Trade Museum Basel
The Basel Business Museum stood on the site of the former 13th century monastery of the Barfüsser and later the Sisters of St. Bernhard. Until the Reformation the monastery was run by the Clarissi .
The drawing and modeling school for young craftsmen, founded in 1796 on the Steinenvorstadt, was accepted into the general trade school founded by the canton in 1887 as an arts and crafts department, in which more and more design and artistic training vessels were kept. In 1880 Wilhelm Bubeck was appointed director of the Gewerbemuseum. Teachers at the vocational school included Fritz Schider , Paul Kammüller , Arnold Fiechter , Jean Jacques Lüscher and Albrecht Mayer .
In 1889 the Great Council decided to erect a building for the trade school and the trade museum at this point. Construction began in 1890 and the building was occupied in 1892. It was planned by the architects Heinrich Reese and Friedrich Walser . The head of the building department, Rudolf Falkner (1827–1898), the head of the education department, Richard Zutt , the president of the trade school commission Eduard Hagenbach and the president of the trade museum commission, the banker and politician Louis La Roche (1852–1920), contributed significantly to the realization of the trade museum. In 1917, Erwin Heman (1876–1942) converted the collection rooms of the trade museum.
In 1914 the trade museum became a state institution. The supervisory commission that had existed until then was dissolved and the museum was placed under the management of the general trade school. Under director Hermann Kienzle (1876–1946), influential exhibitions by the German and Swiss Werkbunds were shown between 1916 and 1943, and from 1928 a series of exhibitions in the spirit of the Bauhaus , for which the curator Georg Schmidt was responsible, who between 1929 and 1939 worked at the trade museum. After the outbreak of World War II , in addition to design and architecture , topics with social, technical and local historical aspects increasingly came to the fore.
In 1970, Gustav Kyburz, a full-time director, took over the management of the trade museum for the first time. Unlike his predecessors, he was no longer director of the trade school or its arts and crafts department. In 1984 the museum was renamed “Gewerbemuseum Basel / Museum für Gestaltung”, from 1989 it was only called “Museum für Gestaltung”. The name change corresponded to a conceptual reorientation: instead of the previous branch exhibitions, thematic exhibitions were shown, which wanted to present questions of everyday culture, philosophical terms and abstract concepts.
In the spring of 1995, the Basel government decided to close the museum as part of the austerity measures at the time. Despite interventions from various circles to persuade the government to reverse this decision, the museum closed its doors on March 31, 1996. The extensive poster collection and library were incorporated into the Basel School of Design .
literature
- Gewerbemuseum Basel (Ed.): Gewerbemuseum Basel 1878–1978. A hundred years of change and progress . Basel 1978.
- New construction of the general trade school with trade museum in Basel. In: Schweizerische Bauzeitung, Vol. 27, 1896, pp. 8-10.
- Albert Gessler: The Basel artists at the commercial exhibition. In: Switzerland: Swiss illustrated magazine, Vol. 5, 1901, pp. 361–363.
- Rudolf Kelterborn: The Basel trade school at the cantonal exhibition. In: Switzerland: Swiss illustrated magazine, Vol. 5, 1901, pp. 364–373.
