The floorplan bears instructions: HOW TO REACH THE GEGENWART. Scan the QR code and Google Maps will show you just how easy it is to find your way to the present day.
I won't be going quite so far this afternoon: the Gegenwart is hosting “When We See Us,” and Basel’s Kunstmuseum collections are to be seen in the galleries in the Hauptbau and two spaces in the Neubau. They are what I'm visiting today. Or rather, since visiting a collection is not really something one can do, I am calling on a small selection, excerpts from a holding of works so vast that many never see the light of day. Any museum collection is itself a selection: not a random gathering or a complete system, but rather a result of a vast series of contingencies, historical accidents, fortuitous meetings, chance encounters, smart purchases, friendships and jealousies, thefts and gifts, bequests and conditions, many no doubt kept reluctantly, not to mention all the breakages and losses, the works that were forgotten, abandoned, and destroyed, all the happenstance that makes a collection simply what it happens to be: a unique and idiosyncratic gathering of strangers (the title of Maria Balshaw’s recent book on museums and Nathan Coley’s lightwork, which Balshaw installed outside the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester).
The Basel collection began with the city’s acquisition of the Amerbach Cabinet in 1661. This vast collection of objects, books, and images, including many works by Holbein the Younger, to whom both Erasmus and Amerbach (the elder, Bonifacius) were close, was greatly extended by Basilius, one of Bonifacius’s sons, and became the first such collection in the world to be held by and for the public. This mark of distinction it will never lose: other houses may claim to be the most extensive, representative, or thorough collection of this or that (artist, period, region, school), but Basel’s collection will always be the oldest of them all. And Holbein’s paintings are still amongst its star attractions, especially his extraordinary The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb(c. 1521).Commissioned by Amerbach, it has the power to stop even the most casual visitors in their tracks. Dostoyevsky was famously enthralled, “enraptured” by the painting, in the words of Anna, his wife: “wishing to see it more closely, he climbed on a chair, so that I was in great fear that he would have to pay a fine, because here one has to pay a fine all the time.” The painting later figured in The Idiot (1868–69) as the image of nihilism, a work that could make one lose one’s faith.
After Dostoyevsky’s visit in the mid-19th century, the collection continued to grow, first with the addition of another cabinet of curiosities and works, including more paintings by Holbein and his peers, which had been collected by the lawyer Regimius Faesch 200 years earlier, and later with the acquisition of substantial holdings of Swiss, European, and, increasingly, American art. Just as Amerbach had saved so many works from the iconoclastic excesses of the Reformation, several works were bought (at knockdown prices) from Nazi Germany’s collection of Entartete Kunst – degenerate art – rescued by Georg Schmidt. These include Lovis Corinth’s magnificent Ecce Homo(1925), which replays Christ as a very living body in the room, a thorn-crowned bundle of androgenous energy in chains, held back by a man in a uniform and one in a white coat, embodiments of modern power.
The passage through the centuries is long; I am relieved to reach the upper floor with its natural light and familiar faces, landscapes I recognise, perspectives I can share. I pause at Pissarro’s painting of women with baskets and bundles of straw, and think of Agnès Varda’s film Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (“The gleaners and I,” 2000), and Varda herself as a gleaner too, attending to the detail of the scenes she collects and recollects, picking up threads, assembling bits and pieces of the world and giving them a new life in her work. Pissarro’s Les Glaneuses (1889), which is both a landscape and a portrait of the group that is gathered and gathering there, was painted in honour of those at the edges and the bottom of a society which had hitherto considered them unworthy of such fine attention. Varda’s film begins with an earlier portrayal of these workers by Jean-François Millet, which she films together with its visitors in the Musée d’Orsay. Some pause, some linger, others barely glance; some capture it on camera for collections of their own. Are we, the museum visitors and I, also gleaners in the galleries as we gather our impressions and take our notes, collecting and recollecting images?
There’s a lot to pick up from the modern works, which feel more like friends and relations than strangers from the distant past and are given far more room in which to play. Irène Zurkinden’s Meret à l’oiseau (1940) hangs out with a troupe of circus performers, tightrope walkers, clowns and harlequins, including Picasso’s Arlequin assis (1923); Chagall’s Rabbi (1912) takes a pinch of snuff as though in an effort to cope with the sightof Hermann Scherer’s Penthesilia(1929). Maeglin’s Farbarbeiter beim Einfüllen von Rot (1834/38) mixes the red hue that then appears in several of his other paintings, and in His’s depopulated landscapes too. The early cabinets reflected the new sense of perspective that marked their times: a new understanding of history, humanity, the sciences and arts, and a longing to bring something of everything together in one place. We still have these ambitions, even though we know how close they come to the colonial mentality with which Europe strove to acquire whole regions and peoples, as well as their art and artefacts, and hold them in a meta-collection of its own. But it is not so easy to break with this legacy. Growth is what drives the collection: it has gaps to fill, omissions to correct, prejudices to overcome, as well as the works of living artists to collect for a time when our present will be just another gallery display.
Are there limits to this growth? Deaccession and disposal are almost taboo, but how far can the logics of expansion and accumulation go? How big will the depots have to be? How will they be curated and visited? Are we thrilled by the thought of all these treasures, hidden in the holds, a store of potentiality? Or is this an embarrassment of riches which we’re not quite sure what we are keeping for – even a source of anxiety? I think of all the images and objects in the stores, fearing they may never see the light of day. And always more to choose from too: more artists and works and regions of the world. We make more space, for their storage and for their display: the Neubau here in Basel, the extension to the Kunsthaus in Zürich, and the one that is planned for the Kunstmuseum in Bern. We wonder: should everything be on display? Should we take a lot of a little or a little of a lot (or even a little of a little, as Orhan Pamuk has done with his Museum of Innocence in Istanbul)? What should be our guidelines, and where should they be drawn? “Zeichnung Heute,” the current exhibition of drawings acquired in recent years for the Kupferstichkabinett, makes a thoughtful effort to avoid the encyclopaedic tendency to show “a few works of as many artists as possible.” Two hundred works by just nine artists are hung in all sorts of imaginative ways to suggest something more like collectives than gatherings. In the Neubau, however, works from this same period feel more separated than linked by a space in which they stand as fragments, isolated individuals who don’t quite know how to interact, either with each other or their visitors. We learn a lot about some of them; to others we are not even introduced. Gatherings of strangers indeed. Can there be a dialogue between Frank Stella’s Damascus Gate: Variation I(1969–70) and its neighbour, Louise Lawler’s Three Flags (swiped and taken) (adjusted to fit) (mirrored or flipped) Cease Fire (2022)? Do we really want to get to know the strangers in our midst? Or is this our way of keeping them at bay?
In “New Constellations,” which includes one of Julie Mehretu’s impressive TRANSpaintings, Cameron Rowland’s police flashlights, three of Richter’s takes on Titian’s Annunciation (c. 1562), flashing neon from Bruce Naumann, a Danh Vo piece of We the People (2010–14), and a 17th-century painting of peasants fighting, to name a few, the question of selection is explicitly addressed: A wall text speaks of unexpected encounters and juxtapositions which make a deliberate attempt to move away from the “chronological, stylistic, geographical, or thematic arrangements that guide other collection presentations in the museum.”
This certainly draws our attention to the traditional bases on which works are selected for display. I see how empowering it wants to be, both for the art works and their visitors: they are free to make their own connections, and we are free to make of them what we will. But something brings them together, the strangers gathered here. What are the new criteria?
Agnès Varda’s mission was not, she said, “to show things, but to give people the desire to see.” As well as Millet’s painting, her film refers to a gleaner painted by Jules Breton; an anonymous pastiche, itself gleaned from a brocante, which effectively combines Breton’s figure and Millet’s group; and, in the last scene, Edmond Hédouin’s Gleaners Fleeing before a Storm(1852), which she films as its curators bring it out of storage for its own brief visit to the present day.