Virtual Showcases

The painter, writer and art critic Walter Kern (1898–1966) was a prolific letter-writer all his life. When preparing for a publication or an exhibition, he above all corresponded with artists. In the late 2000s, SIK-ISEA acquired all the artists’ letters as a gift from the family estate.

SIK-ISEA’s first managing director, Marcel Fischer, made it a lifetime project to study the Zurich animal painter Rudolf Koller (1828–1905). A particularly fertile source were Koller’s letters to his fellow-painter Ernst Stückelberg. In the mid-1960s, after Fischer’s death, the documents were donated to SIK-ISEA.

The posthumous papers of painter Reinhold Kündig (1888–1984), held by SIK-ISEA since the mid-1980s, include not only diaries and sketchbooks, but also several hundred handwritten letters from fellow-artists Hermann Huber, Otto Meyer-Amden, Cuno Amiet, Willy Baumeister and Oskar Schlemmer.