Caricature & Cartoon Museum Basel

The Cartoon Museum is dedicated to the themes Cartoons with and without text, parodies and pastiches on art and artists, cartoons, illustrations on themes of culture and everyday life, as well as general political nature. The Basel museum is the only one of its kind within a radius of 500 kilometers.

The 3,000 original works by over 700 artists of the 20th/21st. Century, scoring from 40 countries collection inventory is presented in changing exhibitions. In addition, two to three exhibitions a year that are aligned thematic or monographic and also present loans alongside works from own stock. The collecting policy of the museum aims to present a representative and high quality selection of cartoons and caricatures from around the world.

Apart from the exhibitions can be found in a museum nor a reference library with literature on the subject cartoon, cartoon and comics. The approximately 5,000 specialized publications include journal series like The Bear Mirror, Nebelspalter, Flying leaves, Meggendorfer leaves, Kladderadatsch, Munich Bilderbogen, L' Assiette au beurre, Le Rire, Punch and The New Yorker.

A museum shop with new and antiquarian books, posters and postcards complements the museum's offer.

History

The Caricature & Cartoons collection Foundation was founded in 1979 by the Basel patron Dieter Burckhardt and is now affiliated as a dependent foundation of the Christoph Merian Foundation. The first director of the museum was the cartoonist Jürg Spahr aka " JÜSP ".

The exhibition rooms are located after a change of domicile in 1996 in a late Gothic building. This has been carefully renovated by the architects Herzog & de Meuron and supplemented by a contrasting new building.