Museums in Basel

With at least three dozen institutions, not including the local history collections in the surrounding communities, the region offers an extraordinarily high density of museums compared to other metropolitan areas of similar size.

In view of the numerous municipal, regional and national administrative units that come together here as well as the broader agglomeration,[2] it is difficult to produce a conclusive figure for the number of Basel museums.

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.

Significant holdings of antiquities, coins, fossils and natural curiosities made their way into the Haus zur Mücke through purchases, gifts or bequests by private collectors.

In Basel, however, a substantial number of them were preserved, which means that the armory caretakers wished to store the obsolete medieval or early modern militaria for the sake of memory value.

A few decades later, however, the building and its infrastructure no longer accommodated the increased volume of visitors (with the facility open four days of the week starting in 1829) and the modern culture of knowledge established through the Enlightenment.

Moreover, a comprehensive index of the holdings was lacking, having been "altogether impossible heretofore in the inadequate premises where some pieces lay buried in darkened recesses for decades beneath an inch-thick layer of dust.

"[9] The need for space was resolved in 1849 with the removal of the collection to the multi-purpose building by Melchior Berri on Augustinergasse – simply named the "Museum" – on the site of the former Augustinian monastery.

While taking clear inspiration from Karl Friedrich Schinkel and his Academy of Architecture in Berlin, the allocation of spaces and functions here combined university facilities with a library and natural history and art collections.

Meanwhile, in 1874, the chemistry and physics institutes had moved into the new Bernoullianum building for the study of the natural sciences, whereupon their holdings of objects shed their collection character in favor of laboratory facilities.

It is the only Swiss museum devoted exclusively to the art of the Mediterranean area (mainly Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek, Italic and Roman cultures, as well as Levante and the Near East) from the 4th millennium B.C.

On display are burial objects such as urns, documents on the history of cremation, hearses, coffins, cemetery regulations, graveyard crosses, glass pearl chains and memorial keepsakes.

[21] The concept of a multi-purpose building, following the example of the Museum on Augustinergasse, was embraced by the Basel Art Society (Basler Kunstverein), which erected the Kunsthalle on Steinenberg between 1869 and 1872.

It is one of the world's largest collections on the history of pharmacy, encompassing old pharmaceuticals and early apothecary objects, laboratory utensils, ceramics, instruments, books, arts and crafts.

The exhibition galleries have been located in a structure from the Late Gothic period since 1996, following the completion of renovations and a new building addition by the architects Herzog & de Meuron.

It realizes exhibitions and projects, provides artists with international networking opportunities and helps convey works of media art to the general public.

With one of the world's most extensive collections of photographs (around 300,000 works with an emphasis on industrial society in the 19th century), the Herzog Foundation has exhibited its holdings since 2002 in a “Laboratory for Photography”.

Located in the Dreispitz industrial sector, the warehouse converted by Herzog & de Meuron encompasses the collection along with a reference library on the history of photography and two additional rooms for study, teaching and research purposes.

The adjacent reconstruction of a Roman House (Römerhaus) was a gift of the Basel patron René Clavel while the museum and the entire archaeological park constitute a departmental division of Basel-Country.

In addition to the 1989 museum by Frank O. Gehry, the grounds feature structures by Zaha Hadid, Nicholas Grimshaw, Tadao Ando and Álvaro Siza.

Since the 19th century, in contrast, Basel has embraced a culture of remembrance of having created the oldest existing civic museum collection through its purchase of the Amerbach Cabinet in the year 1661.

[43][44] These occurrences led to the founding of the Voluntary Academic Society of Basel (Freiwillige Akademische Gesellschaft) in 1835, which began supporting the collections in financial terms and through purchases and gifts as part of its general promotion of the university.

The museum, by contrast, was seen as a driving force for practical popular education and the community was willing to support its construction with private contributions as part of a wider process of renewal in the city.

[47] Open to all residents of Basel, the association promoted the collections with financial means and sought to generate interest in the museum through public lectures to which women were also admitted.

With the epochal break of the First World War and in light of societal and cultural developments, the Basel museums became concerned with the citizenry's assertions of legitimacy and quest for recognition and their representation within these very same institutions.

The construction of a dedicated museum for Basel's art collection ignited a “monumentality debate” in the late 1920s, in which the proponents of functionally oriented New Building (Neues Bauen) rejected the timelessly classic palatial form that was ultimately chosen as a demonstration of power by a conservative and “intellectually spent” notion of culture.

The acquisitions of the State Art Credit and the 1967 Christmas exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel set off fierce protests among the loosely organized association of rejected artists, which became known as the Farnsburg Group (Farnsburgergruppe).

With a focus on the constructivist works of the 1960s associated with the “New Tendencies” (Nouvelles Tendances) movement, the short-lived Progressive Museum (1968–1974) set out to “establish a modern collection that would be accessible to the public from the very beginning” and wanted to avoid any sort of “secularized ceremony”.

As a central component of cultural expenditures,[61] the museums have also been included in the intensified negotiations over the past several years between the two Basel cantons regarding payment for the city-provided services within the framework of a fiscal equalization scheme.

This competitive situation is further reflected in the considerable institutional autonomy of the Basel-City museums, which are the only governmental enterprises in the canton operating under the private-sector influenced method of New Public Management.