassily Kandinsky, Fernand Léger,
Blinky Palermo, Pablo Picasso, Yves
Tanguy, Georges Vantongerloo:
Pro Litteris, Zürich; © 2015 for the
works by Alberto Giacometti:
Fondation Giacometti / Pro Litteris,
Zürich; by Marc Chagall: Chagall ®;
by Henri Matisse: Succession
H. Matisse / Pro Litteris, Zürich; by
Emil Nolde: Nolde Stiftung Seebüll;
by Juan Miró: Successió Miró / Pro
Litteris, Zürich; by Sigmar Polke:
The Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne /
Pro Litteris, Zürich; by Gerhard
Richter the artist; and by Maria
Lassnig her legal successors.