Museum Foundation Beyeler

The Fondation Beyeler is a museum of modern art that ranks as one of the finest in the world. It has won international renown with its exhibitions of celebrated artists of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

Its central aim is to facilitate, for its visitors, a personal, immediate, sensory experience of art. The museum addresses itself to a broad public and aims in particular to fire the enthusiasm of young people for art. This was a goal especially close to the hearts of the museum’s founders, Basel art collectors Ernst and Hildy Beyeler. The couple wanted to make their world-famous collection accessible to the public and to share their passion for art and nature with others. In 1982 they converted their private collection into a foundation and in 1997 opened the Fondation Beyeler in their home town of Riehen, near Basel.

The Beyeler Collection is rehung several times a year and is thus seen in constantly changing constellations. It comprises some 200 works of Post-Impressionism, Classical Modernism and contemporary art, together with 20 objects of ethnographic art from Africa, Oceania and Alaska.

The Fondation Beyeler regularly organizes exhibitions devoted to the great masters of modern art and to the leading artists of our own day. Periodically, too, the museum conceives thematic exhibitions on cities and art movements that played a key role in the development of modernism. Every year the Fondation Beyeler also collaborates with contemporary artists on projects inside the museum and outdoors in public spaces.