Late in their careers, Swiss art dealers Ernst and Hildy Beyeler asked acclaimed architect Renzo Piano to design a building to house their collection. Piano produced a low, light-filled structure within easy reach of Basel. In the first ten years since the museum opened in 1997 it attracted almost 3,000,000 visitors and mounted some thirty exhibitions. The Beyelers consistently sought to promote an active and innovative engagement with art in their museum, encouraging unusual juxtapositions of works in order to generate unexpected insights and experiences for a broad spectrum of visitors, many of them from abroad. Displays have ranged from the work of Claude Monet to digital Impressionism and from paintings by Titian and Velázquez to a constantly changing Mark Rothko installation. In 2008 Sam Keller, head of the influential art fair Art Basel, became director of the Fondation and continues the Beyelers’ lifework. The collection comprises approximately 280 major works of painting and sculpture by such artists as Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Henri Rousseau, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Henri Matisse, Barnett Newman, Francis Bacon, Jean Dubuffet, and Georg Baselitz.

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