10 Years of Fondation Beyeler

Written by Henry Wentworth Saturday, 21 August 2010 22:45

Riehen / Basel, Switzerland - Inaugurated on 18 October 1997, the Fondation Beyeler can now look back on a successful ten-year history. We are taking our jubilee year as an opportunity to celebrate with our visitors, friends, artists and partners. In 1997, Ernst and Hildy Beyeler requested star architect Renzo Piano to design a museum building expressly tailored to their outstanding collection. The result was a wonderful synthesis of art, architecture and landscape. The austere, light-flooded rooms and their spacious arrangement bring out the collection to best effect, and make a museum visit an experience in its own right. From the beginning, the high quality of the collection’s works has determined the demands placed on loans for the exhibition schedule.

Since the Fondation’s inauguration, approximately thirty exhibitions have been held. By the end of 2006, the museum had attracted a total of 2.7 million visitors, giving it a top box-office ranking among Swiss museums. Yet the Fondation is not just one of the key art institutions in the cultural center of Basel and environs. The fact that half its audience comes from abroad lends it a key role in the premiere league of international museums.

 The Fondation has continually supplemented the collection by new acquisitions from the start. Although its activities focused initially on the permanent collection, by 1999, only two years after the opening, more space to accommodate special exhibitions had already become necessary. The large north room was expanded by twelve meters. Thus the museum was prepared for the enormous crowds who flocked in spring 2001 to the Mark Rothko exhibition, curated by Oliver Wick. On its basis, the Fondation established its Mark Rothko Rooms, which for six years now have been presented in uninterrupted succession and varying composition, representing the artist’s work in a way found nowhere outside the United States.

The Fondation’s profile as an exhibition institute, as defined by Ernst Beyeler, has consistently reflected a combination of two basic emphases: thematic exhibitions and monographic exhibitions devoted to the work of a single artist. The majority of the special exhibitions have concentrated on one or two artists represented in the collection, or temporarily closed the gaps that resulted from the Beyelers’ personal preferences – as in the case of “Expressive!” in summer 2003, where the Expressionists, not represented in the collection, were on view. Reflecting the founder’s understanding of the museum as a place of living involvement and innovation, a number of unusual juxtapositions of works from highly diverse directions in art have provided surprising insights and experiences for broad audiences.

One reason for the museum’s unbroken attraction, the versatility of its exhibition spaces, their transparency and superb illumination, came out to special effect in the monographic shows of Ellsworth Kelly (2002-03) and Wolfgang Laib (2005-06). Yet it proved just as apposite, in more subdued form, to the works of Titian and Velazquez included in “Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art” (2004). Colors were introduced into the White Cube by Christoph Vitali for the first time in winter 2003, when he stipulated dark blue walls for “Paul Klee: Fulfillment in the Late Work.” The first exhibition mounted by the new team, in which Ernst Beyeler and Christoph Vitali were joined by curators Philippe Büttner and Ulf Küster, was devoted to the theme of “Flower Myth” (2005). Over the past two years the Fondation attracted an even wider audience with large exhibitions of Pablo Picasso, René Magritte, and Henri Matisse. By the end of 2006, visitor numbers had markedly risen, to an annual 340,000.

In future, the Fondation Beyeler will remain true to its credo of mounting exhibitions of wide public appeal on the highest level of quality. The strengths of the collection will remain the focal points and points of departure for each project to come. Our jubilee year will feature two shows: a grand retrospective devoted to “Edvard Munch: Signs of Modern Art” (18 March – 15 July 2007), and “The Other Collection: Homage to Hildy and Ernst Beyeler” (19 August 2007 – 6 January 2008). The latter will reunite a selection from the many thousands of works that have passed through Galerie Beyeler and juxtapose them with the museum’s collection. Visit Fondation Beyeler at : www.beyeler.com/