If man-sized black spiders lurk with blood-red eyes, horses snort flames, wooden beams burst, walls break, people swirl into the air – then Franz Karl Basler-Kopp (1879-1937) has something to do with it. As spectacularly fantastical as the fabulous pictorial cosmos of this Basle-born and Lucerne-based artist, who trained as a painter on glass and later as an illustrator, might seem, it remains bound to the everyday world of simple people, their fears and dreams. Within the context of the Albert Koechlin Foundation’s thematic focus for 2013 – ‘sagenhaft’, or ‘fabulous’ – a fresh eye is cast on this almost forgotten body of work, whose formal quality and contemporary content have in the past tended to be overlooked.

Kunstmuseum Luzern owns the key works Hexenhalfter and Die schwarze Spinne. The exhibition brings together loans from all over Switzerland, to present the oeuvre of Franz Karl Basler-Kopp for the first time in all its media breadth. The selection from his complete works encompasses paintings, chalk drawings and book illustrations. The exhibition catalogue is the first academic examination of Basler-Kopp’s work.

Narrative is at the heart of Basler-Kopp’s thematically wide-ranging work. He finds most of his subject-matter in the world of European fairy tales and legends, historical situations and biblical events. His landscapes and portraits are rarer. The selection of themes from the popular culture of former times, along with the fact that the Lucerne painter was forgotten for several decades, makes him difficult to place in art-historical terms, but also puts him in an interestingly unique position. But the peasants, Alpine landscapes and horses also lend charm to his fantastical illustrations, and in spite of their popular pictorial language they do not appear in any way trivial.