Museums in Basel
The Basel museums encompass a series of museums in the city of Basel, Switzerland, and the neighboring region. They represent a broad spectrum of collections with a marked concentration in the fine arts and house numerous holdings of international significance. 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. They draw some one and a half million visitors annually.
Constituting an essential and defining component of Basel culture and cultural policy, the museums are the result of closely interwoven private and public collecting activities and promotion of arts and culture going back to the 16th century. The public museums of the canton of Basel-City arose from the 1661 purchase of the private Amerbach Cabinet by the city and the University of Basel and thus represent the oldest civic museum collection in continuous existence. Since the 1980s, a number of collections have been made public in new purpose-built structures that have achieved renown as acclaimed examples of avant-garde museum architecture.
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; [plug.in]; contemporary and avant-garde art from the 1960s up to the present
![Museum of Contemporary Art and Media Art; [plug.in]; contemporary and avant-garde art from the 1960s up to the present](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/Museum_Gegenwartskunst_und_plug-in%2C_Basel.jpg/120px-Museum_Gegenwartskunst_und_plug-in%2C_Basel.jpg)
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.
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[1] 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.
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,[2] 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.[3]
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.
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,[4] 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.