Dealer's choice

Last October, after three years of painstaking construction and a series of last-minute alterations, the Beyeler Foundation 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 Renzo Piano, the museum is the brainchild of Ernst Beyeler, a 76-year-old Swiss gallery owner who, after nearly a half century as one of Europe's preeminent art dealers, wished to create a permanent home for his own collection of modern, contemporary and tribal art.

Beyeler got his start as an art dealer in 1945 after taking over a failing bookstore in the center of Basel's old town. With the profits from a sale of Goya prints, he acquired prints by Toulouse-Lautrec, then drawings by the Impressionists and by Klee and Picasso. Early on, he decided to concentrate on modernist painters, publishing glossy catalogues to attract an international clientele. A hoard of important works by Klee and Giacometti was acquired in the late 1950s 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 on Baumleinstrasse where he started out 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 success of this show and subsequent ones in Berlin and Sydney fired Beyeler to give the works a permanent home. As the collection's reputation grew, Basel authorities were moved to lend a hand. According to Beyeler, who was one of the cofounders of the Basel contemporary art fair and for decades excelled at luring collectors to the city, Basel began worrying that it might lose his incomparable anthology to another city. Skillfully playing on this anxiety, Beyeler negotiated with the canton of Basel to obtain a parcel of publicly owned parkland on an 80-year lease (with an option for a further 100 years). The canton will pay one-third of the yearly operating costs of 5.25 million Swiss francs ($3.75 million); the remaining two-thirds of operating costs and the 55 million Swiss francs ($39.2 million) for museum construction will be borne by 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 own collection. On early visits to the Berowerpark, as the Riehen site is known, Piano was struck by the existence of a pair of north-south walls -- one following Baselstrasse, the adjoining street, 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 two walls. "The genius of the place was already there, so I took advantage of it," he observed in an interview for this article.

Tucked away unobtrusively behind a mottled reddish-pink wall of Patagonian porphyry, the long, one-story museum is set on 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 encounter a series of shallow terraces which descend 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 rooms created by this layout are lit by natural light from the glass roof. Outfitted with light-refracting brise-soleil panels, the flat glass roof is one of the museum's most distinctive features. Large windows at the ends of the building also provide illumination.

In one gallery devoted to Monet's 40-foot-long Pond of Water Lilies (1917-20), reflections from the adjoining outdoor pond dance off the walls, sometimes competing for attention with the painting, sometimes lending it unpredictable vibrancy. According to Piano, this was the first room he visualized for the museum interior. Natural light is also emphasized in the narrow, sunlit conservatory which stretches along one side of the museum. Here visitors can plop down in comfortable couches and gaze through a wall of glass that looks across a rolling pasture toward hilly vineyards planted just over 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 model of serene understatement. Unlike the blatantly high-tech Pompidou Center in Paris, which branded Piano and his partner Richard Rogers as the bad boys of architecture when it was completed in 1977, the museum in Basel fastidiously hides even the barest whit of technology, down to sequestering humidity meters behind the walls and placing motion sensors out 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 feel as if you should take off your shoes to appreciate the art and the building."