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.

The private archive of André Kamber (1932–2021) was donated to SIK-ISEA in 2021. This fonds contains a great abundance of material from numerous Swiss artists. Kamber’s posthumous papers consist primarily of correspondence with these artists, including well-known iron sculptors, Fluxus associates, plastic artists and adherents of Nouveau Réalisme. Kamber was variously involved in the activities of the Swiss art community from the 1960s onwards, as his archive testifies.