For Your Eyes Only: A Private Collection, from Mannerism to Surrealism
Kunstmuseum Basel
From September 20, 2014 to January 4, 2015, the Kunstmuseum Basel exhibited a selection of more than one hundred works from the private collection of Richard and Ulla Dreyfus-Best.
In assembling their collection, the collectors have held to strict principles that have excluded random elements of chance. They not only made of originality and quality essential criteria, they also required that all works specifically reference “artifice” (in the strict sense of the word). The outcome is a truly distinct and contemporary “cabinet of curiosities.” The collection juxtaposes secular works of art with erotic and religious art from the Middle Ages to the present; Renaissance and Baroque master drawings share space with the arcane worlds of Surrealist painting; eccentric visions of the 18th century encounter the fantastic artifices of Mannerism; Symbolism and Pop Art meet on common ground. The thread that ties all these works is an artificiality that continually probes and experiments limits.
Artists featured (selection): Hans Baldung Grien, Hans Bellmer, Arnold Böcklin, Victor Brauner, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Angelo Caroselli, Giorgio de Chirico, Francesco Clemente, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Frans Floris, Alfred Kubin, René Magritte, Man Ray, Gustave Moreau, Richard Oelze, Yves Tanguy, Andy Warhol.
Hatje Cantz
2014
Hardcover
25 x 19 cm
208 pages
£70
Enquire
Kunstmuseum Basel
From September 20, 2014 to January 4, 2015, the Kunstmuseum Basel exhibited a selection of more than one hundred works from the private collection of Richard and Ulla Dreyfus-Best.
In assembling their collection, the collectors have held to strict principles that have excluded random elements of chance. They not only made of originality and quality essential criteria, they also required that all works specifically reference “artifice” (in the strict sense of the word). The outcome is a truly distinct and contemporary “cabinet of curiosities.” The collection juxtaposes secular works of art with erotic and religious art from the Middle Ages to the present; Renaissance and Baroque master drawings share space with the arcane worlds of Surrealist painting; eccentric visions of the 18th century encounter the fantastic artifices of Mannerism; Symbolism and Pop Art meet on common ground. The thread that ties all these works is an artificiality that continually probes and experiments limits.
Artists featured (selection): Hans Baldung Grien, Hans Bellmer, Arnold Böcklin, Victor Brauner, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Angelo Caroselli, Giorgio de Chirico, Francesco Clemente, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Frans Floris, Alfred Kubin, René Magritte, Man Ray, Gustave Moreau, Richard Oelze, Yves Tanguy, Andy Warhol.
Hatje Cantz
2014
Hardcover
25 x 19 cm
208 pages
£70
Enquire