History

The Kunstmuseum Bern has its roots in art education. The first art school was established in 1779, followed by the founding of the Bernische Akademie in the buildings of the former Franciscan monastery in 1805. There, a ‘hall of antiquities’ was established to house the plaster casts of ancient statues, which the French government sent as a gift to Berne. The casts laid the cornerstone for the national art collection. In 1820, part of the collection of the enterprising art journalist and art dealer Sigmund Wagner was purchased. Groups of works by Johannes Dünz, Niklaus Manuel and Joseph Werner the Younger served as the basis for a ‘patriotic painting museum.’
The Bernische Künstlergesellschaft, established in 1813, sought not only the exchange of ideas but also to promote Swiss art. Its activities included collecting and organising exhibitions on a regular basis. In the period from 1840 to 1854 it mounted a national art exhibition every two years. The Bernese art collections were kept at several temporary locations until 1864: these were the late Gothic Antonierhaus, the baroque Stiftsgebäude adjoining the Berne Minster or a room in Erlacherhof. The national art collection was finally united with the collection of the Bernische Künstlergesellschaft in 1849 and exhibited in the choir of the French Church. This year marked the actual foundation of the Kunstmuseum Bern. From 1864 on, the collection could be viewed in the west wing of the newly built Federal Palace for fifteen years.

Albert Anker, in his role as a member of the Upper Council of the Canton of Berne, made a serious effort for the case of constructing a museum for the fine arts in 1874. When the Bernese architect Gottlieb Hebler passed away, leaving a bequest of 350,000 francs on hand for building an art museum, it was finally possible to pool the various interests in a concrete building plan. For this, the State Council of the Canton of Berne granted the trusteeship of the future art museum corporation status in 1871. The corporation was composed of the state, the municipality and the Burgergemeinde Bern as well as the Bernische Künstlergesellschaft and the Kantonaler Kunstverein. Designed by the town master architect Eugen Stettler, the museum building was implemented by the corporation from 1876 to 1878.

The Kunstmuseum Bern opened its doors to the public on 9 August 1879. The magnificent building in the Gründerzeit style was constructed according to Stettler’s Renaissance Revival-design and set on the periphery of the historical city plateau as the urbane counterpart to the Federal Palace of Switzerland.

In 1917, the responsible body of the corporation was transformed into a public foundation, which today is part of the umbrella foundation Kunstmuseum Bern – Zentrum Paul Klee, continuing its management of the museum as owner, acquiring its own works and taking care of the collections entrusted to it by its former corporation partners. The Kantonaler Kunstverein was dissolved in 1919. Verein der Freunde Kunstmuseum Bern, which celebrated its centenary in 2019, took its place.

The Kunstmuseum Bern acquired a work of art itself for the first time in 1892: Arnold Böcklin’s Meeresstille from 1887. It was possible to purchase works as of 1896 thanks to the Gottfried Keller Foundation. The Kunstmuseum was often represented in the commission of the Gottfried Keller Foundation during the first half of the century: Albert Anker was a member of the first commission from 1891 to 1901, the architect and museum director Horace Edouard Davinet from 1903 to 1920. Conrad von Mandach, curator at the Kunstmuseum from 1920 to 1943, was a member from 1930, and from 1931 to 1948 its president. The painter Cuno Amiet was part of the commission from 1934 to 1948. Many principal works of Swiss art gained admission in the collection as deposits, such as Niklaus Manuel’s Die Zehntausend Märtyrer am Berg Ararat, Louise Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s La Fête des bergers suisses à Unspunnen le 17 août 1808, Albert Anker’s Kleinkinderschule auf der Kirchenfeldbrücke or Ferdinand Hodler’s Mädchen mit der Mohnblume, Der Auserwählte and Das Jungfraumassiv von Mürren aus, Alice Bailly’s Fantaisie équestre de la dame rose from 1913 and Johannes Itten’s Komposition in Blau from 1919.

The acquisition of four of Hodler’s major works, the so-called ‘Ehren-Hodler’, followed in 1901: Der Tag, Die Nacht, Eurythmie and Die enttäuschten Seelen. In the same year, the museum received the legacy of Adolf von Stürler with his exceptional collection of early Italian paintings, among them Duccio’s Maestà. 

The first landmark purchases of modern art were Kirchner’s Alpsonntag: Szene am Brunnen in 1933 and Paul Klee’s Ad Parnassum in 1935, which was acquired by the Verein der Freunde. Both works stemmed from the exhibition programme of the Kunsthalle Bern, which at the time was under the direction of Max Huggler.

Only twenty years after the museum had been opened, it was considered insufficient for the rapidly expanding collection. It was possible to begin with a museum extension eastwards into the neighbouring plot of land after 1932. The architect Karl Indermühle, who died in 1933 while the construction work was in progress, and his successor Otto Salvisberg designed a modern side wing in the style of the New Objectivity movement; the extension was directly connected to the Stettler building. Opening on 29 February 1936, it offered unadorned white walls, which on the top level were lit by skylights – an ideal architecture for modern art. Modern art, however, would only later find its way there. Instead, in its founding years, the museum was dominated by Swiss artists who subscribed to a rustic Realism that paid tribute to the zeitgeist of ‘spiritual national defence’. In this vein, Cuno Amiet executed the architectural decoration Apfelernte, a sgraffito, on the facade facing Hodlerstrasse. Bernese artists representing progressive trends protested by besmearing the sgraffito with tar at night.

In 1944, former Kunsthalle director Max Huggler succeeded Conrad von Mandach and held the position until 1965. Huggler, an eminent authority on nineteenth-century French art and modern art, gave the collection an international profile. He declared Paul Klee ‘growing point’ of his collecting policy. With Klee’s works as the core, he sought to assemble around it ‘several of the really creative Cubists and abstract artists such as Braque, Picasso, Gris and Kandinsky’. Following the decease of Paul Klee’s widow Lily Klee, a group of Bernese collectors founded the Klee-Gesellschaft in 1946, which was transformed into the Paul Klee Foundation a year later. Its extensive holdings were kept at the Kunstmuseum Bern from 1952.

Besides acquisitions purchased by the Kunstmuseum Bern itself, generous private and institutional gifts, legacies and permanent loans make up the larger part of the extensive collection. Hans Hahnloser, for example, who was the son of the Winterthur collector couple Arthur and Hedy Hahnloser and taught art history in Berne, donated Vallotton’s L’Enlèvement d’Europe to the museum in 1946 and Vincent van Gogh’s Verblühte Sonnenblumen in 1971.

Huggler was on friendly terms with art dealer and collector Georges F. Keller, who had been active in Paris during the 1930s and 1940s. Part of Keller's collection was deposited at the museum in 1952. When Keller passed away, his collection went to the Kunstmuseum Bern. It included major works by Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse, Chaïm Soutine, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí.

The Bernese business man Hermann Rupf was among the first collectors who, from 1907, acquired works in Paris by Picasso, Georges Braque and even the Fauves. With the help of a friend of his youth, Parisian art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Hermann Rupf succeeded in obtaining large bodies of works by Fernand Léger, Juan Gris and André Masson for his collection. They were entrusted to the Kunstmuseum Bern in 1954 and transformed into a foundation.
In 1961, the Verein Ernst Kreidolf deposited Kreidolf’s works at the Kunstmuseum Bern. Furthermore, gifts from Nell Walden and Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach, among others, expanded the collection from the 1960s. The Adolf Wölfli Foundation has the administration over the legacy of Adolf Wölfli, a not only controversial but also visionary author, poet, draughtsman and composer. Since the foundation was established in 1975, its home has been the Kunstmuseum Bern. While the work of Adolf Wölfli was, early on, outlandish in every way, it is now distinctively characteristic for the Kunstmuseum Bern. In 1979, the Othmar Huber Foundation deposited major works by Picasso, Klee, Franz Marc, Alexej von Jawlensky and Wassily Kandinsky at the Kunstmuseum Bern.
The foundation of the Bernese collector couple Anne-Marie and Victor Loeb closed gaps in the constructive art and post-war avant-garde art parts of the collection with main works by Johannes Itten, Victor Vasarely, Camille Louis Graeser, Max Bill and Richard Paul Lohse, Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni, Jean Tinguely and Jesús Rafael Soto.

The extension building designed by the Bernese Atelier 5 collective of architects was opened in 1983. It provided additional space for the collection, a cinema, offices, seminar and library rooms as well as a café. The grounds were not large enough for a third building. The Indermühle-Salvisberg extension was demolished with the exception of the street front. The basement floors were extended into the slope by several additional levels. The former street facade, an unbroken wall, was left intact and supplemented by a simple steel construction clad in sheet metal. Extensive art performances under the title of Vor dem Abbruch preceded the construction work.
In close collaboration with artist Rémy Zaugg, the design of the entire extension focused on uttermost clarity and austerity, as expressed by the black floors and the walls, which initially were intended to be grey. Additionally, the hanging concept was to present paintings without historical frames. Nothing should distract from the exhibits. As early as 1993, the Atelier 5 building urgently had to undergo structural renovations. Refurbishing the stairway hall in the Stettler building was completed by 1999.

In the 1980s, the Kunstmuseum Bern was the lucky recipient of the Meret Oppenheim Bequest as well as numerous gifts from donors, such as Eberhard W. Kornfeld and Marlies H. Kornfeld. The Johannes Itten Foundation was affiliated to the Kunstmuseum Bern in 1992. The foundation’s holdings are deposited at the Kunstmuseum Bern, comprising over 100 works by Johannes Itten, his diaries and even students’ works and projects from his courses. The Itten Foundation augments the Berne Bauhaus focus because both Johannes Itten and Paul Klee were formative Bauhaus masters in their teachings and their artistic practice. In 2005, the extensive holdings of the Klee Foundation were transferred to the Zentrum Paul Klee, which had been initiated by Bernese patron of the arts Maurice E. Müller and Paul Klee’s heirs. Since then, Renzo Piano’s spectacular architecture houses some 4,000 works, boasting the most important collection worldwide of Paul Klee’s paintings, watercolours and drawings, as well as archival and biographical material from all phases of the artist's career. The Zentrum Paul Klee is conceived as a cultural centre for many fields – besides exhibitions, also music, literature, agriculture and events shape the institution’s programme.
The Kunstmuseum Bern collection was able to grow in recent decades, especially in regard to contemporary art. Among other sources, this was owing to gifts from Bernese gallery owner and collector Toni Gerber and the Kunst Heute Foundation as well as partnerships with new foundations. Today, the Kunstmuseum Bern has at its disposal – together with the holdings of its partner foundations GegenwARTt, Kunsthalle Bern and the Bern Foundation for photography, film and video – one of the most significant collections of contemporary art in Switzerland.

In 2006, a project competition for an extension building was held. Its goal was to extend the exhibition space for showing contemporary art in particular and to provide for the safe delivery of artworks. The two winning projects, ‘angebaut’ (attached) and ‘Scala’, had to be discarded – the first for reasons of preserving monuments of historic interest and the second because of the costs. A modernisation project planning the renovation and extension of the A5 building fell through in 2017 owing to tender procedures.

In 2014, the Kunstmuseum Bern inherited the legacy of Cornelius Gurlitt. As a consequence, the first department for provenance research in Switzerland was established, largely financed by private foundations. The current focus is on the bequests of Cornelius Gurlitt and Georges F. Keller.

In 2015, the umbrella foundation Kunstmuseum Bern – Zentrum Paul Klee was founded as the conclusion of a cultural and political process lasting many years. Thus the two institutions share a common strategic organisation.