SAM KELLER

Sam Keller has spent his working life in two institutions in Basel that owe their beginnings to Ernst Beyeler. For eight years he ran the fair Beyeler helped found, and since 2008 he has run the museum Beyeler built for his own collection. Between them they are two of the reasons the art world comes to Basel in June, and under him the first of them crossed the Atlantic.

He studied art history and philosophy at the University of Basel from 1985 to 1990, and worked afterwards as a journalist. In 1994 Art Basel made him its head of communications, in 1998 its deputy director, and in 2000 its director, a post he held until 2007.

The fair he took over was already thirty years old. It had begun in 1970, when three dealers of the city, Ernst Beyeler, Trudl Bruckner and Balz Hilt, brought ninety galleries and thirty publishers from ten countries to the Messe, and more than sixteen thousand visitors came. Early in the 1990s it had handed the choice of its galleries to an independent committee. In his first year as director it opened Art Unlimited, a section for monumental sculpture, installation, video and performance, in the new Hall 1 of the Messe; it is there still, for works too large for a stand.

The larger step was to leave Switzerland. Collectors in Miami had urged the fair to come, and the first edition was set for December 2001. Six weeks before it opened, the fair was put off for a year, after the attacks of September 11th; only five galleries had withdrawn, and the organisers expected to lose about four million dollars. Art Basel Miami Beach opened on 5 December 2002, the first edition of Art Basel outside Switzerland. It is the cornerstone of Miami Art Week now, with some two dozen other fairs drawn to the city around it, and in 2007 the City of Miami Beach gave Keller its Medal of Honour. The fairs in Hong Kong, Paris and Doha came after his time.

He was asked about the fair’s standing in an interview in The Art Newspaper in 2006, his last full year, and answered: “It was the world’s most important fair before I came, it is now, and it will continue to be after I’ve left.” It is a director’s sentence, careful to give credit both ways.

In 2008 Ernst Beyeler named him director of the Fondation Beyeler at Riehen, on the edge of Basel. The Fondation grew out of the collection Ernst and Hildy Beyeler assembled over several decades, and opened in 1997 in a museum by Renzo Piano. The collection now has more than four hundred works of modern and contemporary art, from Cézanne and Monet to Picasso, Matisse and Rothko, and on to Louise Bourgeois, Warhol, Marlene Dumas, Roni Horn and Wolfgang Tillmans. Major loan exhibitions are hung beside it.

Under him the museum has grown. Peter Zumthor was chosen in 2016 from a field of a hundred architects, and in 2026 his three buildings were completed beside Piano’s: the Wyss Museum, given chiefly to the Fondation’s own collection; the Ammann Pavilion, for cultural events; and a gatehouse for offices and the handling of art. The park around them was roughly doubled. The University of Basel made Keller an honorary doctor in 2016.

His career matters to the season because it joins the two halves of a June week in Basel. The fair is the market: two preview days for invited collectors, then four for the public, with much of the buying done in the first hours. The Fondation is where a collection, once bought, was kept together and given to the public. The Art Basel entry warns against seeing only the fair; the Fondation Beyeler is a tram ride out.