How a Swiss city the size of Peterborough conquered the art world

William Cook on the story of a trailblazing Swiss couple who shunned the bright lights of New York and Paris to build a museum full of masterpieces in Basel... making it home to the most prestigious art festival on the planet

Ernst Beyeler in front of a work by Pablo Picasso at Art Basel in 1970 (Fondation Beyeler/Kurt Wyss )

In a quiet side street in Basel, on a steep hill above the River Rhine, stands a building that reveals the vast artistic clout of this unassuming Swiss city. At first glance, it doesn’t look like much – a discreet and tidy townhouse, a lot like the other tidy townhouses all around it – but for 65 years it housed a remarkable gallery, run by a remarkable Swiss couple called Ernst and Hildy Beyeler.

Ernst Beyeler was one of the world’s great art dealers, and in 1970 he co-founded an art fair called Art Basel, now widely regarded as the most important art fair in the world. During this year’s fair, more than 200 of the world’s top galleries will descend upon this compact city, showing and selling works by thousands of leading modern artists. However, Art Basel has never been just about the numbers. Quality not quantity has always been its watchword, and this has made it the gold standard of the commercial art scene.

I drop into Galerie Knoell, a chic commercial gallery around the corner from Ernst Beyeler’s old HQ. It’s run by a dynamic young gallerist called Carlo Knoell. This year, he’s exhibiting at Art Basel for the first time. So how important is Art Basel, I ask him. “If you compare it with football,” he tells me, “it’s the Champions League.”