Museums in Basel - Museum Landscape

Museum Landscape

The main focus of collecting among Basel museums is the fine arts – painting, drawing and sculpture. More than a dozen museums cover a spectrum that extends from antiquity up to the present and includes historic and established works of art as well as pioneering creations. In particular, the latter category has been made increasingly accessible to the public over the past two decades in a series of newly opened museums. There are collections with more of a local and regional character, yet a number of area museums, especially the larger institutions, are noted for their international orientation and reach. In addition, Basel benefits from a long tradition of collecting that, in contrast to many other museums in Central Europe, was not disrupted by the wars of the 20th century, as well as from the city’s well-established connections to the market of art dealers and art collectors – such as through Art Basel.

• Kunstmuseum Basel; painting and drawing by Upper Rhine artists of the 14th to 16th centuries, art of the 19th and 20th centuries

• Basel Museum of Ancient Art and Ludwig Collection; ancient art and culture from the Mediterranean region

• Museum of Contemporary Art and Media Art; ; contemporary and avant-garde art from the 1960s up to the present

• Beyeler Foundation; classical modern art of the 20th century

Numerous museums address various themes of cultural history and ethnology while other institutions feature technical and scientific collections. The museums continue to be oriented to the scholarly tasks of collecting, conserving and exhibiting as well as research and education or at least view these as part of their activities. Consistent with museological trends seen elsewhere, however, the traditional self-image has evolved since the 1960s. Alongside the new forms of public outreach (museum education and didactics), institutional hybrid forms have arisen that actively embrace a sociopolitically relevant role and in which museum operations constitute just one facet, albeit a highly important one, of a more comprehensive cultural institution.

• Basel Museum of Cultures; European and non-European ethnology (Tibet, Bali, South Seas, Ancient America)

• Swiss Paper Museum – Basel Paper Mill; paper production and the culture of writing

• Natural History Museum Basel; zoology, entomology, mineralogy, anthropology, osteology and paleontology

• S AM Swiss Architecture Museum in Kunsthalle Basel; international architecture and contemporary urban design

With the city's position at the junction of the "Dreiländereck" (Three-Countries Corner) and the compact municipal boundaries within the Basel region, most of Basel’s museums are located in the city of Basel and thus in the canton of Basel-City but quite a few of museums lie in the canton of Basel-Country. The Basel museum landscape can also be said to extend to the museums of the greater metropolitan area, such as those in the neighboring towns of Lörrach, Saint-Louis and Weil am Rhein, with the latter included in the annual Basel Museum Night through the participation of Vitra Design Museum in Weil. In view of the numerous municipal, regional and national administrative units that come together here as well as the broader agglomeration, it is difficult to produce a conclusive figure for the number of Basel museums. Yet even when taking a narrowly drawn perimeter, the total comes to at least three dozen institutions that house collections and make them accessible to the public. The Basel museums are also part of the German-French-Swiss "Upper Rhine Museum Pass" that was introduced in 1999. This covers a much wider area than the Basel region, however, extending via Strasbourg up to Mannheim.

• Museum am Burghof in Lörrach; history of the Three-Countries Region up to the present

• Toy Museum and Village and Wine Cultivation Museum in Riehen; toys, village life and wine growing

• Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein; furniture design and architecture

• Roman House in Augusta Raurica; finds from the Roman town and archaeological park

With the increasing aestheticization of everyday life, the architecture of museums has taken on special significance since the 1980s. A striking number of exhibition structures have incorporated a vocabulary of postmodern and deconstructivist forms. In and around Basel, new buildings, additions or renovations have been constructed from designs by nationally and internationally renowned architects (Renzo Piano, Zaha Hadid, Frank O. Gehry, Wilfried and Katharina Steib, Herzog & de Meuron, Mario Botta) and celebrated as examples of avant-garde museum architecture. In other area museums, by contrast, the building fabric is old to very old, consisting of former residential and commercial buildings or monasteries and churches that have been converted for exhibition purposes.

• Schaulager (architects: Herzog & de Meuron); Emmanuel Hoffmann Foundation

• Tinguely Museum (architect: Mario Botta); Jean Tinguely and contemporaries

• Dollhouse Museum at Barfüsserplatz; dolls, teddy bears, miniatures

• Historical Museum Basel – Barfüsser Church; cultural history of the city of Basel and the Upper Rhine

The museums are a central aspect of Basel's touristic appeal and hence an important economic factor. A number of Basel's museums are public institutions but the majority are privately sponsored, backed in most cases by foundations. Helping to generate the high density of museums compared to other cities and metropolitan areas of similar size, these private collections have also made a substantial contribution to the high level of museum quality. The private collections nearly all came into being after the Second World War. Most of the public museums, by contrast, date from before the war. In fact, the collections of the five publicly run museums of the canton of Basel-City have histories that go back several centuries.