Dealer's choice

Art in America, Feb, 1998 by Richard Covington

While the chief function of the museum is to display the foundation's collection, one third of the exhibition space has been reserved for temporary shows. Currently, the Beyeler is hosting an exhibition of 52 paintings and works on paper by Jasper Johns, all in the artist's collection and ranging from the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s. Although a number of the pieces appeared in the recent Johns's retrospective at MOMA, the Beyeler exhibition, which runs through February, marks the first occasion so many works owned by the artist have been displayed together.

Another temporary exhibition, devoted to Renzo Piano's recent work, presents projects from Berlin's Potsdamer Platz to Osaka's Kansai airport and a cultural center in New Caledonia; it encourages visitors to examine architectural models, drawings and computer simulations in a recreation of Piano's workshops in Paris and Genoa. The Piano show runs until April 1998, then moves to Tokyo's MA Gallery.

Far less brash than Gehry's museum in Bilbao and noticeably less high-tech than Piano's own Menil Collection museum, the Beyeler impresses by not calling too much attention to itself and instead directs contemplation to where it should be focused -- on its founder's rich, lovingly assembled collection of modern art.