Agenda

Be it in furniture design, fashion design, industrial design, or interior design, women have contributed crucially to the development of modern design, both creatively and commercially. The exhibition (Here We Are! Women in Design 1900 – Today) Presents women designers from the past 120 years.

It tells a new story of design against the background of the struggle for equal rights and recognition. Around eighty women in design are showcased in the exhibition, including protagonists of modernism like Eileen Gray, Charlotte Perriand, Lilly Reich, and Clara Porset, business leaders like Florence Knoll and Armi Ratia, but also lesser-known figures like the social reformer Jane Addams. Contemporary positions and future outlooks are represented by such designers as Matali Crasset, Patricia Urquiola, Julia Lohmann, as well as the collectives Matri-Archi(tecture) and Futuress.

To celebrate the 700th anniversary of the death of Alighieri Dante (1265-1321),  the museum honours this great figure of literature with the  exhibition The Making of Dante. 

The term “making” is intended to interpret Dante’s work as a giant laboratory of literature and to refer to his ongoing “creation” over the centuries. 

The exhibition is divided into three parts; the first brings visitors closer to Alighieri through famous readers of his works, from Charles Baudelaire to David Bowie. 

The second part reconstructs what is likely to have been Dante’s library and the poet’s “dialogue” with the texts he read. 

The third section leads to his writings and to Dante, the poet and Dante, the human being.

The show also presents rare books and manuscripts from the Martin Bodmer Fondation and from other institutions. There is, for example, an original copy of the famous portrait of Dante by Sandro Botticelli from 1495.  

The Centre Culturel du Manoir de Cologny is organising the exhibition Le studiolo de Dante and  the three worlds of the Divine Comedy, the Hell, the Purgatory and the Paradise.

The exhibition is a journey back in time to the 15th century and lets the lord of Landshut Castle at that time, Thüring von Ringoltingen, have his say. Fascinated by the French legend of the water fairy “Melusina”, in 1456, he tells his own version of this mythical figure’s fate, of her knight Reymond and the doom of the “forbidden gaze”.

This is what happened to the noble knight when he broke his promise, observed Melusina in the bath and discovered that his wife had “the shape of a large worm from the navel downwards”!

The printing of Thüring’s Melusina novel by a publisher in Basel, embellished with expressive woodcuts, laid the foundation for a four-hundred-year success story! While the exhibition impressively depicts Thüring’s Melusina in artistic illustrations, the visitor is learning exciting facts about fashion, habits and customs in the late 15th century.

The Tinguely museum ship Ahoy! returned on 23 September from a trip of eleven weeks.

The weekend of 25–26 September 2021 will mark the culmination of the jubilee activities of the museum. The Solitude Park, the museum and the exhibition barge at anchor right next to the museum set the stage for the celebrations.

Countless activities, workshops, shows and culinary will be embedded in a dynamic labyrinth. Saturday evening will be devoted to concerts and DJ sets.

The programme has been conceived as a kind of ‹Best of› the museum’s many different activities of the past twenty-five years.

The richly decorated staircase in the Neuchâtel Museum of Art and History (Musée d’art et d’histoire) is a total work of art that always exerts a special fascination. But what is the history behind it? Who were the visionary artists that created this extraordinary structure?

And what can we learn from each of the details in its monumental paintings and unique architecture?

Museum decided to install a multimedia terminal featuring new methods of visualisation  to meet educational and scientific challenges. Details that were almost invisible can now be examined, and visitors are free to choose the information that matches their particular interests.

Visitors can explore the fine details of the three monumental paintings by Léo-Paul Robert (1851-1923): they depict the canton of Neuchâtel’s main regions and their specific activities.

At Neuchâtel: intellectual life, the glory of God and an ambience of the Last Judgement. At Val-de-Ruz: country life, the regeneration of nature spoiled by human activities, together with Peace and the Kingdom of God. And at La Chaux-de-Fonds: industrial life, resolution of the social conflict, and benevolence towards the human race in a pre-apocalyptic era.

The Art Nouveau decoration of the staircase and the stained-glass windows (Clement Heaton 1861-1940) can be admired as well.

The exhibition (Die geträumte Stadt. Nicht realisierte Planungsprojekte für Basel) presents hitherto little-known 20th-century ideas for town planning in Basel that have not been realised and places them in their current context.

It shows that ambitious projects are also being worked on and realised today, even if they were previously considered “dreams”.

Surveys of the history of construction and planning reveal the leaps in scale and significance that the city has made from the pre-industrial city to the post-industrial, globally networked business location of the knowledge society.

The exhibition shows works by women artists occupying prominent positions within the history of modern art from 1870 to the present day.

It was at the beginning of this period that women artists in Europe and America were in a position to make their first significant incursions into the professional world of art.

The exhibition centers around nine artists, united in their emphasis on the depiction of the human figure: on the portrait, in widely differing forms, and the self-portrait.

The French painter Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) and the American Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), both active in the 1870s and 1880s in Paris, the then center of contemporary art; the German Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907), moving in the early 1900s between cosmopolitan Paris and the north German provincial town of Worpswede; the German Lotte Laserstein (1898-1993), active from 1925 to 1933 in Berlin during the later years of the Weimar Republic; Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), who worked from the early 1920s until around 1950 in Mexico City, during the consolidation and institutionalization of the Mexican state in the aftermath of the Revolution; the American Alice Neel (1900-1984), with a practice spanning the late 1920s to the 1980s, at first in Cuba and then in Manhattan, moving between Greenwich Village, Spanish Harlem, and the Upper West Side; Marlene Dumas (1953), who grew up in Cape Town when apartheid was at its height, before relocating in 1976 to work in Amsterdam; from the same period, the US artist Cindy Sherman (1954), based in New York, the Western center of contemporary art established by the new postwar generation; and finally, the American Elizabeth Peyton (1965), travelling back and forth between New York and western Europe since the 1990s.

The exhibition focusses on the artists’ gaze, on their personal vision of their surroundings that finds expression in the portraits of themselves and others.

In a synoptic perspective, it becomes possible to experience how the artists’ view of their subject shifts between 1870 and the present day, and what makes it significant.

The exhibition (Menschen in Stein gemeisselt) displays Neolithic stelae from various European countries, offering a unique insight into the world of people who lived around 6,000 years ago.

In the Neolithic period, people in Europe began to settle down; they started practicing agriculture, keeping animals and using metal. These changes brought about tremendous societal upheaval.

The stone stelae in human shape found throughout Europe, erected at great effort, are testament to this. They are among the earliest monuments on our continent. Some of the stone figures have faces and arms, hairstyles and even tattoos.

Others are wearing or carrying valuable or useful items that depict the innovations of their time: axes for felling trees or for fighting, a plough for working the fields, jewellery made of copper for prestige display, bows and arrows for hunting and weapons for hand-to-hand combat.

Even today, the stelae tell of the reality of life in an era that was marked by violence and change. The growing population, the struggle for resources and jealousy led to conflicts that can be read from the stone sculptures and the places where they were found.

Depicted on the stone stelae are members of the new elite, high-ranking women and men at the head of an increasingly hierarchical society. With their symbols of power, they had themselves immortalised in stone, demonstrating their exalted status. The stelae were also used for ancestor worship – for their descendants, the individuals depicted became heroes and heroines or even gods, and passed on the collective history of the clan in visual form.

The exhibition brings together around 40 stelae from Italy, France, Germany and Switzerland.

Max Bill (1908-1994) was a painter, sculptor, architect, designer, graphic designer, and typographer but also a theorist, collector, curator, publicist, teacher, politician, and activist. The formative influence of his work on mid-twentieth century art and design extended far beyond Switzerland.

Bill was a leading proponent of Concrete art. He organized exhibitions, authored numerous texts on Concrete art, and exchanged ideas with colleagues around the world.

At the same time, he set standards for design in the graphic arts, product design, and architecture.

In his highly original and multifaceted design practice, he synthesized various disciplines and artistic movements. He built a worldwide network of contacts and was committed to an international artistic dialogue throughout his life.

The exhibition (Bis auf die Knochen) presents graves from Schaffhausen ranging from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages. Skeletal remains and grave goods illuminate the lives of the deceased.

Interactive puzzles invite visitors to conduct their own research: What do bones reveal, and what do they conceal? Why do some graves have many grave goods and others none? And what might archaeologists find out about us one day?

These and other questions will be revealed in the exhibition.