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What makes a museum — and its collection — unforgettable? I ask myself that question a lot these days. For me, it’s not about scale or prestige — it’s whether the works stay with you. Weeks later. Years later. Whether they worm into your memory and won’t let go.
Kunstmuseum Basel holds one of the most extraordinary art collections anywhere. But what makes it even more remarkable is that it happens to be the world’s first truly public one. A surprising fact — one might expect such a thing in bigger cities or art capitals like Paris or London or Florence. But in 1661, more than 100 years before those places established public collections, Basel made a radical decision: to preserve art not for a king or a court or the elite few, but for everyone.
That founding impulse still shapes the museum today. Across three buildings and eight centuries, the collection doesn’t sit still — it breathes. Choosing six works from its more than 300,000 is almost impossible. So this list doesn’t aim for coverage. It’s about affection. These are the pieces I return to most, right now. They inspire me, provoke me, surprise me still.
1. Hans Holbein the Younger, “The Dead Christ in the Tomb” (1521-22)
There are few paintings in the world like this one. Christ lies stretched out in a stone enclosure. His body has begun to rot. His eyes are rolled back and slightly open. And then there’s that middle finger — it juts out with eerie insistence, almost breaching the space between image and viewer. Dostoevsky travelled to Basel just to see it. He was overwhelmed after spending 20 minutes in front of it, and later described the painting in The Idiot. Gerhard Richter studied it. So did Marlene Dumas. And so have countless other artists who turned to it to figure out how to portray death. Painted half a millennium ago, it still refuses easy beauty or the reassurance of faith. It is not transcendent. It is uncomfortably human. And unforgettable.
2. Catharina van Hemessen, “Self-Portrait at the Easel” (1548)
One of the smaller works in the collection, and one of the most revolutionary. Van Hemessen’s self-portrait is the first known image of a woman artist at her easel — and the first in western art to show any painter, male or female, in the act of painting themselves. She looks at us as she works and demands to be seen. It’s 1548, and already she’s insisting on her place in history. A Flemish Renaissance artist working in a man’s world, she didn’t just claim authorship — she left a bold visual testament to women as creators. It feels almost like a manifesto: a declaration that women not only make art, but have the right to be seen doing so. Yes, it is modest in scale — but it is radical in implication. I never walk past it without feeling a little awe.
3. Pablo Picasso, “Les Deux Frères” (1906)
In 1967, this painting — along with another by Picasso — long on deposit at the museum, risked being sold abroad. But the people of Basel wouldn’t let it go. There was a referendum and a citywide vote. Schoolchildren sold cakes to raise money. Taxi drivers donated their earnings. Hippies and business leaders took to the streets. The painting was saved, and Picasso, deeply moved, donated four more works to the museum. “Les Deux Frères” is the heart of that story. Two boys, barefoot and solemn, hold each other in a desert of ochre and pink. Their bond is fierce and tender. Painted during Picasso’s so-called “primitive” period, it’s a quiet work but undeniably affecting. For Basel, it became a symbol of collective care and cultural democracy. For me, it’s a reminder of how the love of art — and commitment to a museum — can bring a city to its feet.
4. Arnold Böcklin, “Isle of the Dead (First Version)” (1880)
Arnold Böcklin painted five versions of this scene. The Kunstmuseum Basel’s was the first. A ghostly island floats towards you in a black sea. A small white boat approaches its shore, bearing a shrouded figure and a coffin. It’s one of the most enigmatic and iconic images in European art — so haunting, in fact, that it inspired Sergei Rachmaninoff’s tone poem of the same name, and stalked the dreams of Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, and Max Ernst. Böcklin was born in Basel, and in 2027, on the bicentenary of his birth, we’ll celebrate his work with a major exhibition. But even without that, this painting is a pilgrimage site. We once took it down briefly — and visitors protested. That’s how seriously the public here takes its connection to art.
5. Helen Frankenthaler, “Riverhead” (1963)
This was the first work I helped bring into the collection after becoming director, so it feels a bit like a cornerstone for me. “Riverhead” is over two metres tall and nearly four metres wide. A cascade of pigment seeps into raw canvas, unfurling like a storm cloud. Frankenthaler poured thinned paint directly on to the surface — her pioneering soak-stain technique that changed postwar abstraction. For too long, she was dismissed as too lyrical or “feminine”, sidelined by critics who took male aggression more seriously. But this work holds its own: fierce, open, vast. It feels like a continent you can get lost in. And it riffs sensationally with “Green April” (1969) by Sam Gilliam across from it — two artists long marginalised in histories of abstraction. In 2026, we’ll open the largest survey of Frankenthaler’s work in Europe. Until then, I visit this one often. It reminds me what painting can still do.
6. Pamela Rosenkranz, “Skin Pool (Plasmin)” (2025)
The newest work to enter the collection — and maybe one of the strangest. Installed in the museum’s 19th-century courtyard, “Skin Pool (Plasmin)” is a liquid sculpture that bubbles and shimmers like synthetic flesh. It looks alive — and in a way, it is. Rosenkranz explores how biology, technology and ideology shape what we think of as “human”. The courtyard has long been defined by sculptures by Auguste Rodin, Alexander Calder and others — a cohort marked by monumentality and masculine bravado. Rosenkranz’s piece is the opposite: fluid, ephemeral, unstable. It doesn’t try to overpower them. It slips between categories. It’s not a monument. It mutates. It asks what “human” even means in an age of AI, biotech and climate collapse. It slips under your skin. And stays there.
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