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Private Collector’s Room | Presented by Littmann Kulturprojekte & Galerie Mueller
He didn’t like openings. Crowds repelled him, and talking about art often struck him as presumptuous. For him, art was not a matter of discourse but of closeness, of silence, of everyday encounter. His collection wasn’t born of strategy, investment drive, or a need for status – it was the result of a life endlessly centered around the act of seeing.
The collector, as we imagine him, was born in Basel, perhaps in the 1930s. His father was a doctor, his mother played the piano, and a melancholy Emmenegger hung above the living room sofa. Early on, he roamed the city’s museums as if they were secret sanctuaries. His first pivotal encounter was with an early Tinguely – still little known at the time, but brimming with energy. Something in the combination of movement and transience captivated him and never let go.
He studied – perhaps history or literature – but none of it gripped him as deeply as art did. Not as a profession, but as a companion. He had an eye for the restless, the marginal, the contradictory. He did not collect systematically – his choices came from the gut, from the moment, guided by an instinct that was more psychological than aesthetic. He was drawn to ruptured biographies, existential depth, and the struggle between form and content.
He inherited his house on Rittergasse from a great aunt, and he furnished it like a retreat from another time. The fireplace was never modernized, the stucco remained untouched. The room was no white cube, but an echo of historical layers. And that’s where he lived – with a Schiele drawing, a work by Cahn, a small Rainer, and many other discoveries. The Traccia table by Meret Oppenheim stood there not as a statement, but because he liked it – the way one likes an animal: mysterious, wilful, alive.
Over the years, the collection grew – not in breadth, but in depth. Some works stood for years, unnoticed in a corner; others shifted places like old acquaintances suddenly seen anew. He was not a collector of labels, but of relationships – between artwork and space, artwork and life.
He rarely spoke about his collection. But those invited soon realized: this was no showroom, but a lived-in cosmos. Art was not decoration to him – it was a counterpart. A mirror, a challenge, a comfort. And it remained – after his death, too – as a quiet imprint of a life that approached the world more through images than through words.
Today, this room is open – for a short while. The collector is gone, but his gaze remains. In every detail. In every choice. In every work.
Featured artists: Eva Aeppli, Cuno Amiet, Bernard Buffet, Hans Emmenegger, Max Ernst, Sonja Sekula, Jean Tinguely, Andreas Walser, Kurt Schwitters, Egon Schiele, Alberto Giacometti, Arnulf Rainer, Meret Oppenheim, Alfred Heinrich Pellegrini, Miriam Cahn, Alfred Hofkunst, and others.
DATES: Sunday, June 15th – Saturday, June 21st
OPENING HOURS: Daily 2pm – midnight
LOCATION: Rittergasse 21-25, CH-Basel