Kunstmuseum Basel honors the collector who bought a Van Gogh at 19: ‘Van Gogh, Hodler and a Cabriolet’

BASEL — Kunstmuseum Basel opened on 19 September 2026 in the Neubau the exhibition “Van Gogh, Hodler and a Cabriolet — The Collector and Pioneer Gertrud Dübi-Müller,” curated by Géraldine Meyer, as The Art Newspaper reports. The exhibition, open to the public until 7 February 2027, is the first comprehensive show devoted to Gertrud Dübi-Müller (Solothurn 1888–1980), one of Switzerland’s most distinguished art collectors. Around 80 works by renowned artists from her international collection, striking photographs and unpublished documents shed light on the extraordinary life of a woman who lived art as an adventure.

The heart of the exhibition is the purchase that made her famous: at the age of 19, before Van Gogh was internationally recognized, she bought the “Portrait of Charles-Elzéard Trabuc” (September 1889) — painted at the Saint-Rémy asylum in the south of France, where the asylum’s head nurse had posed as the model. The work reached her on 27 April 1908, two days before her 20th birthday; payment was made on 30 April — 40,000 Swiss francs, the equivalent of about $7,700 at the time. It was a bold purchase, as Van Gogh was still considered “mad” and the value of his works was unknown. She learned the model’s real name, Charles-Elzéard Trabuc, only in 1959.

But Gertrud Dübi-Müller was not merely a shrewd buyer. Orphaned as a child, at 23 she became the first woman in Solothurn to buy a car — the Piccard-Pictet cabriolet that gives the exhibition its title. A talented photographer of Alpine landscapes, she climbed the Matterhorn at the age of 49; in 1921 she married the lawyer Otto Dübi. She took her first painting lessons from Cuno Amiet, who introduced her to Van Gogh’s art; she was friends with Alice Bailly, Giacometti and Ferdinand Hodler — the latter portrayed her no fewer than 17 times.

When she died in 1980, she bequeathed 190 works to the Kunstmuseum Solothurn, including the Van Gogh and paintings by Cézanne, Matisse, Klimt and Picasso. The Basel exhibition shows not just a collection, but the portrait of a woman who, in an era when women were not even allowed to vote, resolutely built one of the most significant collections of 20th-century European art.