MY MAGICAL ATTIC: THE FONDATION BEYELER: A PASSION FOR ART

April 03, 2018

THE FONDATION BEYELER: A PASSION FOR ART

THE PERMANENT COLLECTION

THE FONDATION BEYELER: A PASSION FOR ART

THE PERMANENT COLLECTION

Hildy and Ernst Beyeler’s collection of around 300 works by more than 70 artists provides an extensive overview of classic modern and contemporary art. Starting with late and Post-Impressionist works by Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet, it continues via Cubism with Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque to other characteristic groups of works by Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, Vasily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, and Paul Klee. American Expressionism is represented by artists like Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. The collection’s time-frame comprises works by Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer and Neo Rauch. Among the new acquisitions are works by Louise Bourgeois, Lucio Fontana, Franz West, Philippe Parreno, Felix González-Torres, Gerhard Richter and more. A number of sculptures from Africa, Alaska and Oceania provide an exciting counterpoint to the works of European and American origin.

The collection was built up over more than fifty years, in parallel to the activities of the Galerie Beyeler. Early on, Hildy and Ernst Beyeler started setting aside works they could not or did not wish to sell. They held their first exhibitions at the Galerie Beyeler in the 1940s with Japanese woodcuts, drawings by Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists, and graphic works by Toulouse-Lautrec. The gallery soon became known as a leading specialist in modern art. The Beyelers’ successful activities as art dealers, for example their purchase of Improvisation 10 , which Vasily Kandinsky painted in 1910, laid the foundation stone for the present collection. Another important factor was their personal relationship with a number of artists, for example their friendship with Picasso, several of whose masterpieces can now be seen in one of the main exhibition rooms at the Fondation Beyeler. Works by Picasso and a group of works by Paul Klee are among those that determined the collection’s character from the outset.

The idea of setting up a non-profit-making foundation emerged in the 1970s, but did not at first take concrete shape. All that Hildy and Ernst Beyeler wished to do initially was to adorn their home with art and to keep some of their favourite works for themselves rather than selling them. In 1989, at the invitation of the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the previously unknown collection was publicly displayed for the first time in the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, where it attracted international attention. Since then, the Beyelers have extended it through carefully selected acquisitions.

The Beyeler Collection’s distinctive character derives from its concentration on a particular period. Thanks to its selectiveness and the high quality of the exhibits, it represents more than merely the subjective viewpoint of a collector, providing an impressive survey of 20th-century art.

Most of the works in the Beyeler Collection are paintings but it also includes a few sculptures. It ends with works by Baselitz, Kiefer and Rauch. Conceptual art, the second main development in modern art, and more recent trends are intentionally not represented in the permanent collection. Instead, they are

dealt with in the context of temporary exhibitions designed to create a dialogue with contemporary art and to make the museum a dynamic forum for the presentation of artists’ ideas.

Another priority of the Fondation Beyeler, alongside its permanent collection, its architecture and its temporary exhibitions, is to teach visitors more about art. Private and public guided tours and viewings of individual works are organized. Events involving other artistic disciplines also serve to enhance visitors’ appreciation of art. These events, which are very popular, add a further facet to the comprehensive range of activities offered by the Fondation Beyeler.

https://www.fondationbeyeler.ch/en/museum/

HENRI MATISSE

Nu Bleu I, 1952

Gouache Painted Paper Cut-Outs onPpaper on Canvas
Dimensions: 106.3 x 78.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

HENRI MATISSE

Algue Blanche Sur Fond Rouge et Vert, 1947

Gouache Painted Paper Cut-Outs, Verso: Pencil Drawing
Dimensions: 52.5 x 40.5 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

HENRI MATISSE

Nu Bleu, la Grenouille, 1952

Gouache Painted Paper Cut-Outs on Paper on Canvas
Dimensions: 141.0 x 134.5 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

HENRI MATISSE

Océanie, le Ciel, 1946-1947

Screen Print on Unbleached Linen, Piece 4/30
Dimensions: 173.0 x 364.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

SARAH MORRIS

Damselfly [Origami], 2009

Household Gloss Paint on Canvas
Dimensions: 289.0 x 289.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel

SARAH MORRIS

Banco Aliança [Rio], 2013

Household Gloss Paint on Canvas
Dimensions: 214.0 x 214.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel

FRANCIS BACON

Portrait of George Dyer Riding a Bicycle, 1966

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 198.0 x 147.5 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, BeyelerCollection

Foto: Peter Schibli

FRANCIS BACON: THE LOGIC OF SENSATION BY GILLES DELEUZE

Author’s Preface to the English Edition:

Francis Bacon's painting is of a very special violence. Bacon, to be sure, often traffics in the violence of a depicted scene: spectacles of horror, crucifixions, prostheses and mutilations, monsters. But these are overly facile detours, detours that the artist himself judges severely and condemns in his work. What directly interests him is a violence that is involved only with color and line: the violence of a sensation (and not of a representation), a static or potential violence, a violence of reaction and expression. For example, a scream rent from us by a foreboding of invisible forces: "to paint the scream more than the horror ..." In the end, Bacon's Figures are not racked bodies at all, but ordinary bodies in ordinary situations of constraint and discomfort. A man ordered to sit still for hours on a narrow stool is bound to assume contorted postures. The violence of a hiccup, of the urge to vomit, but also of a hysterical, involuntary smile Bacon's bodies, heads, Figures are made of flesh, and what fascinates him are the invisible forces that model flesh or shake it. This is the relationship not of form and matter, but of materials and forces making these forces visible through their effects on the flesh. There is, before anything else, a force of inertia that is of the flesh itself: with Bacon, the flesh, however firm, descends from the bones; it falls or tends to fall away from them (hence those flattened sleepers who keep one arm raised, or the raised thighs from which the flesh seems to cascade). What fascinates Bacon is not movement, but its effect on an immobile body: heads whipped by the wind or deformed by an aspiration, but also all the interior forces that climb through the flesh. To make the spasm visible. The entire body becomes plexus. If there is feeling in Bacon, it is not a taste for horror, it is pity, an intense pity: pity for the flesh, including the flesh of dead animals ....

There is another element in Bacon's painting: the large fields of color on which the Figure detaches itself - fields without depth, or with only the kind of shallow depth that characterizes post-cubism. These large shores are themselves divided into sections, or crossed by tubes or very thin rails, or sliced by a band or largish stripe. They form an armature, a bone structure. Sometimes they are like a ship's rigging, suspended in the sky of the field of color, upon which the Figure executes its taunting acrobatics.

These two pictorial elements do not remain indifferent to one another, but instead draw life from one another. It often seems that the flat fields of color curl around the Figure, together constituting a shallow depth, forming a hollow volume, determining a curve, an isolating track or ring at the core of which the Figure enacts its small feats (vomiting in a sink, shutting the door with the tip of its foot, twisting itself on a stool). This kind of situation finds its equivalent only in theater, or in a Beckett novel such as Le Depeupleur - "inside a flattened cylinder .... The light .... Its yellowness"2 — or else it is found in visions of bodies plunging in a black tunnel [44]. But if these fields of color press toward the Figure, the Figure in turn presses outward, trying to pass and dissolve through the fields. Already we have here the role of the spasm, or of the scream: the entire body trying to escape, to flow out of itself. And this occurs not only in Bacon's sinks, but through his famous umbrellas which snatch part of the Figure and which have a prolonged, exaggerated point, like vampires: the entire body trying to flee, to disgorge itself through a tip or a hole. Or else, on the contrary, it will flatten itself and stretch itself into a thick mirror, lodging its entirety into this width until it separates and dissipates like a lump of fat in a bowl of soup. The Figures themselves always present scrubbed zones and blurred ones which attest to this dissipation. As of 1978-9, we can speak of a few paintings — still rare with Bacon — in which the Figure has in effect disappeared, leaving a trace or a geyser, a jet of water [82], of vapor, sand, dust, or grass [see 86, 88, 97]. This new period, which seems so rich in possibilities for the future, is an abstraction which is purely Bacon's. It consummates the double motion, of the fields of color toward the Figure, and of the Figure toward the fields.

Bacon is a very great colorist. And with him, color is related to many different systems, two most importantly one of which corresponds to the Figure/flesh, and the other to the color field/section. It is as though Bacon has reassumed the entire problem of painting after Cezanne. Cezanne's "solution" - basically a modulation of color by means of distinct touches that proceed according to the order of the spectrum - in effect gave birth or rebirth to two problems: how, on the one hand, to preserve the homogeneity or unity of the background as though it were a perpendicular armature for chromatic progression, while on the other hand also preserving the specificity or singularity of a form in perpetual variation? This was the new problem for Van Gogh as much as for Gauguin - a problem with two pressing dangers, since the ground could not be allowed to remain inert, nor could the form become murky or dissolve into grisaille. Van Gogh and Gauguin rediscovered the art of the portrait, "the portrait through color," by restoring to the background vast monochrome fields that are carried toward infinity, and by inventing new colors for the flesh that are "far from nature" - colors that seem to have been baked in a kiln, and which rival ceramics. The first aspect has not ceased to inspire experiments in modern painting: those great, brilliant monochrome fields that take life not in variations of hue, but in very subtle shifts of intensity or saturation determined by zones of proximity. This would be Bacon's path: where these zones of proximity are induced either by sections of fields of color, or by virtue of a white stretched band or large stripe which crosses the field (an analogous structure can be found in Barnett Newman). The other aspect, the colors of the flesh, was to be resolved by Bacon along lines that Gauguin presaged: by producing broken tones [tons rompus], as though baked in a furnace and flayed by fire. Bacon's genius as a colorist exists in both of these ideas at once, while most modern painters have concentrated on the first. These two aspects are strict correlates in Bacon: a brilliant, pure tone for the large fields, coupled with a program of intensification; broken tones for the flesh, coupled with a procedure of rupturing or "fireblasting," a critical mixture of complementaries. It is as though painting were able to conquer time in two ways: through color as eternity and light in the infinity of a field, where bodies fall or go through their paces; and in another way as passage, as metabolic variability in the enactment of these bodies, in their flesh and on their skin (thus three large male backs with varying chasms in value [63]). It is a Chronochromie, in the spirit in which the composer Olivier Messiaen named one of his works.

The abandonment of simple figuration is the general fact of Modern painting and, still more, of painting altogether, of all time. But what is interesting is the way in which Bacon, for his part, breaks with figuration: it is not impressionism, not expressionism, not symbolism, not cubism, not abstraction .... Never (except perhaps in the case of Michelangelo) has anyone broken with figuration by elevating the Figure to such prominence. It is the confrontation of the Figure and the field, their solitary wrestling in a shallow depth, that rips the painting away from all narrative but also from all symbolization. When narrative or symbolic, figuration obtains only the bogus violence of the represented or the signified; it expresses nothing of the violence of sensation — in other words, of the act of painting. It was natural, even necessary, that Bacon should revive the triptych: in this format he finds the conditions for painting and for color exactly as he conceives them to be. The triptych has thoroughly separate sections, truly distinct, which in advance negate any narrative that would establish itself among them. Yet Bacon also links these sections with a kind of brutal, unifying distribution that makes them interrelate in a way that is free of any symbolic undercurrent. It is in the triptychs that colors become light, and that light divides itself into colors. In them, one discovers rhythm as the essence of painting. For it is never a matter of this or that character, this or that object possessing rhythm. On the contrary, rhythms and rhythms alone become characters, become objects. Rhythms are the only characters, the only Figures. The triptych's function is precisely to this point to make evident that which might otherwise risk remaining hidden. What a triptych's three panels distribute in various ways is analogous to three basic rhythms - one steady or "attendant" rhythm, and two other rhythms, one of crescendo or simplification (climbing, expanding, diastolic, adding value), the other of diminuendo or elimination (descending, contracting, systolic, removing value). Let us consider every Bacon triptych: in any given case, where is the attendant-Figure, where is the adjunctive or the reductive Figure? A 1972 Triptych [70] shows a Figure whose back is "diminished," but whose leg is already complete, and another Figure whose torso has been completed, but who is missing one leg and whose other leg runs. These are monsters from the point of view of figuration. But from the point of view of the Figures themselves, these are rhythms and nothing else, rhythms as in a piece of music, as in the music of Messiaen, which makes you hear "rhythmic characters." If one keeps in mind the development of the triptych, and this way Bacon has of effecting relationships between painting and music, then one can return to the simple paintings. No doubt one would see that each of them is organized as though a triptych, that each already encompasses a triptych, each distributes rhythms, at least three, as though so many Figures resonating in the field, and that the field separates and unites them, superposes them, of a piece.

Note: You may have to read whole book of Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation by Gilles Deleuze. This part quoted by Gilles Deleuze book Preface of the English edition.

FRANCIS BACON

Lying Figure, 1969

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 198.0 x 147.5 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection

Foto: Robert Bayer

FRANCIS BACON

Sand Dune, 1983

Oil and Pastel on Canvas
Dimensions: 198.5 x 148.5 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection

Foto: Peter Schibli

FRANCIS BACON

In Memory of George Dyer, 1971

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 198.0 x 147.5 x 2.5 cm Triptychon

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection

Foto: Robert Bayer

EDGAR DEGAS

Trois Danseuses (Jupes Bleues, Corsages Rouges), Ca. 1903

Pastel on Paper on Cardboard
Dimensions: 94.0 x 81.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

EDGAR DEGAS

Le Petit Déjeuner Après le Bain (Le Bain), Ca. 1895-1898

Pastel on paper on paper mounted on card
Dimensions: 82.5 x 79.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

PAUL KLEE

Die Vase, 1938, 122 (J 2)

Coloured Paste on Jute on Second Jute Mounted on Stretcher; Original Frame Strips
Dimensions: 88.0 x 54.5 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection

PAUL KLEE

Wald-Hexen, 1938, 145 (K 5)

Oil on Paper on Burlap
Dimensions: 99.0 x 74.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection

PAUL KLEE

Aufgehender Stern, 1931, 230 (V 10)

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 63.0 x 50.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection

PAUL KLEE

Ohne Titel [Gefangen, Diesseits - Jenseits/Figur], um 1940

Oil, Drawing With Coloured Paste on Burlap With a Paste Ground Mounted on Burlap
Dimensions: 48.0 x 44.0 cm Originaler Bildträger; 55.2 x 50.1 cm Tiefe 2 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection

PAUL KLEE

Nach der Über Schwemmung, 1936, 7 (7)

Coloured Paste and Watercolour on Ingres Paper Mounted on Cardboard
Dimensions: 47.9 x 62.6 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection

PAUL KLEE

Zeichen in Gelb, 1937, 210 (U 10)

Pastel on Cotton on Coloured Paste on Jute Mounted on Stretcher;

Original Frame Strips
Dimensions: 83.5 x 50.3 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection

PAUL KLEE

Ein Weib für Götter, 1938, 452 (A 12)

Coloured Paste and Watercolour on Paper Mounted on Cardboard
Dimensions: 44.3 x 60.5 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

PAUL KLEE

O! die Gerüchte!, 1939, 1015 (CD 15)

Tempera and Oil-Colour on Jute
Dimensions: 75.5 x 55.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

PAUL KLEE

MUMOM Sinkt Trunken in den Sessel, 1940, 301 (H 1)

Coloured Paste on Paper Mounted on Cardboard
Dimensions: 29.5 x 21.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

PAUL KLEE

Schlamm-Assel-Fisch, 1940, 323 (G 3)

Coloured Paste and Chalk on Paper Mounted on Cardboard
Dimensions: 34.0 x 53.5 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

ROY LICHTENSTEIN

Girl With Tear III, 1977

Oil and Magna on Canvas
Dimensions: 117.0 x 101.5 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

ROY LICHTENSTEIN

Beach Scene with Starfish, 1995

Oil and Magna on Canvas
Dimensions: 300.5 x 604.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

ROY LICHTENSTEIN

MARK ROTHKO

Untitled (Plum and Dark Brown), 1964

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 236.5 x 212.5 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

Foto: Robert Bayer

MARK ROTHKO

Untitled (Red-Brown, Black, Green, Red), 1962

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 206.0 x 193.5 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

Foto: Peter Schibli

MARK ROTHKO

Untitled (Red, Orange), 1968

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 233.0 x 176.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

Foto: Robert Bayer

MARK ROTHKO

Blue and Gray, 1962

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 193.0 x 175.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

Foto: Robert Bayer

PAUL CÉZANNE

Sept Baigneurs, Ca. 1900

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 38.0 x 46.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

PAUL CÉZANNE

La Route Tournante en Haut du Chemin des Lauves, 1904-1906

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 65.0 x 81.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

CLAUDE MONET

La Cathédrale de Rouen: Le Portail (Effet du Matin), 1894

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 107.0 x 74.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection

CLAUDE MONET

Nymphéas, 1916-1919

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 200.0 x 180.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection

CLAUDE MONET

Nymphéas, 1916-1919 ( Detail )

CLAUDE MONET

Le Bassin aux Nymphéas, Ca. 1917-1920

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: Panel 3: 200.7 x 301.0 cm; Panel 2: 200.7 x 300.9 cm;

Triptychon, je 200.7 x 301.0 cm; Panel 1: 200.6 x 300.7 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

PIET MONDRIAN

Composition No. VI (Composition 9, Blue Façade), 1914

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 95.5 x 68.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

CH frei, © Mondrian/Holtzman Trust c/o HCR International Warrenton,

VA USA / Foto: Peter Schibli

PIET MONDRIAN

Komposition mit Doppellinie und Blau, 1935

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 72.5 x 70.0 cm

Ohne Leisten und Grundplatte

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

CH frei, © Mondrian/Holtzman Trust c/o HCR International Warrenton,

VA USA / Foto: Robert Bayer

PIET MONDRIAN

Rautenkomposition Mit Acht Linien Und Rot (Picture No. III), 1938

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 100.5 x 100.5 cm; 103.0 x 103.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

CH frei, © Mondrian/Holtzman Trust c/o HCR International Warrenton, VA USA /

Foto: Robert Bayer

PIET MONDRIAN

Komposition mit Gelb und Blau, 1932

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 55.5 x 55.5 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler; Erworben Mit

Einem Beitrag von Hartmann P. und Cécile Koechlin-Tanner, Riehen

CH frei, © Mondrian/Holtzman Trust c/o HCR International Warrenton,

VA USA / Foto: Robert Bayer

PABLO PICASSO

Femme Assise (Dora), 1938

Pen and Ink, Gouache and Coloured Chalk on Paper
Dimensions: 76.5 x 56.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

PABLO PICASSO

Femme Assise Dans Une Chaise (Dora), 1938

Pen and ink on Paper
Dimensions: 65.0 x 50.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

PABLO PICASSO

Profil de Femme (Jacqueline), 1969

Linocut With Ink and Coloured Pen
Dimensions: 75.0 x 62.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

PABLO PICASSO

Mandoliniste, 1911

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 100.5 x 69.5 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

PABLO PICASSO

Le Sauvetage, 1932

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 130.0 x 97.5 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

PABLO PICASSO

La Femme Qui Pleure, 1937

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 55.0 x 46.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

PABLO PICASSO

Femme (Époque des "Demoiselles d'Avignon"), 1907

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 119.0 x 93.5 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

PABLO PICASSO

L'Enlèvement des Sabines, 1962

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 161.5 x 130.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

PABLO PICASSO

Vase de Fleurs Sur Une Table, 1969

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 116.0 x 89.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

PABLO PICASSO

2. PRIMITIVISM & CUBISM 1906 - 1915

Source: Oxford University Press

In his paintings immediately prior to the early Cubist paintings of 1908, Picasso had initiated the breakdown of illusionistic space that he was to pursue with an apparently greater intellectual rigour through Cubism, a style that over the course of a decade secured his prominent place in the history of 20th-century art. For Picasso, however, the restraint of Cubism was preceded by works exhibiting a raw intensity and violence in part stimulated by his reading of non-Western art, and aligned with European currents of primitivism (see Primitivism, §2). This dialogue of apparently contrasting positions, between the intellect and the emotions, between forms of classicism and expressionism and between the conscious and the unconscious, provided the dynamic of much of Picasso’s work.

Picasso and Fernande Olivier spent the summer of 1906 in Gosol, a remote Catalan village in the Pyrenees where he came to terms with his experience of Iberian sculptures from Osuna, which he had seen in the Louvre in the spring. He began in his work to make reference to forms of archaic art and to make expressive use of distortion with insistently rhythmical repetitions and contrasts. In Gosol, Picasso made his first carved sculptures. The resistance of wood produced simplified forms akin to those in his paintings. Gauguin’s work in the same medium, the most immediate European precedent available to Picasso, had been known to him through Paco Durio, a previous tenant in the Bateau-Lavoir; its primitivism had been given authority by the retrospective held at the Salon d’Automne in 1906, and it offered access to another major stimulus, the art of the Pacific Islands. At the same Salon ten paintings by the recently deceased Cézanne were exhibited. Resolving his response to the achievements of these two artists preoccupied Picasso over the next year and helped define his later work. On his return to Paris, Picasso quickly completed his portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906; New York, Met.; for illustration see Stein, (3)), which had been left partly obliterated in the spring after over 80 sittings, giving her a mask-like visage of monumental chiselled forms compressed within a shallow space. The Stein portrait stands as a crucial shift from observation to conceptualization in Picasso’s practice.

(I) ' LES DEMOISELLES D'AVIGNON '

The primitivism of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907; New York, MOMA) was more shocking still. While it gestated from a series of preparatory drawings and underwent major overpaintings during its production, it does not so much summarize Picasso’s previous work as reframe his understanding of painting; he called it his ‘first exorcism picture’. This radical picture, seen by friends in his studio and designated by various appellations, was put aside and shown publicly only in 1916, when it was given its present title by Salmon. It was purchased by the couturier Jacques Doucet in 1924 and acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1939 at the time of Picasso’s retrospective. Embedded in its matrix are the vestiges of Picasso’s encounters with 19th-century artists: Ingres, Manet, Delacroix, Cézanne and Gauguin. Initially conceiving it as a narrative brothel scene, Picasso changed it to a vertical format, adopted a more discontinuous sense of space for the setting, removed the male visitors and reorientated the women to confront the (implicitly male) viewer. Controversy surrounded its stylistic disjunctures, confused by Picasso’s own equivocal statements. Rubin (1984) has argued that Picasso reworked the painting in late June and early July after a visit to the African and Oceanic collections in the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris. Although the painting has defeated most efforts to specify African or Pacific sources, it records Picasso’s reassessment of Gauguin’s primitivism and attests to the revelations accorded by forms of non-Western carving in terms of conceptual principles of representation and an emotively powerful evocation of magic and ritual. Linking eroticism and the fear of death, the Demoiselles fixed an image that was savage in style and violent in its dismemberment of the female body.

In paintings such as Mother and Child (1907; Paris, Mus. Picasso, 19) and wood-carvings such as Figure (1907; Paris, Mus. Picasso, 238), Picasso probed the fetishistic and conceptually simplifying aspects of primitivism. Although the juxtaposition of discordant elements in the Demoiselles gave way to internal pictorial coherence, in general his work of the following year displays an astonishing diversity of handling. Picasso sundered and isolated illusionistic conventions, using bright hues contrasted with subdued greys and earth colours, striated hatchings against angular crumpled planes, and rhythmic repetitions paired with bar-like outlines. In still-lifes painted in spring and summer 1908 and landscapes executed in August at La Rue-des-Bois, Picasso continued to reflect on the work both of Cézanne, which he had studied in depth at the retrospective held at the Salon d’Automne of 1907, and of Henri Rousseau, whom Picasso and Olivier fêted with a banquet in November.

By October 1907, and probably earlier in the spring of that year, Apollinaire had introduced Georges Braque to Picasso. In the winter of 1908–9 Picasso repainted his monumental Three Women (St Petersburg, Hermitage). Possibly in response to Braque’s Cézanne-influenced landscapes from the summer, in this work and a number of still-lifes Picasso imposed a more consistent control both on the surface and on illusions of space, after the example of Cézanne but with a greater concern for physicality. In contrast to Picasso’s usual assertive individualism, the invention of Cubism was such a joint effort that even he and Braque sometimes had difficulty in distinguishing each other’s work; Braque later described their relationship as that of mountaineers roped together.

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PABLO PICASSO

Nu Couché Jouant Avec un Chat, 10.5./11.5. 1964

Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 114.0 x 194.5 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

THE FONDATION BEYELER

THE ARCHITECTURE

The Fondation Beyeler consists of three parts: the Berower Park, acquired by the Riehen authorities in 1976, the 18th-century Berower Villa, which houses the restaurant and offices, and the museum recently built by Renzo Piano. In 1991, the Genovese architect Renzo Piano–who was awarded the renowned Pritzker Prize in 1998– was invited to develop an architectural concept for the Fondation. Piano described the assignment as follows: “A museum should attempt to interpret the quality of the collection and define its relationship with the outside world. This means taking an active, but not an aggressive role.” Two years later following a referendum held in Riehen, permission was given to build the museum. Construction work began the following year and continued until autumn 1997.

THE MUSEUM BUILDING

The elongated building covers the whole breadth of the narrow plot of ground situated between a busy main road and a protected area of farmland. It combines two contrasting motifs: long, solid walls and a light, apparently floating glass roof. All the external walls are clad with red porphyry from Argentina.

The building is supported by four 127 metre-long parallel load-bearing walls placed at intervals of about seven metres. The two end façades are made of glass and look out over the park. On the road side, the museum is completed by a windowless wall that protects the building and on the inside of which the Art Shop, cloakroom, toilets, etc. are located. Piano has described this wall as a kind of “backbone” or “formative zone” from which the architecture of the whole building develops. On the opposite wall there is a winter garden with a view of the surrounding countryside.

Located between the longitudinal walls, the exhibition rooms dedicated to the permanent collection are arranged in a well-proportioned pattern that can be altered if necessary. The rooms are not organised in any strict linear order, but visitors feel a natural inclination to move in a certain direction. Another distinctive characteristic of the Fondation Beyeler is the absolute serenity of the exhibition rooms, which is unmarred by any technical or design details and is enhanced by the sensitive interplay between the walls, the ceiling and the light-coloured French oak floor.

About one-third of the total exhibition space is reserved for temporary exhibitions that are presented directly beside the permanent collection. A staircase in the adjacent winter garden leads down to the museum’s lower level, where there is a 311 square metres multi-purpose room that can also be used for temporary exhibitions.

A large glass roof lets daylight into the whole building. Unlike conventional top lighting, this roof allows the zenithal daylight to filter into the building’s interior in its natural state instead of homogenising it and making it diffuse and milky. There are also three systems with artificial light sources that illuminate the rooms when there is insufficient light from outside. With his museum for the Fondation Beyeler, Renzo Piano has created a building of restrained elegance that serves art without being self-effacing. This characteristic is discussed in detail in the book “Renzo Piano–Fondation Beyeler. A Home for Art,” which places the building in the context of international museum architecture. Basel’s international reputation as a centre of fine architecture is considerably enhanced by the Fondation Beyeler.

THE EXTENSION

Less than two years after the Fondation Beyeler’s inauguration, the museum was extended by 12 metres (between September 1999 and May 2000). The total exhibition space was increased by 458 square metres to 3,764 square metres, offering more flexibility for the organisation of exhibitions. Additional space was created on the lower level for events, seminars, new media and offices. At the same time, the museum’s grounds were extended to the north so that the building now stands in the centre of them geographically as well as in other respects.

http://www.fondationbeyeler.ch/en/Museum/Impressions/Architecture

THE FONDATION BEYELER

DIRECTOR SAM KELLER

THE FONDATION BEYELER

DIRECTOR SAM KELLER & ARVO PART

YOU MAY LISTEN ARVO PART - FRATRES

THE FONDATION BEYELER

ERNST BEYELER

THE FONDATION BEYELER DESIGN BY RENZO PIANO

THE FONDATION BEYELER

JOHN MIRO

1. LIFE & WORK - (I) CHILDHOOD AND WORK, TO 1919

Miró came from a family of craftsmen. His father Miquel, the son of a blacksmith, was a goldsmith from the vicinity of Tarragona in southern Catalonia; his mother, Dolors Ferrà, was the daughter of a carpenter from Mallorca. He initially obeyed his family’s wishes that he follow a business career by studying at the Escuela de Comercio in Barcelona from 1907 to 1910, but in 1911 an attack of typhus, coupled with nervous depression, enabled him to abandon the course. He recuperated in his parents’ country house at Montroig, south of Tarragona, a peaceful place to which he often returned in later life and in which his artistic vocation and devotion to nature were confirmed. Plants, insects, simple forms of life; the stars, sun, moon and sea, especially the Mediterranean; the cultivated countryside itself, together with elements of rural existence, all later found their way into his work.

In 1907 Miró began his artistic training in Barcelona at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios de la Lonja, where Picasso had studied 12 years earlier; his teachers were Modest Urgell (1839–1919) and Josep Pascó (1855–1910). In 1912 he entered the escuela de arte run by the great teacher Francesc Galí (1880–1965), and there met the potter Josep Llorens Artigas, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship. Galí noticed that Miró had an aptitude for colour but difficulty in delineating shapes, and therefore blindfolded him so that he would acquaint himself with the forms by touching them before drawing them or modelling them in clay. Miró’s first paintings date from this period, for example The Peasant (1914; Paris, Gal. Maeght, see 1981 exh. cat., p. 49). In 1915 Miró left the Escuela Galí and began attending drawing classes at the Círculo Artístico de Sant Lluc, where Artigas was again a fellow student and where he met Joan Prats (1891–1970), who became another great friend. In 1918 Miró became one of the first members of the Grupo Courbet, an association of artists founded by Artigas with other students from Sant Lluc.

Between 1915 and 1918 Miró briefly painted in a manner that he himself described as Fauve, using strong, bright colours. His tendencies, however, to geometry, broad brushwork and a clarity of construction distanced his work from the earlier movement. During this period he painted figures, as in his portrait of V. Nubiela (1917; Essen, Mus. Flkwang), as well as landscapes and views of villages in the province of Tarragona, for example The Road from En Güell (1917; New York, MOMA). 1918 was a decisive year: Miró held his first one-man show in the Barcelona gallery run by Lluís Dalmau, a key figure in the Catalan avant-garde, who in 1912 had dared to exhibit the Paris Cubist painters. It was vital to Miró’s development that Barcelona was then a very lively cultural centre that attracted foreign artists seeking refuge from World War I.

Miró remained faithful to the brilliance of colour of his early work, but under the influence of Paul Cézanne and Cubism he continued to emphasize the underlying construction of his pictures. In his works of 1918 to 1922 he introduced a meticulousness and precision of drawing, not out of an interest in illusionism or in a slavish adherence to perceived reality but as a means of concentrating attention on particular details. This new tendency is especially evident in paintings such as Vegetable Garden with Donkey (1918; Stockholm, Mod. Mus.) and Montroig, the Church and the Village (1919; Spain, priv. col., see 1986 exh. cat. by R. S. Lubar and others, no. 16). The self-portrait sometimes known as Young Man in Red Shirt (1919; Paris, Mus. Picasso) and subsequent works, such as Standing Nude (1921; Chicago, IL, Alsdorf Found.), display a stylization and flatness, which can perhaps be traced to the Romanesque paintings that had greatly impressed him in the Museu d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona. The general sense is of containment, as opposed to the almost uncontrolled colour and violence of the previous period.

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JOAN MIRÓ

Peinture (Personnage: Les frères Fratellini), 1927

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 130.0 x 97.5 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

JOAN MIRÓ

L'Étreinte du Soleil à L'amoureuse, 1952

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 22.0 x 16.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

JOAN MIRÓ

Peinture, 1930

Oil, Charcoal and Plaster on Canvas
Dimensions: 231.0 x 150.2 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

JOAN MIRÓ

Composition (Petit univers), 1933

Gouache on Card
Dimensions: 39.5 x 31.5 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

JOAN MIRÓ

Danseuse Espagnole, 1945

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 146.5 x 114.5 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

KASIMIR MALEWITSCH

Suprematistische Komposition, 1915

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 80.4 x 80.6 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

MAX ERNST

Naissance D'une Galaxie, 1969

Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 92.0 x 73.0 cm x 2 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

SAM FRANCIS

Round the World, 1958-1959

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 276.5 x 321.5 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

Isaku Yanaihara, 1961

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 100.0 x 81.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

Grande Femme IV, 1960

Bronze, Piece 3/6; Inscription: "Susse Fondeur Paris, Cire perdue"

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

Grande Femme III, 1960

Bronze, Piece 6/6; Inscription: "Susse Fondeur Paris"

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

L'Homme Qui Marche Sous la Pluie, 1948

Bronze, piece 1/6; Alexis Rudier Fondeur, Paris

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

Femme Assise, 1949 - 1950

Bronze, Piece 2/6;

Inscription: "Susse Fondeur Paris"

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

Femme de Venise VIII, 1956

Bronze, Piece 6/6; Inscription: "Susse Fondeur Paris"

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

Aïka, 1959

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 92.0 x 72.8 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection

VINCENT VAN GOGH

Champ Aux Meules de Blé, 1890

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 50.0 x 100.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

VINCENT VAN GOGH

Champ de Blé Aux Bleuets, 1890

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 60.0 x 81.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

JEAN DUBUFFET: METAMORPHOSES OF LANDSCAPE

Landscape runs like a defining leitmotif throughout Jean Dubuffet’s multifarious oeuvre. From his earliest phase right up to his late period he constantly developed it in unexpected but consistent ways. The retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler focuses on Dubuffet’s innovative concept of landscape, which also served him as a springboard for addressing many other subjects.

Dubuffet has often been quoted to the effect that “Everything is landscape,” and landscape does indeed dominate his artistic practice and ideas: in both, anything can metamorphose into landscape at any time. It is this special capacity for metamorphosis, together with an intense delight in experimentation, that singles out the multi-faceted character of Dubuffet’s work. In his paintings, the shapes and textures of landscape can emerge even from bodies and faces. His art is governed by a unique interaction between nature and creatures that can even transform objects into landscape. With Dubuffet a landscape is not, therefore, a faithful depiction of actual appearances but their translation into mental images: landscape gives visible form to the immaterial world inhabited by the human mind. Instead of seeking beautiful idyllic landscapes, Dubuffet explores raw, naked earth, occasionally reaching down into its geological substructure. Sometimes he will fashion his landscapes and figures from actual natural elements, such as sand and gravel, making them the real material of his pictures. Natural landscape becomes a free and open field for artistic practice.

http://www.fondationbeyeler.ch/en/exhibitions/jean-dubuffet/introduction

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JEAN DUBUFFET

Automobile à la Route Noire, 1963

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 195.0 x 150.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection

JEAN DUBUFFET

Ponge Feu Follet Noir, 1947

Oil on Canvas on Pavatex
Dimensions: 132.5 x 99.5 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection

JEAN DUBUFFET

Argument et Contexte, 1977

Acrylic on Glued Paper Mounted on Canvas (66 Sections)
Dimensions: 201.0 x 249.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection

JEAN DUBUFFET

Site Avec Trois Personnages, 1974

Vinyl Paint on Cut-Out Pressed Wood
Dimensions: 269.5 x 446.7 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection

JEAN DUBUFFET

Incitations Divergentes, 1976

Acrylic on Glued Paper on Canvas (28 Sections)
Dimensions: 173.0 x 291.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection

JEAN DUBUFFET

Corps de Dame - Pièce de Boucherie, 1950

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 116.0 x 89.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection

JEAN DUBUFFET

Chassé Croisé, 1961

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 81.0 x 100.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

PHYSIOGNOMIC ILLEGIBILITY

JEAN DUBUFFET’S POSTWAR PORTRAITS BY KENT MITCHELL MINTURN

From the summer of 1946 to the fall of 1947, Jean Dubuffet produced a series of comical, irreverent portraits depicting some of the most important literary figures of his day, including Antonin Artaud, Joë Bousquet, Marcel Jouhandeau, Henri Michaux, Jean Paulhan, Francis Ponge, and Jules Supervielle. While many of these individuals are not widely known by AngloAmerican readers, at the time they constituted—to borrow the title of Gaëtan Picon’s canonical postwar study—a veritable Panorama of New French Literature.1 Some were former Résistant figures being lauded as heros, while others were coming under fire in the postwar period for having contributed to German publications during the Occupation. Jean-Paul Sartre, for reasons that will become clear, represents perhaps the most conspicuous absence from Dubuffet’s panthéon. In October of 1947, Dubuffet exhibited his portraits in Paris at the Galerie René Drouin under the sardonic title, Les gens sont bien plus beaux qu’ils croient: vive leur vraie figure [People Are Much More Beautiful Than They Think: Long Live Their True Face].2

According to most accounts, Dubuffet’s foray into the genre of portraiture was the direct result of the elaborate weekly lunches he attended, along with an array of other artists and literati, at the home of the wealthy American expatriate and patron of the arts, Florence Gould. Dubuffet himself seems to be the source of this oft-repeated origin story. In a letter to Gould dated August 4, 1946, he confesses, “What an adventure you have thrown me into! Nothing was farther from my thoughts than doing portraits! Now it’s all I think about . . . and it’s all your handiwork . . .”3 In hindsight, however, Dubuffet’s statement to Gould rings hollow for two reasons. First, because portraiture was on the artist’s mind long before he began attending Gould’s lunches. Several academic and highly naturalistic portraits from Dubuffet’s prewar (or “pre-history,” as he preferred to call it) period still exist—e.g., one of his father, Georges Dubuffet, 1919, another of his maternal Grandmother, 1919, and one of his lifelong friend, the surrealist novelist Georges Limbour, 1920 [Fig. 18]. During the thirties, Dubuffet coupled his interest in portraiture with his passion for theater and created life-sized paper maché portrait-masks of his friends René Ponthier (a local musician), André Claude (the manager of Dubuffet’s wine business), and Robert Polguère (an antique dealer), 1935 [Fig. 19], as well as whimsical puppets and portraits of his wife, Lili Carlu. And secondly, because in his statement to Gould cited above, Dubuffet fails to admit that his postwar portraits are closely related to the large number of anonymous figures and “personnages” he painted during the Occupation and in the months immediately following the Liberation, many of which were displayed at Mirobolus, Macadam, et Cie., his second solo show at the Galerie René Drouin in May of 1946. These earlier figures demonstrate Dubuffet’s interwar and immediate postwar interest in what might be called the illegible, immensurable, or de-standardized body—in short, the body that resists classicizing anthropomorphism, anthropocentrism, and anthropometry.

THE ILLEGIBLE, IMMENSURABLE, DE-STANDARDIZED BODY

Dubuffet’s rejection of the legible, standardized body is readily apparent in several paintings he finished just before he embarked on his Portraits series, including: Volonté de puissance [Will to Power], 1946 [plate 9], and Archétypes [Archetypes], 1945 [Fig. 20]. In my estimation these heavily impastoed “haute pâte” [thick paste] works, which introduce base materials (e.g., sand, asphalt, and pebbles) into high art, are not simply attempts to shock, or to achieve succès de scandale, by returning figuration to a more “primitive” or infantile state (as many of Dubuffet’s early critics and detractors claimed). They also reflect, albeit negatively, an historically specific phenomena—namely, the classicizing “rappel à l’ordre” and nationalistic “retour à la terre” mentalities rampant in France at the time.4 Dubuffet’s writings from this period are replete with explicit and implicit denunciations of this return to classicism via the Renaissance. For instance in “Causette” [“Little Chat”], the text that he wrote to accompany his portrait show, Dubuffet lambastes this return of “Greekeries, post-Greekeries, and neo-Greekeries” in contemporary art, and elsewhere describes himself as staunchly “anti-Humanist.”5

These sentiments are expressed visually in Dubuffet’s Volonté de puissance [Will to Power], a painting from the Mirobolus, Macadam, et Cie. series, which not incidently takes its title from the Nietzschean phrase appropriated by the Third Reich. When juxtaposed with one of Nazi artist Arno Breker’s sculptures, Der Sieger [The Victor], 1939 [Fig. 21], which exemplifies the neo-classical body officially sanctioned by the Third Reich, and by extension Vichy, during the war, the target of Dubuffet’s attack becomes clear. The figure’s rough, hirsute body is the polar opposite of the polished, intact body depicted by Breker. In place of wholeness and perfection, Dubuffet presents us with a grotesquely flattened, disproportionate, and incomplete figure. It is difficult to discern if he is missing arms, or if they have been tied behind his back. Between the figure’s squat legs genitals dangle unceremoniously, like a cow’s udder.

Macadam connotes the idea of the horizontal vector of the ground, or, more precisely, an asphalt road, which is normally seen from above. Here that ground has been raised to a fronto-parallel viewing position. Dubuffet’s “return to the soil” is diametrically opposed to the Nazis’; it no longer takes the form of a glorified sublimated Teutonic body rooted in the soil of the German Motherland—or the French, Vichy equivalent, an autochthonous Greco-Roman Mediterranean body. Rather, Dubuffet’s return to the soil is nothing more than, as he put it at the time, “a rehabilitation of mud” for its own sake.6 Mud, soil, and sand are non-precious substances materially speaking, but also semantically; in Dubuffet’s hands they prevent his figures from taking on any higher symbolic value. Further, the opacity of these base materials block both visual penetration and interpretation, and undermine the observer’s attempts to read anything “into” the figures. At the same time, when viewing this painting, it is nearly impossible to miss the accidental “face” formed by the hair on the figure’s chest and abdomen. By including this detail, Dubuffet emphasizes the fact that faces are arbitrary, rather than transparent entrees into a figure’s true inner character. As is evinced by his later objet trouvé driftwood sculpture, Le vieux de la plage [The Old Man of the Beach], 1959 [plate 51], accidental faces continued to intrigue the artist throughout his career.

Dubuffet’s interwar and immediate postwar figures resist those classical Vitruvian ideals, passed down through the Renaissance and resuscitated in France after World War II, which seek to describe the human body as a perfectly proportioned, measurable, and quantifiable constant. In many ways, Dubuffet’s figures are the opposite of architect Le Corbusier’s contemporaneous neo-classicizing Plan of the Modulor, 1945 [Fig. 22], based on the time-honored Golden Section ratio of 1:1.618. Somewhat surprisingly, Dubuffet and the architect were friends at the time; the former gave the latter Danseuse de corde [Jump Roper], 1943 [plate 1], as a gift shortly after he painted it.7 Dubuffet’s Archetypes nullify Le Corbusier’s “gold standard” of proportion and undermine the notion of the human figure as an ideal form or universally recognized sign. The viewer cannot help but ask: Of what are these figures archetypes? For what archetypical ideal do they stand? And, if they are generalized archetypes, why do they contain obvious particularities, such as the wrinkles around both figures’ eyes? This oscillation between the general and the particular will be a defining strategy of Dubuffet’s postwar portraits. Indeed, Dubuffet once admitted to Max Loreau, the scholar in charge of editing the artist’s multi-volume catalogue raisonné, that Archetypes was a direct predecessor to his Portraits series:

‘ ‘The word archetype evokes for me something like a simplistic generic prototype where any individual particularity is omitted. It should be noted that the first painting of my series Mirobolus, Macadam et Cie., done in 1945, carries the title Archetypes . . . This character of depersonalization is certainly a constant of all my personages . . .The charm of my Portraits enterprise consisted exactly in undergoing a treatment of depersonalization of the effigies of the persons designated. This persistent drive to depersonalize the persons seems to me to precede the paintings (and is more or less conscious in my mind throughout their execution).8 ‘’

Dubuffet was quick to add that his technique of depersonalization requires “imagination from the viewer to recognize and complete the portrait.”9

PHYSIOGNOMIC ILLEGIBILITY

“These pleasantries signify nothing.”10 —CRITIC MICHEL ARVILLE, 1947

Dubuffet’s postwar portraits, or “anti-portraits” as he preferred to call them, similarly resist typification, standardization, and legibility. His goal, he explicitly declared in 1947, was to “block any likeness,” and to “multiply the obstacles” between the viewer and the portrayed individual, in hopes that his effigies would remain “open to multiple interpretations.” “Those who have spoken about my Portraits as an endeavor of psychological penetration,” he claimed, “have understood nothing.”11

Given Dubuffet’s stated goals, the crisis in legibility that accompanied his Portraits show at the Galerie René Drouin comes at no surprise. Contemporary critics were completely baffled, especially when discussing the role of mimesis in Dubuffet’s series. Their reactions range from one end of the spectrum to the other. Whereas one critic, René Guilly, felt Dubuffet’s portraits “resembled the living individuals too much,” another declared that the paintings “absolutely do not evoke the person represented.”12 Dubuffet’s sitters similarly had mixed reactions. Francis Ponge, for example, was pleasantly amused with his likeness, Francis Ponge, jubilation [Francis Ponge, Jubilation], 1947 [Fig. 23], while Paul Léautaud, on the other hand, became so enraged upon seeing his effigy he attempted to destroy it with the end of his cane.13

Yet, if we look at the critical reception as a whole there is one word that perennially resurfaces in the writings of detractors and supporters alike: “physiognomy.”14 Commonly understood, physiognomy refers to the art or pseudo-science of determining an individual’s temperament or character from his or her outward facial features. It presupposes that the face is a text or code which can be read or deciphered; as such, physiognomy can be thought of as a kind of applied semiotics of the body. Although the idea of physiognomy dates to antiquity, it was not systematized and codified until the publication of Giovanni Battista Della Porta’s Della Fisionomia dell’Uomo in 1586; in the following centuries, Della Porta’s work was refined and augmented, most notably, by Charles Le Brun and Johann Caspar Lavater.15

While it might be argued that there is nothing inherently remarkable about the word “physiognomy” resurfacing in the critical literature surrounding Dubuffet’s show—it is, after all, a term inextricably intertwined with the genre—we should not lose sight of how loaded the word had become at this specific historical moment in postwar Europe. In the second half of the 19th century, thanks to the photographic travails of Alphonse Bertillon, Duchenne de Boulogne, and Francis Galton among others, physiognomy was elevated to the status of a positivist epistemology.16 And as the all-too-familiar story goes, 50 years later the Nazis hijacked the idea of “scientific” physiognomy, combined it with dubious notions about race and eugenics, or inherited characteristics, and used it for their own reprehensible ends.17 Dubuffet’s rejection of physiognomy at this particular moment, then, should not be taken lightly, nor should it be treated as an isolated case. It is part of a wider phenomenon in postwar European painting that extends beyond the scope of this essay. Indeed, a more complete analysis of this issue would include a further consideration of postwar portraits by Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti, and those by Dubuffet’s friends, Jean Fautrier, Tal Coat, Henri Michaux, and Antonin Artaud, as well as an investigation into the profound role the human face played in postwar philosophical, literary, ethical, and cultural debates.18

BLOCKING LIKENESS

In his postwar Portraits, Dubuffet creates obstacles between the material signifier of the painting and the signified sitter in three main ways. First and foremost, Dubuffet blocks likeness by purposefully emphazing the materiality and opacity of his painted surfaces. Physiognomic opacification in portaiture and the deconstruction of the genre’s monopoly on mimesis and verisimilitude via this strategy is nothing new in the history of modern art, in fact it very well may be an essential facet of it—we need look no further than Paul Cézanne’s portraits of his wife Mary-Hortense Fiquet, or Pablo Picasso’s 1906 Portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yet, Dubuffet clearly takes things much further with his heavily impastoed, monochromatic “pâte.” This “paste,” “dough,” or “pasta,” (as it can be alternately translated) acts like a culinary substance which engages senses other than the visual; the viewer must “devour” these paintings corporally, rather than look at them from a cerebrally-detached distance. Dubuffet encourages associations of this sort when, in the subtitle to his show, he describes his Portraits as “cuite et confite dans la mémoire” or “cooked and preserved in memory.” “Confite,” suggests conservation, but also something gelatinous, and non-transparent. Likewise, culinary metaphors pepper the artist’s introductory essay for the show. Critics, in turn, were inspired to use similar metaphors when commenting on his portraits.19

The French word for “material,” matière, can mean either the physical substance one would use to build something, or the “contents” or “subject matter” (as in the phrase Table des matières, a “Table of Contents”). At the formal level, Dubuffet conflates these two ideas so that the materiality of the paint confounds our attempts to look into the “contents” or “substance” of the depicted individual. To the same ends, through his painterly process Dubuffet combines the two meanings of the French word trait, which connotes both a mark, such as a brushstroke or a drawn line, and a feature of someone’s personality (in the same sense that the word is used in English to refer to a personality “trait”). In Dubuffet’s portraits the incised trait remains at one with the thick surface of the canvas, it no longer relates to any imagined internal characteristic.20

Second, as in his earlier Archetypes, Dubuffet oscillates back and forth between the general and the particular.21 He includes the “accidental” and “insignificant” in order to cancel out any trait “others might quite rightly have judged more significant.”22 In each case Dubuffet begins with a very rudimentary plan, and then adds just enough information to suggest the individual identity of the sitter. For example, in Antonin Artaud aux houppes [Antonin Artaud with Tufts of Hair], 1947 [Fig. 24], he adds the actor’s recognizable wild tufts of hair and a careful line tracing his emaciated jawline, ruined by the electroshock therapy he received in a psychiatric hospital in Rodez during the war. This oscillation between general and particular prevents Dubuffet’s portraits from becoming “caricatures” or theatrical “masks” that aim to fix a face in time. As Benjamin Buchloh has observed, “ . . . both caricature and mask conceive of a person’s physiognomy as fixed rather than a fluid field: in singling out particular traits, they reduce the infinity of differentiated facial expressions to a metonymic set.”23

Lastly, in his portraits Dubuffet blocks likeness through a lively game of nominalism. The artist often claimed that the act of titling a work was itself an essential part of the artistic process, and once praised critic Renato Barilli for rightly stressing the nominaliste side of his overall enterprise.24 As Norman Bryson has argued, the practice of physiognomy traditionally relies on certain “syllogisms” which seek to embed it within common language and “naturalize” otherwise tenuous connections, as can be seen in the “Similarities Between the Head of an Ox and a Man” illustration included in Charles Le Brun’s Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière, 1688 [Fig. 25].25 This kind of logic was unfortunately alive and well in France in the postwar period [Fig. 26]. In Dubuffet’s praxis, Michaux becomes a spider, René Bertele a wild cat, and Georges Limbour is equated to a crustacean or chicken droppings [plate 11]. However, in contrast to the example from Le Brun’s book, or the more recent page from a widely-read Parisian newspaper, Dubuffet’s animal-human connections are obviously contrived and over the top, and accordingly, strike the viewer as strange, unnatural, and even preposterous. He uses this effect of estrangement to emphasize the schism that exists between the painted portrait and the actual person.26 In the same manner, Dubuffet’s creative titling disrupts the genre of portraiture’s long-standing promise of illuminating a connection between the sitter’s image and his or her class, vocation, or ethnicity. For example, at one point, he nominates Paul Léautaud the “Général d’Empire” even though everyone knew he was, in fact, a writer. Georges Limbour becomes a “Mexican” king, Edith Boissonnas a “Tibetan” demon, Henri Michaux a “Japanese” actor, and Léautaud an “Indian” sorcerer, when, once again, audiences knew they were not Mexican, Tibetan, Japanese, or Native American, respectively. This enthnographic confusion was purposefully compounded by Dubuffet’s choice to also exhibit six “L’Arbi” paintings, done in early 1947 during his first of three trips to the Sahara, along with his portraits.27

https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/fineart/people/faculty/minturnPDFs/Minturn%20Final%20(low%20res).pdf

You may read whole essay from New York University web page writing by Kent Mitchell Minturn to click above link.

WILHELM SASNAL

Anka, 2012

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 40.0 x 35.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel

WILHELM SASNAL

Kacper, 2012

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 40.0 x 35.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel

WILHELM SASNAL

Partisans, 2005

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 40.0 x 50.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel

GERHARD RICHTER: REAL & TANGIBLE ACCOMPLISHMENTS

AS A YOUNG MAN

While the years immediately following the end of World War II were in many ways difficult, Richter also has fond memories of this time, not least because he found he had access to books that had previously been forbidden under Nazi control. Speaking to Robert Storr, Richter explained: "It was very nasty, [but] when the Russians came to our village and expropriated the houses of the rich who had already left or were driven out, they made libraries for the people out of these houses. And that was fantastic."¹ In a later conversation with Jan Thorn-Prikker, Richter elaborated, "Cesare Lombroso's Genius and Madness, Hesse, Stefan Zweig, Feuchtwanger, all that middle-class literature. It was a wonderful, care-free time … made it easy to forget the dark side of things."² Dietmar Elger, having described Richter's mother Hildegard's role in encouraging her son's interest in Nietzsche, Goethe, Schiller and others, notes that it was an "endless supply of illustrated books that prompted his own first drawings."³ In an interview with Jeanne Anne Nugent, Richter recalls studying art "from books and from the little folios with art prints that you used to get then – I remember Diego Velázquez, Albrecht Dürer, Lovis Corinth […] It was simply a matter of what was around, what we saw and bought for ourselves."⁴

It was around this time, at the age of 15 or 16, that Gerhard's passion for art began in earnest, having an early epiphany during an eight-week summer camp organized by the Russian-controlled State, where "for the first time he spent a lot of time drawing."⁵ One of the first drawings that Richter recalls and acknowledges producing⁶ as a young man in 1946 was a nude figure copied from a book, which his parents are said to have reacted to with both pride and embarrassment.⁷ He recalls also having made landscapes and self-portraits, and perhaps more unusually, often working in watercolours. In a 2002 interview with Storr, Richter describes a watercolour drawing he produced whilst living in the village of Waltersdorf of a group of people dancing. "Automatically I was an outsider. I couldn't speak the dialect and so on. I was at a club, watching the others dance, and I was jealous and bitter and annoyed. So in the watercolor, all this anger is included, at 16. It was the same with the poems I was writing – very romantic, but bitter and nihilistic, like Nietzsche and Hermann Hesse."⁸
In 1947, while still studying stenography, accounting and Russian at college in nearby Zittau, Richter began attending evening classes in painting. Little has been documented about these first painting lessons, although Elger records that before completing the course, Richter realized that he had learnt all that he was likely to from the teachers there.⁹ A year later, Richter moved into a hostel for apprentices in Zittau, leaving his family home in Waltersdorf.
While clearly passionate about art, on completing his studies in Zittau in 1948, Richter did not assume his career would be as a painter, and for a while considered an eclectic array of professions, including forestry, dentistry and lithography. Looking for openings that would use his artistic skills for trade and commercial purposes if not in the fine art arena, his first position was as a member of a team producing banners for the German Democratic Republic government. Storr recounts that during his five months in this post, Richter never had the opportunity to actually paint any of the banners himself, instead being charged with the task of taking the old banners and cleaning them up ready for his colleagues to paint.¹⁰ In February 1950 he was taken on as an assistant set painter for the municipal theatre in Zittau. Richter had recently been involved with an amateur theatre group¹¹, so it was perhaps through this, or even, as Storr proposes, through friends from his evening classes, that he was aware of and disposed to the role at the theatre. During his few months here, Elger notes that he enjoyed working on the sets for productions including Goethe's Faust and Schiller's William Tell among others. His career in the theatre came to an abrupt end, however, when the young Richter refused to do wall painting work on the theatre's staircases, and was promptly dismissed.¹²
Soon after leaving the theatre, he applied to study painting at the Dresden Art Academy [Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden]. It is unclear whether he had already been planning to do so whilst at the theatre, or whether his dismissal prompted fresh consideration of his future. But it was clearly an idea to which he was committed, as having had his first application rejected, he was advised by the examiners to find a job with a state-run organization in order to increase his chances of being accepted, which he duly did. As Elger explains, State employees tended to receive preferential treatment at that time, and the recommendation must have worked, as following eight months working as a painter at the Dewag textile plant in Zittau, he reapplied and was accepted onto the course.¹³ He returned to his birth city of Dresden in the summer of 1951, ready to begin his formal studies to be a painter.

https://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2016/10/gerhard-richter-real-tangible.html

You may visit to read and see more painting from Gerhard Richter to click above link.

GERHARD RICHTER

Doppelgrau, 2014

Enameled Glass, Two Parts, Overall
Dimensions: Glas Links 200.0 x 185.0 cm; Glas Rechts 200.0 x 215.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel

GERHARD RICHTER

12 Scheiben (Reihe), 2013

Glass and Steel

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel

GERHARD RICHTER

Doppelgrau, 2014

Enameled Glass, Two Parts, Overall
Dimensions: Glas Links 200.0 x 185.0 cm; Glas Rechts 200.0 x 215.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel

ELLSWORTH KELLY

White Curves, 2001

Welded Aluminium and Stainless Steel Plate Over Internal Truss Finished

With Gloss White Catalyzed Urethane Paint

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

ELLSWORTH KELLY

Yellow White, 1961

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 213.4 x 141.5 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

ELLSWORTH KELLY

Blue Black Red Green, 2000

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 249.0 x 1219.0 cm

Gemäss Maquette EK

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

TAPIES’ POSTERS & THE PUBLIC SPHERE

"Tàpies’ poster production can be classified into two broad groups. Firstly, the posters he produced for his own exhibitions. Secondly, those that engage with the public sphere and which constitute invaluable graphic and artistic testimony to certain needs and aspirations felt by civil society, as well as other cultural realities forming part of our recent past. Tàpies’ posters also provide documentary material of the highest order, both on general issues (the abolition of the death penalty, amnesty and human rights, protests against nuclear power, calls for peace or against apartheid, etc.) and particular questions. However, above all his posters are connected to events in the social, cultural and political history of Catalonia, both during the last years of the Franco regime and during the period from the restoration of democracy to the present, with posters dedicated to the Assembly of Catalonia, commemorating the Catalan national day on 11 September and the fifth centenary of the first book printed in Catalan, defending the Catalan masters and music sung in Catalan, as well as those announcing or commemorating other important events, such as the festivities of La Mercè, the establishment of the Catalan broadcasting company in 1983 and the international recognition of Catalan culture. To this we should also add a subgroup comprising the artist’s homages to writers, poets, musicians, film directors and intellectuals, and which introduce a new use of the poster as an open, public letter."

Nuria Enguita Mayo, exhibition curator.

"Tàpies’ posters, which are imbued with a yearning for a social Utopia, are closer in spirit to the Russian avant-gardes of the twenties, a time when new art came to the fore and the artist was at the service of the people and education. Tàpies offered up his artistic language to the service of a social Utopia, dream and vindication, and he has continued for more than four decades without interruption. 1960 to 2006 is the overall period covered by this exhibition. Whilst these posters comprise a journey through Tàpies’ painting over the last few decades, it is also true that his paintings are ‘contaminated’ by the social purpose of the poster and that both his pictorial work and his posters have become a form of public art. All Tàpies’ painting embodies a great manifesto in favour of freedom as the essential right of people and nations, but in the poster this proclamation becomes a cry, a guiding voice, a public message."

"Tàpies’ posters occupied an important position in the Catalan public sphere as instruments vindicating democracy and Catalan identity, whilst serving as ambassadors for Catalonia internationally. Over the years, then, Tàpies’ posters reflected both the evolution of his own work and the progress being made in terms of the cultural and social demands of the country. It is true that many of Tàpies’ posters announce his exhibitions, but even these have a certain air of the manifesto about them."

"Tàpies brings all the spirit and resources from the language of painting to his posters. However, unlike other poster artists, who more or less faithfully reproduce their habitual aesthetic, with Tàpies the graphic force of the concept rises above all aesthetic considerations, so that there is less material and more spirit. (...) In Tàpies’ posters we may find such resources as drawing, collage, frottage, the pencil stroke, the forceful application of a thick paintbrush, traces of such ‘poor’ materials as cardboard, scratches using cane, angry spray paint and the mark of a tampon. However, they nearly always reflect personal energy through calligraphy. His posters are full of visual force and power and are designed for visual interpretation: the impact of illuminated or capital letters, the presence of the human element represented by fragments of the body such as the foot, symbolising life as a path that we travel along by the action of walking (‘You make your path as you walk’, Machado dixit), the senses (eyes, nose, mouth, ears, hands) as a source of perceptive knowledge, letters and numbers, hieroglyphics, newspapers, plays on words, the use of objects to produce a striking graphic effect, which should be more convincing than the word. (...) The high conceptual quality of Tàpies’ posters leads us to say that in many cases these can be considered almost visual poetry; sketches for a concrete poetry. The resources he uses are often those characteristic of graffiti, of the impact of automatic writing and of the spontaneity with which he turns concepts, matured and shaped decisively, into reality."

"Tàpies’ posters fully belong to the political fabric and they show the artist, the intellectual, as a servant, a kind of ‘social worker’, or an ‘art worker’ at the service of the people, since the forms of representation of a public domain that is autonomous and opposed to the dominant forms must always reflect the roots of people’s real experiences. With his posters, Tàpies erases the barriers between the political and the poetic. He creates conceptual cartographies for an emancipating public domain within the ideological context of an unrepeatable historical moment."

Excerpts from Pilar Parcerisas’ prologue, ‘Tàpies’ Posters and the Public Sphere’, Els cartells de Tàpies i l’esfera pública / Los carteles de Tàpies y la esfera pública (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2006).

http://www.fundaciotapies.org/site/spip.php?rubrique632

You may visit to read and see more painting from on news Antoni Tapies to click above link.

ANTONI TÀPIES

Écriture Sur le Mur, 1971

Mixed Media on Canvas
Dimensions: 270.0 x 200.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

ANTONI TÀPIES

Relleu Negre Per a Documenta, 1964

Mixed Media on Canvas
Dimensions: 275.0 x 230.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

PHILIPPE PARRENO

Fireflies, 2014

Ink on Paper, Black Ink, Rohrer & Klinger
Dimensions: 29.3 x 20.8 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel. Schenkung des Künstlers.

PHILIPPE PARRENO

Fireflies, 2014

Ink on Paper, Black Ink, Rohrer & Klinger
Dimensions: 29.3 x 20.8 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel

PHILIPPE PARRENO

Fireflies, 2014

Ink on Paper, Black Ink, Rohrer & Klinger
Dimensions: 29.3 x 20.8 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel. Schenkung des Künstlers.

PHILIPPE PARRENO

Dwarf Sun, 2011

Ink on Paper
Dimensions: 21.0 x 29.6 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel

ANSELM KIEFER

Baum mit Palette, 1978

Oil and Lead on Canvas
Dimensions: 280.5 x 190.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

ANSELM KIEFER

Wege: Märkischer Sand, 1980

Acrylic and Sand on Photograph on Burlap
Dimensions: 255.5 x 363.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

WASSILY KANDINSKY

Improvisation 10, 1910

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 120.0 x 140.0 x 3.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection

WASSILY KANDINSKY

Fuga (Fugue), 1914

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 129.5 x 129.5 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection

FERNAND LÉGER

Les Deux Cyclistes, la Mère et L'enfant, 1951

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 162.0 x 114.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

FERNAND LÉGER

Le Passage à Niveau, 1912

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 94.0 x 81.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, purchased with a donation by Kurt Schwank, Riehen

FERNAND LÉGER

Les Perroquets (Les Acrobates), 1933

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 130.0 x 162.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

FERNAND LÉGER

Les Trois Femmes et la Nature Morte, 1921

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 60.0 x 92.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

FERNAND LÉGER

Composition I, 1930

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 141.0 x 291.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

FERNAND LÉGER

Nature Morte au Masque de Plâtre, 1927

Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 88.5 x 130.0 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

FERNAND LÉGER

L'Horloge, 1918

Oil on Coarse Fabric
Dimensions: 50.7 x 61.5 cm

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler

FROM ANTIQUARIAN BOOKSHOP TO THE FONDATION BEYELER

In 1952, Ernst Beyeler and his wife Hildy renamed their antiquarian bookshop at Bäumleingasse 9 in Basel "Galerie Beyeler," thus laying the foundation for a unique career. This led to the establishment of the Beyeler Foundation in 1982 and culminated in the opening of the Fondation Beyeler in 1997, now one of the world's most important and beautiful art museums.

THE BEGINNINGS IN THE ANTIQUARIAN BOOKSHOP

The early lives of Ernst and Hildy Beyeler gave no indication that they were destined for outstanding careers as art dealers. It was more by chance that Ernst Beyeler, then still a student, landed a job with Oskar Schloss at his print and antiquarian bookshop, “La Librairie du Château d’Art,” at Bäumleingasse 9 in Basel. Oskar Schloss had been one of the pioneer publishers of Buddhist texts. Having been robbed of his fortune by the Nazis, he was able to flee from Germany to Switzerland, where he made a living in his later years with a small antiquarian bookshop. For Ernst Beyeler, these were formative years, with Oskar Schloss informally initiating his staff into literature, philosophy, and art in the evenings.
After the untimely death of his employer in 1945, Ernst Beyeler was able to take over the debt-ridden shop – and its debts – with the financial support of his future wife Hildy Kunz. However, antique books and the demands of the business were not what the young Beyeler was looking for. It is no surprise therefore that he devoted increasing attention to the graphic arts, such as lithographs by Honoré Daumier, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, or Japanese woodblocks. The name "Ernst Beyeler" was added to the shop in 1947, and in 1952 the name was changed to “Galerie Beyeler.” The foundation for a unique career had been laid. But one thing remained from those early antiquarian years: the love of beautifully designed catalogs.

THE GALERIE BEYELER SET STANDARDS

It was impressive how consistently the business grew. Initially, and undoubtedly under the influence of art historian and museum expert Georg Schmidt, the Galerie Beyeler was clearly focused on German art. The most important Expressionist painters were well represented at Beyeler’s, as were Käthe Kollwitz, Edvard Munch, Alexej von Jawlensky, supplemented by masterpieces of French graphic art of the 19th and 20th centuries. In the beginning, even works by contemporary and local artists, including some artist friends, were represented.
The first small catalogs, “Bilder des 20. Jahrhunderts” and “Tableaux français,” came out in 1952 and 1953 and were rooted in the tradition of inventory catalogs of graphic art. The selection and artistic quality set a benchmark that brooked no compromise. Beyeler’s goal was to become one of the leading players in the art world, and he boldly followed his own convictions. Art should be substantive, it should be an enduring source of pleasure, and it should stand the test of time. A preference for art that was not too ordinary and not immediately pleasing became apparent quite early.
The 1950s were marked by an ambitious expansion of the gallery, with French painting increasingly setting the tone. Dealing in art functioned according to a simple rule of thumb: for every work sold, two new ones were bought. Ernst Beyeler began to travel more often. Munich, Stuttgart, Cologne, and Paris were his main destinations. He attended the London auctions with increasing regularity. In Basel, Hildy Beyeler oversaw the finances and managed the small staff. By the late 1950s, the gallery in the Bäumleingasse was no longer a tip only for insiders. In addition to the local clientele, more and more Americans made a detour from Paris to the gallery's promising summer exhibitions. The catalog series "Maîtres de l'art moderne (1955-1958)" bears witness to this.

THE ART DEALER BECOMES A MUSEUM DIRECTOR

The sphere of business grew to include North America and Ernst Beyeler met G. David Thompson of Pittsburgh, who first appeared as a client and later sold his legendary collection of modern art. He was regarded as a notoriously unpredictable collector and attracted a great deal of attention in the art world. In buying his collection, Ernst Beyeler gained the respect of prestigious New York galleries. He then sold complete groups of works from the Thompson Collection to museums, establishing a reputation that would open doors from that point on. He received great acclaim for placing a group of works by Klee in Düsseldorf and Giacometti sculptures in the specially founded Giacometti Foundation in Zurich. Beyeler the art dealer proved his credentials as a museum curator long before his own collection began to take shape.As the broker of major art deals, Ernst Beyeler became a friend to many museums. He later gave the impulse for entire exhibitions and actively supported them.
For all his fame, he did not forget his modest beginnings. The challenging quality of a work of art remained the most important thing. He shared this love generously with his clients, visitors, and later with his museum staff. He never lost sight of the essentials, nature, inner balance, and political and ecological aspects. The hustle and bustle of the city never penetrated into the rooms at Bäumleingasse, which had a medieval modesty that let art have center stage.

ESTABLISHMENT OF THE FOUNDATION AND CONSTRUCTION OF THE FONDATION BEYELER

Ernst and Hildy Beyeler assembled a collection of fine works of classical modernism over fifty years, parallel to their work as successful gallery owners. The Collection was converted into a Foundation in 1982, and in 1989 it was publicly exhibited for the first time in its entirety at the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. The collection won international acclaim and the collector couple went on to expand it with great care.
The foundation marked the birth of the idea of building a museum. Ernst Beyeler was looking for a suitable place and found it in his hometown of Riehen: the grounds of the Villa Berower offered the desired connection to nature and seemed made for the construction of a museum that would harmoniously unite architecture, art, and nature. Beyeler commissioned Renzo Piano without a competition for the construction of the Fondation Beyeler museum, which was opened on October 18, 1997.
Ernst Beyeler acted as director of the Fondation Beyeler until 2003. Christoph Vitali took over in 2003, then Sam Keller in 2008 and until today. Ernst Beyeler passed away in 2010, two years after the death of his wife Hildy.

https://www.fondationbeyeler.ch/en/museum/history/

I may work as a freelance Architect. I graduated Yıldız Technical University Istanbul, Turkey. I prepare all the presantation by myself. This blog is my magical attic. Blog include that I already collected and will collect time by time past to future. Some of them influence me with their story , other fascinate me charm of colour, some is bents me differ of design. Some of them come into my life all the fascinating contex together that fuse different concept with there imagination and presantation. They all take part enjoyable place in my memory library to be as metaphor. Some of them I already forgot but when I seen them that make me in good spirits. Other is unforgettable. Some of them connect before to now that make to come new people in our life with new stories. Dream and reality fuses in life. All of them take part in this blog that I love.
I share all the knowledge of art, architecture, interior design, industrial design, people’ s story etc… without professional doubt. After all this progress , my magical attic will improve, get rich, increase and multiply when new comer join us day by day as our universe.
Please you may not hesitate to contact me. I may prefer to hear your idea that you could share with me your own work or other' s people work.

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mymagicalattic@gmail.com

PAGES

April 03, 2018

THE FONDATION BEYELER: A PASSION FOR ART