Zoological Garden

History of the work

If you enter the Wylergut school through the wide arch on the estate's square, you find yourself in an open break hall. This is where Rudolf Mumprecht painted the fresco 'Zoologischer Garten' (Zoological Garden) in 1949. The school itself was built in 1948 and 1949 to designs by the city's building department. According to the City of Bern's building inventory it is made up of several blocks, each under its own pitched roof, as was typical of the late 1940s, and it belongs to the large Wylergut housing estate.

Mumprecht left a second work on the building: on the gable side there is a wall clock which he surrounded with the signs of the zodiac in sgraffito. In the stairwell, an illustrated wall alphabet by Eugen Jordi and Emil Zbinden had been on view since 1949. Three of its fields showed people from Africa, Asia and America in a stereotyped way; in 2020 unknown persons painted over these fields in black. After a competition the city decided in 2023 to remove the painting and give it to the Bern History Museum, which planned an exhibition about it for 2024. The building inventory still lists Mumprecht's works on the building.

Mumprecht was born in Basel on 1 January 1918 and grew up in Bern. He trained as a cartographer, qualifying as a draughtsman-lithographer in 1938, and taught himself painting and etching to a large extent; from 1943 he printed on his own copperplate press. According to the artists' lexicon SIKART his early work was figurative, with portraits, still lifes and animal pictures. The fresco was thus made shortly before he moved to Paris in 1949, where he stayed until 1954. With Jordi and Zbinden, the painters of the alphabet, he also drew the construction of the Grimsel power station from 1951 to 1953.

Mumprecht later turned to abstraction; from the 1970s, pictures made of writing and signs became his main subject. In Bern there are works by him in the town hall (1992) and at the university's Institute of Mathematics (1972), among other places. He died in Bern on 25 July 2019; his estate is held by the Burgerbibliothek. On site, compare the animals in the break hall with the zodiac clock on the gable wall.

Researched and summarised by Bärn Kit. Sources: Kultur Stadt Bern, Kunst im öffentlichen Raum (offene Daten) · Bauinventar Stadt Bern: Dändlikerweg 60 (Schulhaus Wylergut) · SIKART: Rudolf Mumprecht (Eugen Gomringer) · Wikipedia (de): Rudolf Mumprecht · SRF News, 11.4.2023: Umstrittene Wandmalerei wandert vom Schulhaus ins Museum · plattformJ, 12.4.2023: Wandbild Wylergut kommt ins Museum · Wikimedia Commons: Fresko Zoologischer Garten (Rudolf Mumprecht 1949)