The story
For half a century Ernst Beyeler was one of the world's leading art dealers, selling Picassos and Giacomettis from a gallery in Basel. What he could not bring himself to sell became a collection, and in 1997 he built a home for it just outside the city, in the village of Riehen.
He hired Renzo Piano, and the building is deliberately quiet, a long low pavilion of red stone under a floating glass roof, set among old trees and reaching out to fields and vineyards at its far end. There a room of Monet's water lilies opens through a glass wall onto a real pond planted with lilies.
The collection is small and very concentrated, around 200 modern works chosen by a dealer's eye: Cezanne and Van Gogh, Rothko and a wall of Giacometti's thin walking men. Beyeler wanted the art shown in daylight against nature, and Piano's glass walls let the trees outside change with the seasons behind the Rothkos.
