The story
Three landscapes by Gustav Klimt, the Viennese painter, hang in this small museum in the old town of Zug. Fir Forest from 1901 is a dense stand of trunks seen up close. Beside it are a garden landscape he painted in the summer of 1913 on Lake Garda and a garden view with a hilltop from 1916, two years before his death. How Klimt came to central Switzerland goes back to one friendship.
The Viennese sculptor Fritz Wotruba spent the Second World War in exile in Switzerland, mostly in Zug, with his Jewish wife. There he befriended the local patrons Fritz and Editha Kamm, and on his advice Fritz Kamm bought the Viennese Galerie Würthle in 1953. Wotruba ran the gallery until 1964, and through it the Kamms gathered the art of Vienna around 1900, with Egon Schiele, Richard Gerstl and Oskar Kokoschka alongside Klimt, work by the designer Josef Hoffmann, and Wotruba's own sculpture.
In 1998 the family placed the collection, today more than 400 works, in a foundation that lends it permanently to the Kunsthaus. The museum opened in 1990 in the Hof im Dorf, a 16th-century house at the edge of the old town, and also stages contemporary exhibitions. One of its projects lies outside the building. A permanent light installation by the American artist James Turrell glows in the glass facade of Zug railway station after dark.
