We’ve covered small museums here before…you might recall Musée-Placard d’Erik Satie, Edgar’s Closet or even the World’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Largest Things Traveling Roadside Attraction and Museum.
In the 1970s Swiss artist Herbert Distel worked on his Schubladenmuseum (Museum of Drawers), a collection of miniature contemporary artworks. It is often referred to as the world’s smallest modern art museum as it brings together, on a very small scale, a wide range of art, artists and art movements from the 1960s and 1970s. In the drawers of a cabinet that had previously been used for storing silk reels in a haberdashery shop, 500 miniature objects by over 500 different artists are on display in 20 drawers, each with 25 compartments. That sounds like a math problem. My head hurts. Here is a view of drawer six, in case you’re curious as to what teeny tiny modern art looks like. Anyway, the miniature museum is on display at the Kunsthaus Zürich, where it has been since 1979 when it was donated to the gallery by the artist.