Discover Germany | Special Theme | Culture Highlights Switzerland - The Best Cultural Offerings 2018
The world’s largest private collection of tribal art The Musée Barbier-Mueller is a private museum, founded in Geneva in 1977 to study, display and publish its collection of traditional non-western art. Josef Mueller started the collection in 1907 and his son-in-law Jean Paul Barbier, a collector himself, completed it by enriching it and giving it coherence. The collection today houses about 7,000 objects, including art from classical and tribal antiquity as well as sculptures, fabrics and ornaments from civilisations all around the globe.
Left: Board mask. Tussian, Burkina Faso. 20th century. Acquired from Robert Duperrier in Paris in 1968. © Musée Barbier-Mueller, Photo: Silvia Bächli Middle: Silvia Bächli, 2015, gouache on paper, 102x72cm. Private collection. Photo: Serge Hasenböhler Right: Schematic violin-shaped figure attributed to the Metropolitan Museum Master. Greece, Cyclades Archipelago, Cycladic culture, Early Cycladic I (ca. 3000-2800 BCE). © Musée Barbier-Mueller, Photo: Studio Diane Bouchet photographies
and Pre-Columbian art pieces were stacked from floor to ceiling. The artist also brings 16 of her selected gouache drawings into dialogue with 60 objects she has chosen from the Musée Barbier-Mueller collection, to form part of an exhibition with a difference, and one that inspires discussion among art lovers and admirers.
TEXT: JESSICA HOLZHAUSEN
www.musee-barbier-mueller.org The collection began after the First World War, which accounts for the many “historical”artefacts it comprises. In the early 1920s, Swiss collector Josef Mueller moved to Paris where he met artists and art dealers who introduced him to non-western art. A facial mask in the Barbier-Mueller collection, originating in the Republic of Congo, has great resemblance to the famous elongated faces of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and for some time has been thought to have been one of his sources of inspiration. However, it was later shown that this was not the case, since the mask was collected in the then French Congo more than 20 years after the picture was painted. When Josef Mueller died, his and Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller’s collections were brought together by Josef Mueller’s heirs, who de48 | Issue 61 | April 2018
cided to open a museum in Geneva and share this impressive collection with the public. The museum sets up two major exhibitions each year displaying a selection of objects from its collection. It also organises travelling exhibitions and lends out objects to international museums, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The current exhibition curated by Swiss artist Silvia Bächli is exceptional in the sense that it brings together contemporary and traditional non-western art. Inspired by her visits to the Museum der Kulturen in Basel and the Musée de l’Homme in Paris in her youth, where objects were piled up in the displays, Silvia Bächli decided to create a similar experience and turn a museum room into Josef Mueller’s storage, where crates filled with African, Oceanic
Musée Barbier-Mueller 10 rue Jean Calvin, CH-1204 Geneva
Bottom left: Facial mask. Republic of Congo. Hongwe or Ngare. 19th century. © Musée Barbier-Mueller, Photo: Studio Diane Bouchet photographies Bottom right: Mask beete (pebood). Gabon, Kwele. 19th century. Former Tristan Tzara collection, Paris. © Musée Barbier-Mueller, Photo: Studio Diane Bouchet photographies.