RIEHEN.- With around 250 works, the Beyeler Collection provides a unique insight into the creativity of modern and contemporary artists. It is constantly growing as the result of new acquisitions. Three presentations a year accompany the temporary exhibitions, creating new focal points that extend and supplement the content and time frame of the works in the Collection.

Two particular highlights this autumn are the presentation of all the Henri Matisse cut-outs (papiers découpés) in the Beyeler Collection and a room dedicated to works by Louise Bourgeois.

After a long absence because of the exhibition at the Kunstmuseum in Basel, the Beyeler Collection’s Picassos are again on show. Exciting encounters between works by Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian as well as by Paul Cézanne and the Cubists are also to be seen. One room contains works by Alberto Giacometti while another juxtaposes the painting Le passage du commerce Saint-André by Balthus with sculptures by Jean Fautrier. American art from the Beyeler Collection–from Roy Lichtenstein to Ellsworth Kelly and Andy Warhol–is being shown downstairs. The second presentation of the Calder Gallery with the exhibition “Alexander Calder / Trees–Naming Abstraction” remains on show.

Alexander Calder
The Fondation Beyeler’s second Calder Gallery, which is being presented in cooperation with the Calder Foundation, is devoted to a previously unexplored aspect of the artist’s work. In 1933, due to increasing concern over war preparations, Alexander Calder (1898–1976) and his wife, Louisa James, left Paris and returned to their native United States, settling permanently in an 18th-century farmhouse in Roxbury, Connecticut. The environment had a direct impact on Calder, ushering in a new phase in his artistic development. External space increasingly became a defining component of his works.

That decisive period saw the creation of Calder’s first outdoor sculptures, faintly reminiscent of pinnacles on the top of towers or weather vanes, which embrace these new artistic possibilities and provide the point of departure for the monumental outdoor works Calder created after the Second World War.

Although all the works are abstractions in space, their titles denote particular moments of motion, repetitions of form, and elaborate equilibria. Abstraction becomes tangible here, as is demonstrated by two individual works that have been selected. Organic associations determine the works’ forms with, for example, the crowns of trees, cascades of branches, and sequences of leaves. The free play of the many works presented in the museum’s interior space merges into a veritable “Calder Forest.” The consequent interaction between interior and exterior space evokes a theme that is important for the Fondation Beyeler, whose collection is embedded in a harmonious ensemble of architecture and landscape.

Finally, a second group of works, including the original and related intermediate maquettes, explores the creation of Tree, the monumental standing mobile from the collection of Ernst and Hildy Beyeler, which will soon return to its customary place on the grounds of the Berower Park surrounding the Fondation Beyeler.

In addition to loans from the Calder Foundation, the presentation includes rarely loaned works that are in private ownership, as well as works from the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

In 2012 the Fondation Beyeler initiated a programme of collaboration with the Calder Foundation that is projected to run for several years. Works from the two foundations’ collections are being brought together and exhibited in a series of curated presentations known as the “Calder Gallery.” The aim is to provide a permanent presence at the Fondation Beyeler of works by the major American artist Alexander Calder, of a kind unique in Europe, and to enhance knowledge of his oeuvre.

Louise Bourgeois
In 2011/12 the Fondation Beyeler devoted an exhibition to Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) in which her multi-faceted oeuvre was presented in dialogue with the Beyeler Collection, making it possible to establish manifold links between Bourgeois and artists as diverse as Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, and Francis Bacon. Since then, a sculpture and a drawing by Louise Bourgeois have been acquired for the Fondation Beyeler and are displayed within the new presentation of the Collection alongside other works from her estate. The virtuosity with which Louise Bourgeois handled fundamentally different materials is demonstrated by the small but select group of sculptures and the scratched drawing Untitled from 2002 that are on show. A leitmotif of Bourgeois’s very versatile oeuvre, the references to and inclusions of textiles and threads, is evoked by In Respite from 1992, with its metal structure, spools of thread, and drop-shaped element made of latex. In the early 1960s, Louise Bourgeois embarked on a series of convoluted, spiral-shaped and hollowed-out sculptures that sit on plinths or hang from the ceiling. Three works from this “Lair” series can be seen in the room devoted to Bourgeois: her white-painted bronze works Fée couturière from 1963 and Amoeba from 1963-65 show a subtle interplay of forms. The first is suspended from the ceiling like a perforated, discarded chrysalis, while the second is attached to the wall like an empty shell or an impassive mask-their biomorphic forms seem to fuse with the white of the room. The painted plaster sculpture Lair from 1962 is the third work from this series that is on show and, incidentally, the first work by a female artist to be included in the Beyeler Collection. Lair, whose porous surface suggests something natural, exudes an archaic air. With its geometric shape, it calls to mind ancient works of architecture and, at the same time, the formally austere objects and linear forms of Minimal Art. Ultimately, however, the three sculptures defy a clear stylistic classification, whereas the motif of the spiral reappears in the scratched drawing Untitled, 2002.

A tension between intimacy, structure, and fragility that initially attracts and then unsettles the viewer’s gaze is also transmitted by Untitled from 1954, one of Louise Bourgeois’s famous series of stela-like sculptures that she called Personnages. With its mobile, finger-like pieces of plaster stretching towards the ceiling, Untitled resembles a delicate vertebral column or antenna.

Henri Matisse: Cut-outs and Paintings
For the first time since 2006, all the cut-outs and paintings by Henri Matisse that belong to the Beyeler Collection will be reunited in a special presentation that is being shown until 12 January 2014. The display will give visitors the chance to re-encounter some true icons of the Beyeler Collection: the blue nudes, Matisse’s most famous cut-outs, as well as his Acanthes. It will also very clearly demonstrate how Henri Matisse (1869–1954), whose art developed into a purist reduction of form and an innovative use of colour, influenced European Modernism and the representatives of Abstract Expressionism in the USA through his cut-outs. After their presentation in our museum, all the cut-outs from the Beyeler Collection will travel to the Tate Modern in London and later to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which are jointly staging a major exhibition of Henri Matisse’s cut-outs in 2014/15.

The presentation is completed by the Beyeler Collection’s two oil paintings and the sculpture Jeannette IV as well as by the large-format ink drawing Nature morte aux grenades, which is being exhibited for the first time as part of the Beyeler Collection. The drawing was one of Ernst Beyeler’s last acquisitions.

Featuring a crouching figure, Nu bleu I is a wonderfully self-contained work that seems to have been cast from a single mold. Its shapes play with the notions of “inside” and “outside”, thereby conveying a kind of physical contemplation and immanent eroticism. Nu bleu, la grenouille is quite different: the blue shapes of the body, which are arranged on a bright yellow background and evoke lagoons, radiate activity and overt eroticism. The title La grenouille (The Frog) alludes not only to the appearance of the body but also to the frog as a traditional fertility symbol. The two pomegranates on the left have the same symbolic meaning. At the end of his life, Matisse developed an entirely new form of expression that one might see as a summation of his endeavors to achieve harmony in his pictures, in accordance with his notion of a grande décoration. He reduced figures, colors, and space to a kind of system of signs, which he cut out of colored paper with scissors and arranged into pictures, initially serving to decorate the walls of his studio. Henri Matisse’s large-format cut-out Acanthes is finally being displayed again: its restoration, which was generously supported by the National Suisse insurance company, took three years to complete. During that three-year period, Acanthes was not only extensively examined but was also conserved for future generations. Matisse saw the act of cutting out shapes with scissors as the equivalent of working with three-dimensional forms: “Drawing with scissors—cutting straight into color reminds me of the direct carving of the sculptor.” For Matisse, these papiers découpés, with their fusion of painting and sculpture, marked the culmination of his artistic oeuvre. Matisse’s paintings, including Jardin à Issy, show that he sought the same perfect balance between form, colour, plane, and space in his canvases, too.

Balthus and Jean Fautrier
The space is arranged so that visitors are led directly towards the famous street scene depicted by Balthus (1908-2001) in Le Passage du Commerce Saint-André. As they move towards it, they encounter three sculptures by the French painter and sculptor Jean Fautrier (1898-1964) that have come into the Beyeler Collection through the donation of the Renard Collection by the couple Claude and Micheline Renard. Fautrier’s Grand torse from 1928 and his two busts prefigure the raw gesturalism of Art Informel, with the sketchily portrayed female form being anchored in a time of the post-war devastation.