Kunstmuseum Basel

Stand in the courtyard for a moment before you go inside. The stone underfoot is cool and pale. Around you, the arcades of the main building throw long shadows across the paving. In the middle of it all, a group of bronze men stand with heavy feet and bowed heads. This is a cast of Auguste Rodin's Burghers of Calais. It shows six citizens who, according to a medieval account, offered their lives to save their besieged town. It is a sober welcome, and a fitting one for a museum that takes art seriously.

The Kunstmuseum Basel holds one of the oldest public art collections in the world. Many historians call it the first. The story begins with a family of Basel scholars, the Amerbachs. Over several generations in the sixteenth century, they gathered paintings, drawings, coins, books and curiosities. Their cabinet became famous among learned travellers. Then, in 1661, the collection was in danger of being sold abroad. So the city and its university did something unusual. They bought it together and kept it for the public.

That decision is worth a pause. At the time, most great art collections in Europe belonged to kings, princes, or the Church. Ordinary citizens rarely saw them. Basel chose another path. The Amerbach Cabinet went on display to the public a few years later, in the 1670s. The idea was simple — that art could belong to a city and its people, not just to a ruler. Almost everything you see today grew from that civic choice.

The building around you came much later. The main building, often called the Hauptbau, opened in 1936. It was designed by the architects Rudolf Christ and Paul Bonatz. Look at the facade on the way in. It is grey stone, solid and rhythmic, with tall arches and very little decoration. It feels calm and a little severe. The building was made to protect the collection and to give the paintings quiet, even light. It does not try to compete with them.

Now look across the street. On the other side of Saint Alban-Graben stands the newer building, which opened in 2016. The Basel architects Christ and Gantenbein designed it. Here is a small surprise — one of those architects is a grandson of the man who helped design the 1936 building. The new facade is made of grey bricks in many shades. Near the top, a band in the brickwork can display light and text. The two buildings are connected by a passage beneath the street.

Inside the main building, the heart of the old collection is the work of Hans Holbein the Younger. He was born in Augsburg but worked in Basel as a young man. The Kunstmuseum holds a larger group of his paintings and drawings than any other museum. Much of it came from the Amerbach Cabinet. You will find portraits of Basel citizens. You will also find images of the great humanist scholar Erasmus, who lived in the city and knew the Amerbach family well.

One Holbein painting stops most visitors. It is called The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb. It is very long and very narrow, like the inside of a coffin. Christ lies flat, seen from the side. His skin is grey and green. His mouth is open. His fingers are stiff. There are no angels and no glowing light. Holbein painted a dead man, as a doctor might see him. Stand at one end, then walk slowly to the other.

That painting has a second life in literature. The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky saw it here in 1867. According to his wife's diary, he stood in front of it for a long time and was deeply shaken. She feared he might have an epileptic fit. Later, the painting appears in his novel The Idiot. One character says that such a picture could make a person lose their faith. It is strange to think that a Russian classic carries a scene from this room.

As you move through the galleries, the centuries change around you. There are altar panels by Konrad Witz, a painter active in Basel in the fifteenth century. His figures stand in real space, with solid bodies and bright, hard colours. Later rooms bring you to the nineteenth century and to Arnold Böcklin, who was born in Basel. His dark, dreamlike scenes of islands, ruins and mythical creatures influenced many later artists. Then come the French painters, the Impressionists and the masters of early modern art.

Here is another story that most visitors miss. In 1967, the museum had the chance to buy two paintings by Pablo Picasso. The price was very high, and the city put the question to its voters. The citizens of Basel approved the purchase in a public vote. Picasso was so moved that he gave the city several more of his works as a gift. So the Picassos you see here are partly a gift, and partly a democratic decision.

The twentieth-century rooms are strong in Cubism — the early modern style that broke objects into flat, angled planes. You will also find work by Paul Klee, who grew up in nearby Bern, and by many other modern painters. The collection then crosses the Atlantic. American artists of the postwar decades appear here, with large canvases of colour and gesture. The scale of the rooms changes as you go. The modern galleries feel wider, brighter, more open.

The museum also has a third home, by the Rhine in the Saint Alban district. This is the Kunstmuseum Gegenwart, which focuses on contemporary art. Gegenwart simply means the present, or now. It sits in a quiet corner of the old town, near the river and old paper mills. If you have time, the walk there is pleasant. You pass old houses and the sound of running water. It feels a world away from the busy tram lines outside the main building.

When you finish, come back to the courtyard. The Burghers of Calais are still there, heavy and silent. Listen to the trams on the street outside and the voices under the arches. Behind you are centuries of painting, gathered because one city decided that art should stay public. As you walk away, look once more at the grey brick of the new building across the road. It is the newest page of a story that began more than 350 years ago.