The exhibition “Van Gogh, Hodler and a Cabriolet: The Collector and Pioneer Gertrud Dübi-Müller” brings together around 80 works from the collector’s holdings along with photographs, unpublished letters and hand-painted postcards that reveal her wide network, according to the Kunstmuseum Basel. Curated by Géraldine Meyer, the display runs through February 7, 2027, and draws pieces from the Dübi-Müller Foundation at Kunstmuseum Solothurn, other Swiss institutions and private lenders that once belonged to her. It marks the first extensive examination of her role in shaping Swiss appreciation for modern art while illuminating her adventurous life as a photographer, mountaineer and early female motorist. The Kunstmuseum Basel noted that the show includes international masters such as Paul Cezanne, Gustav Klimt and Vincent van Gogh alongside Swiss artists including Cuno Amiet, Alice Bailly, Giovanni Giacometti and Ferdinand Hodler.
Gertrud Dübi-Müller was born in 1888 in Solothurn and lost her parents in childhood, which left her financially independent at an early age, the museum’s exhibition materials state. She received painting lessons from Cuno Amiet as a youth before turning her attention to collecting. In April 1908, just days before her 20th birthday, she purchased Van Gogh’s “Portrait of Charles-Elzéard Trabuc” from 1889, becoming one of the earliest Swiss buyers of his work at a time when the artist had yet to gain broad international recognition. The Art Newspaper reported that the painting was dispatched to her on April 27, 1908, with payment completed the next day.
Dübi-Müller went on to assemble a singular collection of modern art that eventually encompassed works by Henri Matisse and others, with some 190 pieces bequeathed to Kunstmuseum Solothurn upon her death in 1980, exhibition records show. The Van Gogh portrait, which hung in her Solothurn salon for nearly seven decades, is on loan to Basel for the current presentation. A 2026 assessment by the Kunstmuseum Basel found that her acquisitions helped introduce these artists to Swiss audiences decades before many public collections embraced them.
Beyond art, Dübi-Müller embraced a bold lifestyle that included driving one of the first cars owned by a woman in her city, a Pic-Pic model acquired in 1911, according to archival photographs featured in the exhibition. She modeled for Ferdinand Hodler in 17 portraits, among them the large-scale “Blick ins Unendliche” that now belongs to the Kunstmuseum Basel collection. The show incorporates her own photographs and documents sent by artists, offering fresh perspective on a figure who sat for multiple Swiss painters while building lasting relationships across the creative community.
The exhibition arrives as Swiss museums have placed growing emphasis on recovering stories of influential women in the early 20th-century art world, a pattern evident in recent displays across the region. Kunstmuseum Solothurn, which received the bulk of her bequest, collaborated closely on the Basel project to ensure works from both the Dübi-Müller and Josef Müller foundations could be shown together. Organizers have scheduled multiple guided tours in the coming weeks to accommodate expected interest in the collector’s previously under-recognized contributions.
Her friendship with Hodler and other Swiss modernists formed a central thread in the collection, with several portraits of Dübi-Müller herself included in the Basel installation, the curators stated. By combining the artworks with personal artifacts, the exhibition underscores how one individual’s independent resources and discerning eye left a permanent imprint on institutional holdings that remain accessible today. The Kunstmuseum Basel has positioned the presentation as both a celebration of her pioneering spirit and an opportunity to examine the private networks that sustained modern art circulation in Switzerland before the First World War.
