Exhibition 6

Emerik Feješ

6.9.25 – 18.10.25

You are cordially invited to the opening on Friday, September 5, from 6 – 9 pm.

The opening of the exhibition will take place on the occasion of this year’s DC Open. Opening hours: Saturday, September 6, from 1–7 pm and Sunday, September 7, from 1–5 pm

Emerik Feješ finds his motifs on postcards, stamps, and matchboxes, in photographs and newspaper articles. Artists and friends share material with him on which he bases his works; so, sometimes, do clients who want to commission a picture. Most of his creations show buildings the painter is familiar with and outstanding works of architecture that he arranges in imaginary topographies, his way of visiting places he will not see with his own eyes.

Emerik Feješ is born in 1904, the ninth of fourteen children, in Osijek in the Kingdom of Hungary. His father makes combs and buttons, a craft that at the time still involves traditional staples—wood, horn, and bones. In 1909, the Feješ family relocates to Novi Sad, where the father has found employment. It is here that Emerik Feješ spends his youth. He leaves school at the age of nine and starts working, initially as an errand-boy in a factory. The money he earns helps feed his large family.

Over the following years, he often changes professions and residences, living in Zagreb, Pula, Belgrade, Celje, Maribor, Osijek, and Rijeka. Touring the cities and towns of the Yugoslav monarchy, he variously works as a lathe operator, dealer in used goods, and planer. He leaves the country only once: during the turmoil of the Second World War, Feješ, a member of the Serbian-Hungarian minority, seeks refuge in Hungary—first in Pest, then in Nagyvárad. Once the war is over, he returns to Novi Sad, settling down for good and again taking up employment in a button factory.

Working conditions in the factories of the postwar era are harsh. The production of combs and buttons consumes a lot of water, and Feješ struggles with the damp and cold. He falls ill, and his health steadily deteriorates. Finally, in 1949, he is forced to retire—his first attempts at painting date from the same year.

His painting utensils are improvised; instead of brushes, Feješ uses sharpened matchsticks, the paper is spoilage from his wife’s writing and translation office, which, after hours, serves him as a studio, and the paints are leftovers from the button factory.

To begin working on a new picture, he first draws a preliminary sketch in vigorous pencil strokes, enlarging his chosen motif. His label for this first drawing is “original.” Based on it, he subsequently produces additional copies, which he then overpaints—usually in oil or gouache. These paintings are often executed in several variants, and so versions with different color schemes sometimes coexist.

In the 1950s, Emerik Feješ catches the attention of the Yugoslav art scene. He is introduced to the artists Ivan Tabaković, Bogomil Karlavaris, and Ana Bešlić and talks shop with them. His colleagues advise him to set aside the interiors and nudes he initially also paints and encourage him to focus on architecture. He rarely goes to see exhibitions of others’ work—when he does, he searches their pictures for similarities to his own and is relieved when he does not find any. Artists come to see him in his studio, but he does not pay return visits.

He strikes up a friendship with Ilija Bosilj Bašičević, whose son, the art critic Dimitrije Mića Bašičević, organizes a first solo exhibition of his work in 1956 and contributes a critical essay that is later published in a catalogue.

Emerik Feješ dies in Novi Sad in 1969; initial retrospectives of his work are shown the same year and a year later.

The influential art critic Oto Bihalji-Merin integrates his works into the exhibition Die Kunst der Naiven, which is on view first at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, and then at Kunsthaus Zürich in 1974 –1975.

Charlotte Zander, too, debuts Emerik Feješ in 1974; over the years, she presents his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions at her gallery and later at Museum Charlotte Zander at Schloss Bönnigheim. She moreover releases two publications about the artist, to which she also contributes writings. The Zander Collection now holds one of the largest bodies of work by Feješ.

Supported by:

Exhibition 7
André Bauchant / Le Corbusier:
Autodidacts of the avant-garde

1.11.25 – 31.1.26
curated by regina barunke

You are cordially invited to the opening on Friday, October 31, from 6 – 9 pm.

In 1921, Le Corbusier first took note of the paintings by André Bauchant at the Paris Salon d’Automne. Shortly thereafter, the architect visits the painter in the Touraine and becomes the first to acquire one of his works. From this encounter emerged a friendship lasting over two decades, marked by intellectual exchange and mutual respect, which finds expression not least in an extensive correspondence.

Born in Château-Renault, André Bauchant (1873–1958) leaves school at the age of fourteen, becomes a gardener like his father, and later runs a flourishing tree nursery employing more than a dozen workers. For his business, he regularly travels through central and western France, combining his interest in history with visits to ancient sites and historic monuments. At the outbreak of the First World War, Bauchant—then forty—is drafted and takes part in the Dardanelles Offensive. The settings of Greek mythology, which until then he had known only from books, now appear before his own eyes: “I saw Greece, Olympus, the gods—and Homer was my companion. I lived the dreams of my childhood.”

Back in the Touraine, he receives military training in telemetry and impresses his superiors with his drawing skills: with meticulous precision, he sketches topographical maps; his comrades salvage pastel pencils, paint tubes, cardboard, and even canvases from the ruins—in return, he makes portraits of them. After the war ends, he finds his nursery in a state of neglect. He liquidates what remains, buys canvases and paints—and begins to paint. From then on he produces works featuring allegorical, historical, religious, and mythological subjects, infused with memories, literary influences, and daydreams. Another significant aspect of his oeuvre consists of portraits, landscapes, and floral compositions, often framed by depictions of fruits and birds from his daily surroundings.

When Bauchant submits paintings to the Paris Autumn Salon in 1921, nine are accepted—whereas normally at most two would be. Thus begins an extraordinary career: international exhibitions in museums and galleries; patrons such as Wilhelm Uhde and the gallery owner Jeanne Bucher; stage design commissions for Sergei Djagilew; an oeuvre of more than 3,000 paintings. Despite his success, Bauchant eschews the Parisian art scene. He remains in the countryside, devoted to his own imagery: “When he is not painting, he devotes eye and hand to his vineyard, his trees, the flowers and vegetables in his garden … He reads. His library is his only luxury. There he accumulates engravings and beautiful, bound volumes … One of his favourite books is Rollin’s Histoire ancienne … On Sundays he rests. He enters the church, always among the first, through the side door.” (Maximilien Gauthier, 1943) Those wishing to see his latest works had to visit him in person.

Fourteen years after Bauchant, Le Corbusier is born Charles‑Édouard Jeanneret‑Gris (1887–1965) in La Chaux‑de‑Fonds, a small town in the Jura region of Switzerland renowned for its watchmaking industry. Like his father, he learns the craft of engraving and enamelling watch dials, attends the local school of arts and crafts, and is influenced by the regional Art Nouveau style. During educational journeys through Europe and Asia Minor, he studies buildings and craftsmanship. Back home, he designs his first buildings, applying the architectural knowledge he has acquired.

In 1917, he moves to Paris. Initially without major architectural commissions, he turns to painting and joins the artistic avant‑gardes. Together with Amédée Ozenfant and Paul Dermée, he founds the journal L’Esprit nouveau. Revue internationale d’esthétique in 1920, where he formulates ideas about Purism and actively engages in contemporary debates. It is in this journal that the first article about André Bauchant appears; further reviews follow. In this way, Le Corbusier introduces the painter to a broader audience, and also acts as an intermediary for potential buyers. Among these are artists such as Jacques Lipchitz, Jean Lurçat, and Serge Lifar, the designer and architect Charlotte Perriand, and the French art collector Alphonse Kann, originally from Vienna.

Numerous photographs from the late 1920s depict the architect in his old‑fashioned, charmingly cluttered apartment on Rue Jacob, captured in moments of leisure—for example, reading a newspaper, smoking a pipe, and wearing slippers. During this period, Le Corbusier also begins to revise his biography, presenting himself as a self‑taught outsider, distant from institutions and fashionable circles, as the “peasant of Paris.” Accordingly, his enthusiasm for the paysan‑poète Bauchant stems less from the painter’s subject matter than from the artistic conviction he attributes to him. For Le Corbusier, Bauchant’s art embodies a creative practice untouched by academic rules and conventions, whose “truthfulness” he contrasts with what he sees as the exhausted cultural norms of his time: “Bauchant, the peasant poet, masters his work in a wonderful manner—precisely because no aesthetic worries trouble him, because he is free of scruples and has that naiveté which allows one to dare everything—with a craftsmanship which one all too often vainly seeks in the artists of the intellectual classes.” (L’Esprit nouveau, 1921) In a letter written in 1949, Le Corbusier interprets Bauchant’s modest lifestyle as an expression of the authenticity he finds lacking in bourgeois art circles: “They lived on a small clearing; they worked in a room illuminated only through the four glass panes of a small glass door …” He had articulated this idea even more explicitly earlier in a lecture at the Volta Congress in Rome in 1936: the “Sunday painters”—amateurs and outsiders, including Bauchant and himself—are the only legitimate carriers of a new art, one emancipated from the taste of elites and the “plastic aristocracy.” The artistic naïveté Le Corbusier projects onto Bauchant is thus not a deficiency, but a source of creative vitality. Hitherto, he develops an aesthetic theory closely linked to anthropological concepts such as Claude Lévi‑Strauss’s pensée sauvage or bricolage. The bricoleur—in Lévi‑Strauss’s terms—does not adhere to a fixed plan, but designs, improvises, and experiments with whatever is available. It is precisely this approach that Le Corbusier identifies as the strength of autodidactic artists such as Bauchant or Louis Soutter, whom he regards as his “kindred spirits.” Unburdened by the “decadent” academic canon, their works, in his view, bear witness to an unmediated vision of the world, unclouded by education, market forces, or tradition.

In the 1950s, Charlotte Zander becomes aware of André Bauchant, begins exhibiting his works regularly in her Munich gallery from the 1970s onward, and thus significantly shapes his reception in German‑speaking countries. In 2001, she devoted a major retrospective to him at the Museum Charlotte Zander in Bönnigheim, Germany. Today, her collection includes over 140 paintings and drawings—among them works from Le Corbusier’s collection particulière—making it one of the largest holdings of the artist’s work worldwide. From this rich trove, Regina Barunke, curator of the exhibition, has selected a group of works, complemented by loans from the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris. A comprehensive catalogue accompanies the exhibition, featuring in‑depth essays and selected archival material. For the first time, it also presents the correspondence between Bauchant and Le Corbusier, transcribed, translated, and arranged in chronological order.

Supported by

Charlotte Zander:
COLLECTOR, GALLERIST, MUSEUM FOUNDER

10.10.25 – 25.9.26

Ghosts
Visualizing the supernatural

20.9.25 – 8.3.26

Ghosts seem to be everywhere. Visual culture teems with specters, from Hollywood blockbusters like Ghostbusters (1984) to indie films such as All of Us Strangers (2023). They haunt screens, theater stages, and pages: literature, folklore, and myth are saturated with spirits that refuse to leave us in peace.

They have also always haunted art. As entities of the in-between, ghosts are mediators between worlds, between above and below, life and death, horror and humor, good and evil, visible and invisible. Any attempt to depict, record, or communicate with them thus offers a conceptual challenge and an emotional thrill.

This fall and winter, the Kunstmuseum Basel dedicates an extensive exhibition to these unfathomable entities. With over 160 works and objects created during the past 250 years, Ghosts. Visualizing the Supernatural explores the rich visual culture associated with ghosts that took shape in the Western hemisphere in the nineteenth century—when science, spiritualism, and popular media began to intersect in new ways, inspiring art and artists ever since.
– Kunstmuseum Basel

The exhibition has been curated by Eva Reifert. It features works by Agatha Wojciechowsky, on loan from the Zander Collection.

Kunstmuseum Basel
St. Alban-Graben 8
4010 Basel
Switzerland

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Milestone Cooperation on Self-Taught and Outsider Artists’ Work in Cologne. The Kunst- und Museumsbibliothek and ZADIK Receive Major Gifts from the Zander Collection

In 1997, Charlotte Zander was the first woman to be honored with the ART COLOGNE Award for her formidable dedication to “naïve art.” Twenty-eight years later, the documentation and scholarly study of the works of self-taught and outsider artists are firmly established in Cologne, with permanent representation at three venues: last fall, the nonprofit Zander Collection inaugurated an exhibition space in Cologne where exhibitions of works from the collection are held on a regular basis. Susanne Zander now gifts the internationally unrivaled specialized library with literature on the collection’s themes to the Kunst- und Museumsbibliothek Köln (KMB), where scholars can access it effective immediately. Meanwhile, the collector, gallery owner, and museum founder Charlotte Zander’s archive has been entrusted to ZADIK, where it is being made accessible to researchers. ZADIK is preparing a thematically focused exhibition, which will open in 2025.

Nadine Oberste-Hetbleck, director of ZADIK, is delighted: “In the extensive archival material documenting Charlotte Zander’s work, ZADIK now possesses a stock of high-quality sources providing insight into her collection-building activities going back to the 1950s. Because she turned her personal passion into a profession, founding a gallery and, later, a museum, the archive also enables us to learn more about the international networks of dealers and museums handling and showcasing ‘naïve art.’”

Susanne Zander, CEO of Sammlung Zander, is confident that the gifts have opened up new avenues of access to the work of self-taught and outsider artists for specialists and the broader public alike: “One objective of our work with the Zander Collection is to facilitate and promote scholarly engagement with this art. We want to establish Cologne as a central setting of such research. The gifts, which also encompass my personal extensive library on so-called outsider art, are a vital step toward this goal. We are moreover developing new projects involving the collection that embed our exhibitions in diverse discursive and scholarly contexts.”

Elke Purpus, director of the Kunst- und Museumsbibliothek, is inviting the interested public to come and start reading: “We have already entered 2,449 publications into our online catalogue—the work is almost complete. We look forward to welcoming many visitors wishing to consult the Zander Library.”

Bringing both an archive and the related specialized library to Cologne is a model that ZADIK and the Kunst- und Museumsbibliothek have successfully implemented in a series of instances. They underscore its advantages: “It is only a short walk from one institution to the other, enabling scholars to take full advantage of the two related sets of holdings—a collaboration we intend to consolidate and expand on.”