Cézanne to Richter

As the main building of the Kunstmuseum Basel is closed for a year of renovations, the museum has launched a rich program of exhibitions, primarily at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst. One particular highlight is the show Cézanne to Richter – Masterpieces from the Kunstmuseum Basel. Curated by Bernhard Mendes Bürgi, the exhibition traces the major developments in European painting through the 1970s.

One highlight of the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel is its collection of eminent works of late-nineteenth-century and classic modernist art. Works by masters from Paul Cézanne to Gerhard Richter are on display in the great skylight hall and the adjacent galleries of the Museum für Gegenwartskunst. The exposition offers a panorama of the evolution of European painting through the 1970s that enables visitors to trace the seminal artistic developments of the period.

The presentation of around seventy works is generally arranged along chronological lines; instead of constructing a didactic narrative in which one school succeeds another, it vividly illustrates the simultaneity of disparate tendencies that is the period’s essential characteristic.

The show features around seventy works by Cézanne, Pissarro, Monet, Degas, Renoir, van Gogh, Modersohn-Becker, Böcklin, Hodler, Braque, Picasso, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Klee, Miró, Fontana, Palermo, Tanguy, Richter, and others.