Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel_Paintings Collection, The Masterpieces (2)

Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel
Paintings Collection, The Masterpieces
(2)

HOLBEIN, Hans the Younger
The Passion
1524-25
Oil on limewood, 136 x 31 cm (outer panels),
149,5 x 31 cm (inner panels)

The Passion (detail)
1524-25
Oil on limewood, 39 x 31 cm (size of detail)
The picture shows a detail of the scene
Christ on the Mount of Olives.

1524-25
Arrest in the Garden.

1524-25
The picture shows a detail of the scene Arrest in the
Garden.
Christ is arrested at night. To show the soldiers which
man is their victim, the yellow-clad Judas gives Jesus
the traitor's kiss. In the foreground, Peter has thrown to
the ground Malchus, a servant of the High Priest, and in
a stroke has brought out the knife that will cut off the
fallen man's ear. In this scene, Holbein takes up the
challenge of painting a night scene by colourist means.
The sky is shown in solid black, while flickering torches
create dramatic light effects on the tree and the figures.

1524-25
Christ before Caiaphas.

1524-25
The sinister, faceless malevolents surrounding Christ are
only distant cousins to the monstrous degenerates
Hieronymus Bosch portrays in his versions of this scene.
Holbein is adept at mingling observation of the all too
human with the inherent drama of the event; the flickering
torchlight, the plausibly vehement figure addressing a
squirming Pilate, and Christ's calm resignation enthrall
rather than terrify. The elegantly posed guard in half
armour in the foreground focuses on the tension between
the three central figures seen in profile. Despite antique
Roman touches in clothing, the red-haired axe-man on the
left might have been seen by Holbein on the Basel streets
available for hire as a mercenary for military expeditions
into Italy. Mercenaries were one of the region's main
economic resources at the time; Urs Graf, a contemporary
graphic artist, found employment in their ranks when
artistic commissions were scarce.

1524-25
The picture shows a detail of the scene Via
Crucis.
The background of the scene opens up as a
broad landscape. The perspective effect of
distance is achieved by traditional colourist
means, with the foreground, centre ground,
and background being clearly distinguished
in brown, greenish, and blue tones
respectively. Continuity is provided by a
procession of riders and infantry, whose size
diminishes steadily towards the background,
taking the eye into the landscape.

1524-25
Crucifixion.

1524-25
Here the Italianate influences are slightly stronger than in the
scene of Christ before Pilate above, though no direct
borrowing is observable. Holbein has adapted the smoothly
elegant contrapposto stance that Andrea Mantegna had
rediscovered in Roman statuary to suggest the nonchalance
of the guards, just doing their job. Mantegna's frescoes in the
Eremitani chapel at Padua (now damaged) are oblique
sources for Holbein's, perhaps through engravings. The
parallel placement of limbs, as with the green-cloaked
soldier's right leg and the left arm of the guard casting lots,
and the antique-style leggings and body-hugging jerkin of the
guard in yellow, are southern in design. Otherwise, a sense of
northern flurry and activity displaces Mantegna's calm
grandeur; the touch of orientalism in the turbaned figure to
the right may imply Venetian influence (through artists like
Vittore Carpaccio) and contemporary chain-mail, armour and
axes underpin the stark emotionalism of the figure of Saint
John, with his fists clenched, behind the grieving Virgin; a
combination that balances the dourly painful chiaroscuro
treatment of the crucified trio overhead.

1524-25
Entombment.

The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb
1521
Oil on wood, 30,5 x 200 cm

(detail)
1521
Oil on wood, 30,5 x 200 cm

WITZ, Konrad
Synagogue, Healing Mirror altar, outer side
1435
Oil on panel, 86 x 81 cm

WITZ, Konrad
Synagogue, Healing Mirror altar, outer side
(detail)
1435

WITZ, Konrad
Saint Christopher
c. 1435
Panel, 101 x 81 cm

WITZ, Konrad
Saint Christopher (detail)
c. 1435
Panel, 101 x 81 cm

HEMESSEN, Catharina van
Self-Portrait
1548

Self-Portrait (detail)
1548

BÖCKLIN, Arnold
Island of the Dead (First Version)
1880
Oil on canvas, 110.9 x 156.4 cm

BÖCKLIN, Arnold
Island of the Dead (First Version) (detail)
1880
Oil on canvas, 110.9 x 156.4 cm

BÖCKLIN, Arnold
The Plague
1898
Tempera on wood, 105.1 x 149.8 cm

BÖCKLIN, Arnold
The Plague (detail)
1898
Tempera on wood, 105.1 x 149.8 cm

BRAQUE, Georges
The Portuguese
1911
Oil on canvas,116.7 × 81.5 cm

BRAQUE, Georges
The Portuguese (detail)
1911
Oil on canvas,116.7 × 81.5 cm

Gris, Juan
Woman with Mandolin, after Corot
1916
Oil on canvas, 92 x 60 cm

Gris, Juan
Woman with Mandolin, after Corot (detail)
1916
Oil on canvas, 92 x 60 cm

Klee, Paul
Senecio (Soon to be Aged)
1922
Oil on canvas, mounted on cardboard, 40.3 x
37.4 cm

Klee, Paul
Senecio (Soon to be Aged) (detail)
1922
Oil on canvas, mounted on cardboard, 40.3 x
37.4 cm

Paintings Collection, The Masterpieces (2)
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Klee, Paul
Senecio (Soon to be Aged)
The title “Senecio” refers to the botanical name for a genus of plants that includes ragwort and other plants with round flower heads. One interpretation is that there is a parallel
between the flower being the crowning glory of a plant and the human face being the flower of the human body. As this genuine and transparent face sees us, we can feel a deep
spiritual inspriration for honest living and acting in the world of lying and deception.
Completed in 1922, Senecio is a manifestation of Paul's sense of humor and African culture. The simple colors and shapes, Paul makes use of various shades of orange, red, and
yellow to reveal portrait of an old man. Artistic use of shapes gives the false impression that one eye browse is raised. His left eye brow is represented by a triangle while the other
one is made of a simple curved line. The portrait is also called Head of a Man Going Senile and intentionally mimics children's artwork by using ambiguous shapes and forms with
minimal facial details.
This adaptation of the human face is divided by colour into rectangles. Flat geometric squares are held within a circle representing a masked face and displaying the multi-
coloured costume of a harlequin. A portrait of the artist performer Senecio, it can be seen as a symbol of the shifting relationship between art, illusion and the world of drama. This
painting demonstrates Klee's principles of art, in which the graphic elements of line, colour planes and space are set in motion by an energy from the artist's mind. In his
imaginative doodlings, he liked, in his own words, to "take a line for a walk" .

The Passion
Religious paintings form a significant part of the work Holbein produced in Basel. From modest, private commissions in the period 1519-20 (for example, the Man of
Sorrows), through the Dead Christ of 1521, his interpretation grew increasingly painterly, culminating in the broad sweep of emotion and design seen in the Passion.
The coherence of the work is underlined by the decorative framework and is the result of Holbein's continued study of Italian masters. Holbein's maturity is evident in the
way such derivations - the lighting from Raphael's Vatican frescoes, the armour from Mantegna-esque sources - are combined with a natural, native power of religious
expression, dramatic and full of particularized incident, which produces a result quite different from the lofty idealism of the Italian Renaissance.
This change can be charted by comparing the Entombment here with Raphael's 1507 version. The use of limewood panels, the tendency to depict contemporary dress (as
worn by some of the mercenaries haranguing Christ) and the supernaturalistic nocturnal lighting, show the northern tendency predominant.
The eight scenes depicting the Passion are spread over four tall, slender panels, each of which is divided in half horizontally. In the top row (left to right) are Christ on the
Mount of Olives, the Arrest in the Garden, Christ before Caiaphas, and the Scourging. The bottom row (left to right) shows the Crown of Thorns, the Via Crucis, the Crucifixion,
and the Entombment.

The dead man's grey-green face tilts towards you, stiff dry hair spilling over the stone block covered with a white shroud, beard pointing up at the low roof of the sealed box in
which this corpse lies interred. Blackened feet lie close to the wall of the stone enclosure. The right hand teeters on the edge of the rumpled sheet. The body is naked except for a
loincloth. Spiky bones and stringy muscles poke against a lifeless collapsing skin.
The painting is wide and low, the height and length of a coffin, and this is crucial to its disturbing effect. The claustrophobic shape gives Holbein enough space to create his
meticulous perspective setting but not enough to make mistakes or add distracting flourishes. The painted tomb serves purely to hold the body and display its shocking details:
dark blood caked on a wound made by a spear; the ridged hollowness of the ribcage; those small, unseeing eyes.
There is nothing Christlike about this body, nothing to set it apart. It is anyone's corpse. Holbein presents it as naturally and clinically as a pathologist showing you an accident
victim on a hospital mortuary slab. Few artists have ever exposed our fate more ruthlessly.
Some art pilgrimages may seem scarcely worth the struggle; you see the masterpiece but is it really that much greater in the flesh than in its reproductions? An encounter with
Holbein's vision of death is, however, well worth the journey. It will scare and depress. But it will not disappoint. Death has never had a better portraitist.

WITZ, Konrad
Healing Mirror altar
The Healing Mirror altar (around 1430/35, painted on coated canvas with oak panels ) is the main work of the artist. He created him probably for the Augustinian Canons Church
of St. Leonhard in Basel. The work is now cut into individual panels, the front were separated from the backs. Not all plaques are obtained, so that a complete reconstruction is
not possible. The panels obtained it is evidently remains of the altar wings.
The central shrine, possibly carved figures or reliefs contained, perhaps originated by a different artist, is lost. The subjects are taken from the medicinal mirror, a medieval book
of devotion, are represented in the events of the Old Testament and ancient history as a precursor of events of the New Testament.
For example, the three heroes are against King David as the precursor of the Magi in adoration of the Child Jesus. This subject is excessive symbolized by the juxtaposition of
Synagogue and Ecclesia as representatives of Judaism (Old Testament) and Christianity (New Testament). Added to this saint (St. Augustine, Bartholomew ).

WITZ, Konrad
Saint Christopher
This painting was part of the Speculum Altarpiece. The wings of the altar had 16 paintings of which 12 remained, mainly in Basel
The water is miraculously reflective and translucent, as if a pane of glass had somehow been inserted into the picture, but no, because it is molten, mobile, rippling. Rocks like
giant's fingers stutter up out of this green mirror, receding to blue phantoms in the distance. It is one of the eeriest and most beautiful landscapes in the entire history of art.
With its fantastic mountains, its superb reflections and observations of wave motion in water, it is powerfully reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci. But Konrad Witz painted his sublime
work Saint Christopher, with its hunched red-robed saint carrying the infant Christ over a river of dreams, in about 1435, almost 20 years before Leonardo was born. Witz is one of the
great discoveries awaiting anyone who steps away from the high road of western art history, from the famous names of the Italian Renaissance and Flemish tradition, to discover
what painters in central Europe were up to at the end of the middle ages.
The painting is so strange not just because of its glassy green water and surreal vista of rocks but its intense depiction of a man and his burden. Christopher, big and powerful,
stands in water with Christ balanced on his back; bent under the weight of Christ, he is undergoing a spiritual ordeal in physical form. They are isolated in their journey. The
landscape is awfully lonely. Surely Saint Christopher is the soul struggling with truth, alone with God - bearing the weight, in a wasteland of water and mountains.
Witz must surely be responding imaginatively to the inward-looking religious movements of the later middle ages, finding a visual equivalent for new mysticisms that stressed the
soul's quest for God. The poetic solitude of this painting is as startling as the precocity of its style.

Self-Portrait
Her father, Jan Sanders van Hemessen was a well-known painter in Antwerp and presumably her teacher. She was a highly successful painter. Her paintings have a quiet
dignity to them, the sitters eyes never meet the viewer's. Her pictures also tend to be small with plain dark backgrounds that give no sense of location or extended space

Gris, Juan
Woman with Mandolin, after Corot
Gris's works from late 1916 through 1917 exhibit a greater simplification of geometric structure, a blurring of the distinction between objects and setting, between subject matter
and background.
The oblique overlapping planar constructions, tending away from equilibrium, can best be seen in Woman with Mandolin, after Corot (September 1916) and in its epilogue,
Portrait of Josette Gris (October 1916; Museo Reina Sofia).
The clear-cut underlying geometric framework of these works seemingly controls the finer elements of the compositions; the constituent components, including the small planes
of the faces, become part of the unified whole. Though Gris certainly had planned the representation of his chosen subject matter, the abstract armature serves as the starting
point.

BÖCKLIN, Arnold
The Plague
Plague is an 1898 painting in tempera by the Swiss symbolist artist Arnold Böcklin, held in the Kunstmuseum Basel. It exemplifies the artist's obsession with nightmares of war,
pestilence and death. The painting shows Death rides on a winged creature, who travels through the street of a medieval town.
Plague is rendered mostly using shades of pale green, a colour often associated with decomposition. The other predominant tones are black and dull browns; for example, in the
clothes worn by the figures shown in the mid and background as they dive for safety before Death's path. The red cloth of the woman shown in the mid-foreground is the only vivid
colour seen; she lies across the corpse of a woman who was cut down also.

BÖCKLIN, Arnold
Island of the Dead (First Version)
The Island of the Dead is the Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin's most famous composition. Beginning in 1880, he painted five modified versions, four of which have survived (Basel,
Kunstmuseum; New York, Metropolitan Museum; Berlin, Nationalgalerie; and Leipzig, Museum der bildenden Künste).
Each version of the painting shows a magically illuminated island rising from the sea against a gloomy night sky. Burial chambers have been carved into the rocky cliffs around
the natural harbour, with dark cypresses rising above them. A boat with a coffin, a statuesque figure swathed in white like a mummy and gazing away from the viewer, and an
oarsman glides slowly across the water towards the island.
Although we can almost hear the soft splashing of the oars, this only heightens the incredible silence that pervades the scene - a "visual silence" underscored by the
equilibrium of horizontals and verticals. The low-lying horizon creates an impression of endless depths. The sparingness of the composition is matched by the palette: reddish
rocks reflecting the last evening sunlight, the eerie white of the figure in the boat, the deep blue and violet of water and sky (which in other versions is stormy), and the dark, nearly
blackish green of the cypresses.
Many attempts have been made to find the original model for this mysterious island: the cemetery island of St. Jurai south of Dubrovnik, Pontikonissi off Corfu, and one of the
Ponza Islands in the Golf of Gaeta have been suggested.

BRAQUE, Georges
The Portuguese
Le Portugais marks an interesting point in the development of Braque’s paintings. In the top right hand corner, he stenciled the letters “D BAL” and under them, roman numerals.
Although he had included numbers and letters into a still life in 1910, they were a representational element of the painting.
In this piece, the letters and numbers are a purely compositional addition. Braque’s intentions at adding the letters are many, but mostly they are added to make the viewer aware of the
canvas itself.
In representational paintings, the canvas is there only as a surface to hold whatever image the painter desires. By adding numbers, out of context elements, and surface textures, the
viewer becomes aware of the fact that the canvas can also hold outside elements, making the surface of the painting just as important as what is put on top of it.

The Kunstmuseum Basel houses the largest and most significant public art collection in Switzerland, and is listed as a
heritage site of national significance.
The Kunstmuseum possesses the largest collection of works by the Holbein family. Further examples of Renaissance art
include important pieces by such masters as Konrad Witz, Hans Baldung (called Grien), Martin Schongauer, Lucas Cranach
the Elder and Mathias Grünewald. The main features of the 17th and 18th centuries are the Flemish and Dutch schools (e.g.
Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt, Jan Brueghel the Elder), German and Dutch still life painting.
Key works from the 19th century include the Impressionists represented by Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Paul
Cézanne as well as the paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Switzerland’s Arnold Böcklin and Ferdinand Hodler. In the 20th
century, the focus is on works of Cubism with Picasso, Braque and Juan Gris. Expressionism is represented by such figures
as Edvard Munch, Franz Marc, Oskar Kokoschka and Emil Nolde. The collection also includes works from Constructivism,
Dadaism and Surrealism and American art since 1950. Further highlights are the unique compilations of works from Pablo
Picasso, Fernand Léger, Paul Klee, Alberto Giacometti and Marc Chagall.
In the realm of more recent and contemporary art, the collection maintains substantial bodies of work by Swiss, German,
Italian, and American artists, including Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Georg Baselitz, A.R. Penck, Brice Marden,
Bruce Nauman, Jonathan Borofsky, Roni Horn, Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino, Enzo Cucchi, Martin Disler, Leiko
Ikemura, Markus Raetz, Rosemarie Trockel and Robert Gober.
In the year of 1939 a large body of work by German-Jewish artists, whose paintings were considered to be degenerate art by
the Nazi-Regime in Germany could be saved by the Kunstmuseum, were brought to Switzerland and are on display in the
museum up to this day.

Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel_Paintings Collection, The Masterpieces (2)

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