Dealer's choice - Beyeler Foundation's new museum in Switzerland

Last October, after three years of painstaking construction and a series of last-minute alterations, the Beyeler Foundation lay opened its new museum in Riehen, a leafy suburb that is located a 25-minute tram ride from central Basel. Housed in a building designed by the agency of Renzo Piano, the museum is the brainchild of Ernst Beyeler, a 76-year-old Swiss gallery proprietor who, after nearly a half hundred as one of Europe's preeminent art dealers, wished to create a permanent place of abode for his own collection of late contemporary and tribal art.

Beyeler got his start as an art dealer in 1945 after taking above a failing bookstore in the center of Basel's aged town. With the profits from a sale of Goya prints, he acquired prints by dint of Toulouse-Lautrec, then drawings by the Impressionists and through Klee and Picasso. Early upon he decided to concentrate upon modernist painters, publishing glossy catalogues to attract an international clientele. A hoard of important works by the agency of Klee and Giacometti was acquired in the late 1950 from the Pittsburgh collector David Thompson Another big break came in 1957 when Picasso invited Beyeler to his studio in Mougins and said, "Choose what you like." Today, Beyeler still operates his gallery from the considerably expanded bookstore space upon Baumleinstrasse where he started on the outside 52 years ago.

Although Beyeler established a foundation for his collection in 1982 he had nowhere to house it. Not until it was shown in a 1989 exhibition at Madrid's Reina Sofia museum was the collection displayed in its entirety. The succes of this present to view and subsequent ones in Berlin and Sydney fired Beyeler to give the works a permanent domicile As the collection's reputation grew Basel authorities were mov to accommodate with a hand. According to Beyeler, who was single of the cofounders of the Basel contemporary art fair and for decades excell at luring collectors to the city, Basel began worrying that it might be deprived of his incomparable anthology to another city. Skillfully playing upon this anxiety, Beyeler negotiated with the canton of Basel to obtain a parcel of publicly possessed parkland on an 80-year lease (with an option for a further 100 years). The canton will pay one-third of the yearly operating require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergones of 5.25 million Swiss francs ($375 million); the remaining two-thirds of operating require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergones and the 55 million Swiss francs ($392 million) for museum construction will be borne through the Beyeler Foundation.

Instead of holding an architectural competition, Beyeler chose Renzo Piano directly, largely because he admired the architect's 1987 wood-and-glass Menil museum in Houston and envisaged a sparer variant to house his possess collection. On early visits to the Berowerpark, as the Riehen site is known, Piano was struck by dint of the existence of a pair of north-south walls -- single following Baselstrasse, the adjoining public way and another running parallel in the pasture which borders the park. The architect decided to position the museum in the 131-foot-wide gap between the sum of two units walls. "The genius of the place was already there, in the way that I took advantage of it," he observ in an interview for this article.

bilboed away unobtrusively behind a mottl reddish-pink wall of Patagonian porphyry, the lengthy one-story museum is set upon a 2.3-acre plot of land which includes a villa and an English-style garden. (The villa houses the museum's administrative offices as well as a restaurant.) As visitors approach the museum, which is clad in the same reddish-pink stone as the boundary wall, they rencounter a series of shallow terraces which come down gradually to a rectangular pond abutting the building. The interior of the roughly 364-foot-long museum is divided lengthwise into three parallel sections. The strings of white-walled exhibition expanses created by this layout are lit through natural light from the glass cover Outfitted with light-refracting brise-soleil panels, the flat glass cover is one of the museum's greatest in quantity distinctive features. Large windows at the extremitys of the building also provide illumination.

In single gallery devoted to Monet's 40-foot-long Pond of Water Lilies (1917-20) reflections from the adjoining outdoor pond dance not upon the walls, sometimes competing for attention with the painting, sometimes lending it unpredictable vibrancy. According to Piano, this was the first latitude he visualized for the museum interior. Natural light is also emphasized in the narrow, sunlit conservatory which stretches along individual side of the museum. Here visitors can plop down in comfortable couches and gaze [i]or[/i] part of to the other a wall of glass that gazes across a rolling pasture toward hilly vineyards planted just above the border in Germany.

Inaugurated in the same week as Frank Gehry's much-publicized and controversial Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Piano's Beyeler Foundation is a type of serene understatement. Unlike the blatantly high-tech Pompidou Center in Paris, which branded Piano and his partner Richard Roger as the bad lads of architecture when it was complet in 1977 the museum in Basel fastidiously hides smooth the barest whit of technology, down to sequestering humidity meter behind the walls and placing motion sensors without of sight in ceilings and doors. "The Pompidou Center was about the desacralization of art," Piano explained in his Paris workshop. "The Beyeler is the opposite; it's about consecration, a place of quiet, where you almost perceive as if you should take not on your shoes to appreciate the art and the building."