ZURICH. After a year in which Basel's museums kept their heads down, the city that hosts the world's most important art fair is spending the new season looking up. The Kunstmuseum, the Fondation Beyeler and the Museum Tinguely have aligned their calendars around a run of major loan exhibitions of a kind Basel has not attempted since before the pandemic. The wager is deliberate: that audiences, in Basel and beyond, are ready again for the blockbuster.
The anchors are ambitious. The Kunstmuseum opens its Hauptbau galleries to a sweeping survey built around its own Holbein holdings, placing the Basel years of the painter of the Tudor court beside loans from London, Vienna and New York. Across the Riehen fields, the Fondation Beyeler counters with a postwar American painting show, while the Museum Tinguely offers the season's wild card, a kinetic retrospective that fills its halls with motion and noise.
The quiet year that preceded all this was partly self-imposed. Renovation work, the soaring cost of insurance and transport, and a post-pandemic caution among lending institutions had pushed the museums towards smaller, collection-based displays. Attendance held, but the city noticed the absence of the queues that once curled around the Kunstmuseum's courtyard, and so did the hoteliers of the old town.
Blockbusters are, above all, a financial instrument. A major loan show can cost several million francs before a single ticket is sold, much of it in insurance, climate-controlled freight and fees to lending museums. Basel's institutions are better placed than most to carry that risk: the canton underwrites the Kunstmuseum, the Beyeler rests on a private foundation, and the city's corporate patrons, schooled by decades of Art Basel, understand the return on a full gallery.
The curatorial stakes are equally high. The Holbein show is the Kunstmuseum's statement that its Old Masters, the finest such collection in Switzerland, can still anchor an international argument. The Beyeler's exhibition leans on relationships built over seventy years with American lenders, and the Tinguely show draws on the museum's unique archive of the sculptor's machines. Together they amount to a coordinated assertion of what Basel is for.
The early signs have vindicated the bet. Advance sales for the Holbein survey passed the six-figure mark within weeks, timed tickets for the Beyeler's opening month sold out, and the critics, in Switzerland and across the border, have been unusually warm. Even the sceptics concede that the shows earn their crowds.
The museums reject the suggestion that scale means compromise. “A blockbuster is not a compromise, it is an invitation to look longer,” says a Basel curator involved in the season's planning. The real test, the institutions insist, is whether the crowds for the big shows can be led, gallery by gallery, towards the quieter rooms.
Basel's geography does half the marketing. The city sits at the hinge of three countries, and the museums count on visitors from Alsace and Baden as surely as from Zurich and Bern. Wall texts run in three languages, and during Art Basel week in June the exhibitions become, in effect, the fair's unofficial museum wing, catching a global audience already in town.
The season's second half is already in view. The Kunstmuseum will open its newly refurbished study galleries in the autumn, the Beyeler has announced a winter pairing of a classic modernist with a contemporary painter, and planning for next June's fair-week programme is under way. The museum directors, burned once by caution, are already speaking of the season as a template rather than an exception.
There is a broader question beneath the crowd counts. Across Europe, museums are asking whether the blockbuster model, bruised by the pandemic years, can still justify its costs and its carbon. Basel's season is being watched as a test case: if it works here, in a city of fewer than two hundred thousand with three world-class institutions, it can work almost anywhere.
On a recent Friday evening, the queue for the Holbein show stretched past the fountain where the Tinguely machines splash in the dusk. Students waited with day-return tickets from Freiburg and Mulhouse. The quiet year, in Basel, is over.