The Collection.
From Claude Monet to Johannes Itten, from Meret Oppenheim to El Anatsui

The Kunstmuseum Bern owns an important collection of art from the late Middle Ages to the present. The collection exhibition includes selected works from the holdings, presented in changing displays.

In the basement of the old wing the central avant-garde trends of modern art are represented with Cubism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and abstract art. Highlights include Violin Hanging on a Wall by Pablo Picasso, Meret Oppenheim’s Enchantment, or Piet Mondrian’s Tableau No. II with Grey and Black. The presentation is complemented by a selection of works by the Bernese artist Adolf Wölfli from the holdings of the Adolf Wölfli Foundation.

On the ground floor of the old wing, works by El Anatsui and Kader Attia as representatives of global contemporary art form the prelude. A neighboring room features the very greatest names of international art history: Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh. Landscapes by Swiss exponents of modern art such as Ferdinand Hodler, Félix Vallotton and Giovanni Giacometti complete the exhibition. 

A side cabinet is dedicated to the donation of Marion Lichardus-Itten. It presents eight paintings by the artist Johannes Itten (1888–1967), that his daughter donated to the Kunstmuseum Bern in an extraordinarily generous gesture in 2024.

A variety of other works from the collection of the Kunstmuseum Bern can currently be discovered on the upper floor of the new wing in the Collection intervention by Amy Sillman (till 2.11.2025).