Sam Keller in Basel

BASEL—As everyone in Basel knows, Sam Keller was director of Art Basel and its offspring Art Basel/Miami Beach from 2000 until the end of last year. He’d worked on the fairs for several years before that, and, as he’s only 42 now, had more or less grown up with the organization. So it came as a real surprise when it was announced in June 2006 that he’d be stepping down, and even more of a surprise that he’d be taking over as director of the Fondation Beyeler, the organization on the outskirts of Basel with which the fair is deeply interconnected. (Founder Ernst Beyeler still heads up the Art Basel Honorary Board, for example.) Some observers wondered if the Beyeler job was a stepping stone to something else — or if Keller was gracefully easing into an early retirement.

But spend some time with Keller out at the foundation, as ARTINFO did yesterday morning, and you realize that neither is true. The man is still a force of nature. In a fifteen-minute walk through the stunning Renzo Piano galleries, he took three calls on his cell phone and stopped to shake hands with probably a dozen different groups of supporters and admirers, cracking jokes with them in German, English, and French and leaving them most visibly enthused about him and the museum.

Because this is the first post-Keller Art Basel, we thought that it might be fun to ask him for some non-fair Weekend Picks. But we couldn’t resist asking him a few questions first.

Sam, you seem very much at home here at Fondation Beyeler.

I was surprised how quickly that happened: After a few weeks I already felt like I’d been here forever. Maybe it’s because I know the place well — I was born and raised right around the corner — but the transition was a really easy one.

Remind me how long you were at Art Basel.

I was there 14 or 15 years, and I was involved in organizing twenty fairs.

So perhaps you needed a new challenge?

I was not looking for one, actually. Whenever anybody came to me about doing something else, I always turned them down. But this museum is quite special, because it’s a very international museum — 50 percent of its business is international, and the collection has a very international orientation. But at the same time, it’s very much rooted in this city and country. It’s Switzerland’s most-visited art museum.

But Ernst Beyeler is turning 87, and he came to me more than two years ago. He needed somebody to continue this work. So I thought that maybe it was time to take on a new challenge, and not just keep doing Art Basel just because I was enjoying it, and because it was successful. I also thought that maybe my work at Art Basel had been the preparation for this.

Because I’ve always loved this museum so much as a visitor, I thought, “Why not visit every day, going into work …” I told Ernst that if I could keep on doing Art Basel until I’d done twenty of them, then I would pass it on to the next generation, and they could take it further. And I could learn how to become a museum director.

The new generation seems to be coping pretty well.

It looks good, and I think it’s very successful. I hear from the dealers that it’s been one of the best ever.

So Sam, what would be your Weekend Picks — apart from the fairs, obviously — for people who are in and around Basel this weekend?

First of all they should they should enjoy looking at Basel. It’s a beautiful city with a very rich heritage of art and architecture. There’s also a lot of interesting contemporary architecture: Seven Pritzker Prize winners have buildings in the city, which is an amazing concentration of great architecture.

Then I think they should come to the Beyeler Foundation, and enjoy our Fernand Léger exhibition [“Fernand Léger: Paris–New York”] and the project that we’ve done with Sarah Morris [“Black Beetle”], both of which opened this week. But I’d also invite everybody to go to the other museums: The Kunstmuseum has a beautiful Soutine show [“Soutine und die Moderne”], and the Schaulager has a really interesting project that they’ve done with Andrea Zittel and the Polish artist Monika Sosnowska [“Andrea Zittel, Monika Sosnowska. 1:1”]. Also, I don’t really avoid the people who come to the fair — I enjoy having art lovers come here — but at the Beyeler Foundation you can either see everybody or be alone. You just look for a quiet corner. And right outside there is a park where you can go for a walk that leads all the way back to the city.

Plus, because Basel is right in a corner between Switzerland, France, and Germany, there are lots of lovely art experiences outside of the city as well. Personally, I like to send people to Colmar [France] to see the Isenheim Altarpiece, which I think is one of the most stunning works of art ever created. That’s about an hour’s drive. If people are interested in new media they can go to Karlsruhe [Germany] to the ZKM [Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie], or if they are interested in architecture they can make a short trip to Le Corbusier’s chapel [of Notre Dame du Haut] at Ronchamp [France]. And it’s also easy to get to the Black Forest or Alsace. It’s asparagus season, so you can eat very well in the restaurants there.