
The world’s most important art fair invites billionaire collectors to descend on Switzerland and buy work made elsewhere. But is Swiss art itself worth a closer look? Jason Farago investigates.
Among the commuters and daytrippers passing through the central station of Basel in Switzerland last week were a lot of people dressed in black. The international art world had once again descended on the country’s third-largest city for the latest edition of Art Basel, the first and still the most significant of the contemporary art fairs that now occupy such a large portion of the cultural terrain. Inside the halls of Messe Basel, designed by local heroes Herzog & De Meuron, was art of all stripes, including a substantial performance section. Outside, it was as peaceful as ever.
It always seems mildly absurd that a city of fewer than 200,000 is home not only to the world’s most important art fair, but to a clutch of museums that hold their own against institutions in cities forty times Basel’s size. The Fondation Beyeler is presenting a major retrospective of Gerhard Richter, who has as strong a claim as anyone to the title of ‘greatest artist alive’; the Kunstmuseum Basel is showcasing Kazimir Malevich, the father of abstract painting; and half a dozen smaller museums are also bringing their A-game. Switzerland, a country whose population is no larger than New York City, has been punching well above its weight for some time now. And while Art Basel may be the glitziest operation in town, it’s worth remembering that this fair could never have achieved its preeminence without the museums, galleries and, above all, artists in the Swiss firmament.

It took Swiss art a while to get going, and not without cause. If you want to understand why almost no art from Switzerland appears in the standard story of western art, the man to finger is not a cultural figure but a religious one: Ulrich Zwingli, a leader of the Reformation with a deep opposition to art. Images hindered the true worship of God, Zwingli insisted, and under his influence Swiss churches in the early 16th Century became some of the most iconoclastic in Europe. His sweeping reforms, which essentially turned Zürich into a religious dictatorship, had a profound effect on art. At the Kunsthaus Zürich, the country’s most important art museum, the entirety of Swiss art before 1800 occupies just one small gallery.
Things started to move in the late 19th Century, when painters such as Arnold Böcklin and Ferdinand Hodler created strange, powerful compositions in the vein of other northern symbolists, such as Edvard Munch in Norway. Yet the real explosion in Swiss art took place during World War I, when Zürich became a refuge from artists across Europe. The louche Cabaret Voltaire, which is still operating today, offered a platform for radical experimentation in performance, music, poetry and dance and became a gathering place for both foreigners (including Tristan Tzara from Romania, Wassily Kandinsky from Russia) and Swiss figures such as Sophie Taeuber-Arp, a pioneer of geometric abstraction. At the Cabaret Voltaire the artists presented innovative, sometimes nonsensical work that opposed the ongoing war and attacked the right-thinking Swiss bourgeoisie. The latter were disgusted, of course, but the art stuck, as did the name they gave to it: Dada.
Dada is the primordial case of what now seems to be a Swiss hallmark: radical, often aggressive art made in the most benign of circumstances. It’s as if Switzerland, far from anesthetising artists with its prosperity and Gemütlichkeit, actually permits experimentation and risk that might never find its place elsewhere. This is true not only for the great inventors of the modern period, such as the painter Paul Klee and the sculptors Alberto Giacometti and Germaine Richier. It’s true today as well – Switzerland, beyond the private banks and the chocolate shops, is not just a marketplace but a breeding ground for contemporary art.

The art of Thomas Hirschhorn, possibly the most important artist to come out of the country in the last two decades, contradicts the old Swiss stereotype – small scale but high quality – with massive installations made of cardboard, duct tape, plastic sheets and other cheap materials. His art creates spaces for socialising and public debate, often including a library and a bar, and while he sometimes exhibits in museums and galleries (he has a powerful show now open at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris), his most trenchant works are constructed in situ in low-income housing projects, often built with, and for, local audiences. And he has never shied away from debate. In the early 2000s, after the right-wing populist Swiss People’s Party entered into the federal coalition government, Hirschhorn refused to show his art anywhere in Switzerland, including at Art Basel, and presented a furious exhibition in Paris attacking what he called “Swiss xenophobia, isolationism, nationalism”. Despite the huge controversy that resulted, Hirschhorn remains a favourite son – in 2011, after Hirschhorn’s return, he represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale.
Still, somehow the pigeonholing endures, that Swiss art must be as small as Switzerland itself. Not enough has been done to counteract the damning accusation Orson Welles famously makes in The Third Man: “In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed – they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.” You can see why the stereotype is hard to break: filthy-rich Zürich and Geneva are hardly cities that a young, struggling artist might want to visit, and the country has always preferred isolated contentment to external bravado. It’s our loss. Art Basel may be the nexus of power and capital in a giant, global cultural system, but it’s also a local affair, in a national context – and the art scene here is only more rewarding since it takes such a while to crack.