The Glarner Kunstverein has been collecting works by regional, Swiss, and international artists since 1870. The acquisitional activities of the collection from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s can serve as an example for the history of the reception of Swiss art and its global interdependencies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the 1880s and 1890s, the Kunstverein focused primarily on acquiring Swiss landscape painting rooted in classicism and romanticism; works by Rudolf Koller, Balz Stäger, and Johann Gottfried Steffan thus made their way into the collection. The cautious approach to collecting activities in the transition to twentieth-century artistic modernism is evident, for example, in the painting In den Glarner Alpen (undated) by Jakob (Jacques) Ruch: a mountainous landscape—a traditional motif in landscape and genre painting—links the artist to a style of painting inspired by Giovanni Segantini and French impressionism. The works of the Glarus painters Ruch, Alexander Soldenhoff, and Jakob Wäch, acquired in the 1910s, combine tendencies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting. Up to the period following the Second World War, the Glarner Kunstverein concentrated on closing gaps in the collection relative to Swiss positions and acquired works by, for instance, Fritz Pauli, Otto Tschumi, and Johann von Tscharner. Individual acquisitions of representatives of twentieth-century modernism were made possible through the initiative of the multi-term president and longtime board member and collector Othmar Huber—including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s painting Vor Sonnenaufgang (1925–26), acquired for the Kunstverein in 1952. In the 1950s and 1960s, alongside other additions to the collection of more representational painting by Ernst Morgenthaler and Adolf Herbst, the abstract painting of Maly Blumer, Christine Gallati and Mathias Spescha was also acquired.

Since the opening of Kunsthaus Glarus in 1952, the Kunstverein has repeatedly shown the collection in the context of temporary exhibitions. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Glarner Kunstverein focused on acquiring more individual works and positions, at times also from retrospective exhibitions with Swiss artists—coherent series of works were rarely assembled. Since the 1980s, the Kunstverein has increasingly focused on young and local artists and viewed itself more and more as a promoter of an internationally oriented art scene. The creation of a curatorial position in 1991 not only impacted the international and contemporary direction of the venue, but also changed the approach to the collections, which were extensively cataloged and detailed for the first time in 1995. At the same time, the collecting and exhibition activities grew closer together—many of the acquisitions came from temporary exhibitions. Since the 1990s, the Kunstverein has increasingly acquired works by internationally active Swiss artists such as Olaf Breuning, Urs Lüthi, and Annelies Štrba. Overall, a heterogeneous series of works and larger groupings of works have been come under the aegis of the Glarner Kunstverein over the past 150 years—through acquisitions as well as donations and thus through the support of dedicated board members and local collectors. In addition to its own collection featuring holdings from the Swiss Confederation and the Gottfried Keller Foundation, and larger groupings of works by Glarner artists, including Paul Fröhlich, Greta Leuzinger, and Lill Tschudi, the Kunsthaus Glarus today houses part of the Othmar Huber collection on permanent loan, the Gustav Schneeli collection and the Marc Egger collection.

Addressing the history of the collection always offers a possibility for reflecting critically on one’s own contribution to art historiography. In 1920, the Glarner theologian and local chronicler Ernst Buss described the collecting philosophy of the Glarner Kunstverein in the following terms: “Collect works, don’t break them up and focus on works of high artistic value when collecting.” (Ernst Buss, Die Kunst im Glarnerland von den ältesten Zeiten bis zur Gegenwart, published by the Glarner Kunstverein, 1920). Formulated as a noble goal, this historical description ignores the factors that so often characterize a collection’s holdings: groupings of artistic works, individual and collective preferences, and not least financial resources. Questions concerning the circumstances around collecting and acquisitions often also occupy the artists who are invited to exhibit at the Kunsthaus today. One the one hand, some of them work directly with the collections of the Glarner Kunstverein, incorporating them into their exhibitions; on the other, current acquisitions focus primarily on the works of artists shown at Kunsthaus Glarus or even ones produced for the exhibitions. In the last several years, works by Mathis Gasser, Thomas Julier, Shana Moulton, Vanessa Safavi, Yorgos Sapountzis, and Marta Riniker-Radich have thus been included in the collection. The merging of local and international contexts still informs the collections of the Kunstverein today—as a result of its proximity to the Kunsthaus exhibition program, the collection is co-author to a history of exhibitions.

The collections are not on permanent display—a selection of works is regularly shown in exhibitions or is accessible in the context of events held in the Schaudepot. The online catalogue of the collections allows some of the works from the collections to be accessed over the Kunsthaus website and is continuously expanding.