A Museum of Reflection Has a Quiet Start in Switzerland

After nearly half a century as one of Europe’s preeminent art dealers, Ernst Beyeler is used to getting his own way. The Swiss gallery owner who helped persuade Pablo Picasso to donate one of his constructed sheet-metal guitars to the Museum of Modern Art can be a highly persuasive individual.

So when the 76-year-old son of a railroad worker insisted that the basement columns of his new museum in Basel be removed, architect Renzo Piano, best known for his Paris Pompidou Center, grudgingly complied.

“Have you ever tried to cut away columns from a building that’s already been built?” Piano wondered aloud during a recent interview. After reinforcing the roof and its row of light-refracting panels, Piano’s team sliced away the columns with a high-intensity water spray that cuts like a laser and removed them. Upstairs and downstairs, the museum now presents a clean sweep of unobstructed cream-white walls.

After three years of painstaking construction and a series of last-minute acquisitions and alterations, the $39-million Fondation Beyeler museum opened in late October in Riehen, a leafy suburb of Basel. Launched nearly simultaneously with and very much in the shadow of Frank Gehry’s much-publicized and controversial Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain, Piano’s new museum is a model of serene understatement.

Antithetical to Piano’s blatantly high-tech Pompidou Center, which branded Piano and his partner Richard Rogers as the bad boys of architecture when it was completed in 1977, the museum in Basel coyly 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 an interview in his Paris studio. “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.”

The museum is set on the grounds of an English-style garden. At the entrance, a series of shallow terraces descends gradually to a rectangular pond abutting the building. Rising from the pond are four pillars supporting the projecting glass roof and the beginnings of four parallel walls that run the length of the building and divide the structure into three major sections.

Along the west side of the museum, visitors plop down in comfortable couches in the winter garden, a sunlit conservatory with a wall of glass that faces across a rolling pasture toward hilly vineyards planted just over the border in Germany.

“I don’t need outdoor sculptures, I have cows instead,” Beyeler explained with a wink. During a recent interview at the museum, the energetic dealer was constantly in motion, fielding calls from artists and negotiating future acquisitions.

With 145 paintings and sculptures and 24 tribal works from Africa, Oceania and Alaska, the Beyeler collection is an idiosyncratic lexicon of Modern art and its influences. It starts with “Reclining Man,” an 1883 charcoal drawing by Georges Seurat, and passes from late Impressionism to post-Impressionism with works by Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne and Vincent van Gogh and on to Cubist pieces by Picasso and Georges Braque.

In 17 galleries lit by natural sunlight from a glass roof, the collection also includes works by a range of Modern masters and American artists, including Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol.

With 28 drawings, paintings and sculptures, Picasso is the most-represented artist. “I’ve always felt more comfortable with the masters of Modern art,” Beyeler observed. “It’s a reflection of my somewhat conservative nature.” Although the bulk of the collection is permanently installed, Beyeler intends to fill in gaps whenever opportunities arise, particularly in American works.

Artists are juxtaposed to illustrate the debt one owed to another. A mobile by Alexander Calder, for instance, dangles near a wall of Miro paintings, the inspiration for the younger sculptor’s work. Tribal art is scattered throughout the museum, with heads and masks placed like distinguished ancestors at the head of the table of their modernist descendants.

A temporary exhibition of 52 paintings and works on paper by Jasper Johns, all in the artist’s collection and spanning the years from the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s, runs through February. Although a number of the pieces appeared in the recent Johns retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, the Beyeler exhibition marks the first occasion so many works owned by the artist have been displayed together.

An exhibition devoted to Piano projects, from Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz to Osaka’s Kansai airport and a cultural center in New Caledonia, encourages visitors to toy with architectural models, drawings and computer simulations in a re-creation of Piano’s workshops in Paris and Genoa. The Piano exhibit runs until April then moves to Tokyo.

Although Beyeler established his foundation for the collection in 1982, he had nowhere to house it. Not until a 1989 exhibition at Madrid’s Reina Sofia museum was the collection displayed in its entirety. The success of this show and subsequent exhibitions in Berlin and Sydney inspired Beyeler to give the works a permanent home.

The collection’s newfound attention also nudged Basel authorities to lend a hand. The city, fearful of losing the collection, donated the land for the museum on an 80-year lease with an option for 100 more years and agreed to pay one-third of annual operating costs. The remaining two-thirds of operating costs and construction costs are the responsibility of Beyeler’s foundation.

Beyeler chose Piano because he admires the architect’s 1987 wood-and-glass Menil museum in Houston. For the project, Piano dispatched an assistant to the ancient Incan site of Machu Picchu for a sample of stone for the walls and eventually settled on the Patagonian porphyry, a dark-red stone that coats the museum--although not before Beyeler had rejected 20 alternatives.

Far less brash than Gehry’s museum in Bilbao and noticeably less high-tech than Piano’s own Menil Collection museum, the Beyeler impresses by not calling too much attention to itself, drawing attention, rather, to its holdings and the vision of the man who created it.