Agenda

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.