Stranger in the Village - James Baldwin at the Aargauer Kunsthaus

Baldwin grew up in a poor Baptist family in New York, was involved in the Civil Rights Movement and fled to Europe from everyday racism in America. The exhibition, which deliberately focuses on the status of black people in his homeland, tells of Baldwin's winter in 1953 in the Swiss Alps, whose experiences three dozen artists:inside comment on with their works. The tour begins with a half-hour, astonishingly modern film by the SRF, which had visited the young author, already well known as an essayist and activist, in snowy Leukerbad. He says he is an attraction, a stranger as the day he arrived. The most accessible are the children who marvel at him, touch his skin and are amazed that it does not rub off. The artworks in a dozen spacious rooms are not as hermetic and enigmatic as modern art often is. Glenn Ligen from New York has brought in a large-format painting in which some lines from Baldwin's book can only be recognised as reliefs in black writing on a black background, a comment that is immediately obvious to me. A large-scale, colourful installation of living black life is constructed from cardboard boxes. A humiliated, kneeling black figure is duplicated by mirrors into infinity. Baldwin ended his book by deconstructing whiteness. It should no longer be the standard from which all other people deviate. His summary: "This world is no longer white and it will never be white again."

The recently renovated Kunsthaus Aargau also presents an impressive permanent exhibition that is rearranged every year from a fund of 30,000 exhibits. It offers art from the 18th century to the present: classics such as Anker and Hodler, Böcklin, Füssli and Kirchner, modern classics such as Bill and Arp, as well as numerous contemporary works. Women are underrepresented, which is certainly not the museum's intention, but is due to the fact of a patriarchal Switzerland. However, the founding of a national museum was a forward-looking decision. When the Aargau Art Association was constituted in 1860, there were already excellent international collections in Basel, Bern and Zurich. So it made sense for the founders to collect local art. Today's Kunsthaus dates back to 1959. It was extended twenty years ago according to a design by the architects Herzog & de Meuron, and is now modern, spacious, transparent, colourful, also fascinating as a building and absolutely worth a visit.

Stranger in the Village - Racism in the Mirror by James Baldwin runs at the Aargauer Kunsthaus until 7 January 2024. In addition, until 12 November 2003, the exhibition "Collection 23"shows a selection of the more than 30,000 works from the museum's collection, newly combined each year. All further information at www.aargauerkunsthaus.ch