A bizarre start to the European collection at Basel’s Museum of Cultures
Published: Thursday, Apr 25th 2024, 14:32
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"Twelve thousand things" is the title of the Basel Museum of Cultures' presentation of the beginnings of its European collection. The exhibition provides an insight into the special way in which this museum collection was created at the beginning of the 20th century.
In a long row of showcases with countless amulets for and against all sorts of things, you can discover tiny little lucky pigs. They were made from trout tongues, as can be seen on the electronic display board.
A few showcases away, you can see a man's suit with long johns and a stiff shirt collar. The garments were once worn by Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer. He was a wealthy member of the Basel Daig, who donated them to the Europe department of the Basel Museum, which he headed.
Under Hoffmann's aegis until his death in 1936, 12,000 objects were collected - today it contains around 100,000 items, as museum director Anna Schmid said at the media tour on Thursday.
The first "twelve thousand things" were the subject of a provenance research dissertation by museum curator Tabea Buri, a selection of which has now been compiled into an exhibition by her colleague Florence Roth. The exhibition runs until April 27, 2025.
At the beginning of the show is an enlarged facsimile of the "Einlaufbuch", in which all the objects are listed with their origin and price. The first "thing" was therefore a plow, the last a lucky charm.
Objects collected during the vacations
This book also includes the name Johannes Stuber, the museum's caretaker at the time. He was commissioned to buy up objects during a vacation. These included agricultural implements from the Jura, but also crockery from his own household.
Bartering with other museums also contributed to the prosperity of the collection. For example, with the Zurich Ethnographic Museum. The latter was interested in cult objects from Cameroon, many of which the Basel museum owned. In exchange, the Museum of Cultures received rural headdresses of European origin.
The museum staff's passion for collecting knew no geographical boundaries, but hardly any limits in terms of content. For example, you can see a splinter of wood that was cut out of an elder tree trunk. This splinter was used to poke around in a diseased tooth until it was placed back into the trunk in the hope that it would bring relief.
©Keystone/SDA
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