Art in Public Places - Today’s Artwork: "Coghuf / E. Stocker - Les quatre heures"

March 24, 2026

This insight describes one of 563 public artworks in Basel. If you’d like to explore more publicly accessible artworks, browse the full dataset on data.bs. Or even better—experience them in person by booking a tour with Artstübli – Kunst und Kultur.

Photo: Coghuf / E. Stocker, Les quatre heures.

This mural by Coghuf, titled 'Les quatre heures,' transforms a school courtyard wall into a window onto a different world. Created in 1938 for a kindergarten, it presents a panoramic Jura landscape not as a wild idyll but as a cultivated, working terrain. The central scene of farmers taking their four o'clock break is rendered with monumental, simplified figures, making the laborers larger than life. This artistic choice serves a clear pedagogical purpose for its young urban audience: to vividly connect the food on their plates to the physical toil of rural life, embedding a lesson about origin and labor directly into the architecture of their play space. The artwork acts as a silent, enduring teacher within the school's walls.

Figure 1: Location of Artwork "Coghuf / E. Stocker - Les quatre heures"

Data source: Kunst im öffentlichen Raum
Additional resources: Artstübli, street-art-cities, Urban Art in Basel

🤖 This text was generated with the assistance of AI. All quantitative statements are derived directly from the dataset listed under Data Source.