ART BASEL

Art Basel is six days in mid-June at Messe Basel, when some two hundred and ninety galleries show modern and contemporary art: two preview days for invited collectors, then four open to anyone with a ticket. It began in 1970, and the fairs of the same name in Miami Beach, Hong Kong, Paris and Doha grew out of it.

In 1967 the people of Basel voted to spend their taxes on two Picassos. Three years later the city’s dealers founded the fair.

The Three Dealers

It was not the first fair of its kind. In 1967 two dealers in Cologne had held a fair of modern and contemporary art, run by galleries for galleries, and Basel followed.

Its founders were Ernst Beyeler, Trudl Bruckner and Balz Hilt, and the first fair, in 1970, brought ninety galleries and thirty publishers from ten countries, and more than sixteen thousand visitors.

Beyeler was the son of a railwayman. Apprenticed to a Basel bookseller, he took over the shop at twenty-four, when its owner died, and turned it by degrees to art. The New York Times would call him Europe’s pre-eminent dealer in modern art. In 1966 Picasso let him choose twenty-six paintings to sell.

Early in the 1990s the fair put the choice of its galleries in the hands of an independent committee, and a decade later it opened Unlimited, for works too large for a stand.

Miami Beach followed in 2002, Hong Kong in 2013, Paris in 2022 and Doha in 2026.

The City

Basel has kept art in public longer than anywhere. In 1661 the city and its university bought the Amerbach Cabinet, with its Holbeins, and made the first collection in the world to be owned by a city. It is the Kunstmuseum’s still.

In 1967 two Picassos on loan to the Kunstmuseum were about to be sold, and an American had bid for them. The city voted six million francs to keep them, and its people raised the rest, with beggars’ feasts in the streets. Picasso, astonished, gave the city four more of his works.

The Beyelers gave their own collection a museum at Riehen, on the edge of Basel, built by Renzo Piano and opened in 1997.

In fair week the art world meets after hours at Les Trois Rois, one of the oldest hotels in Switzerland, on the Rhine.

In 2026 the fair drew ninety thousand visitors, and a Picasso of 1963, a painter and his model in a landscape, offered by Hauser & Wirth at thirty-five million dollars, sold in its opening hours.

What to Know

The preview days are the Tuesday and Wednesday, for invited collectors, and the public days run from Thursday to Sunday.

A lounge suit, and shoes for a long day on foot.

Much of the buying is done in the opening hours of the first preview day. Parcours sets works in the streets of the city, free to anyone.

Basel’s airport lies across the border, in France, and Zurich is an hour away by train. Stay by the Rhine.

The mistake is to see only the fair. The Kunstmuseum has the Holbeins, and the Fondation Beyeler is a tram ride out.

The Court

Art Basel is not the Court’s own. Cards for the preview days are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay in Basel, and the table afterward. Art Basel Paris follows in October, for a member who wants both.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.