<p>The famous Swiss art collector and gallery owner Beyeler has died.</p>

Basel (Switzerland) - Swiss gallerist and founder of the Ernst Beyeler Museum, renowned for gathering an extensive collection of Impressionists, has died at the age of 88. Beyeler's foundation confirmed this to the Swiss daily Basler Zeitung today.
    Art dealer Beyeler and his wife Hildy, who died in 2008, played a decisive role in the establishment of the Beyeler Foundation Museum in 1997.
    As early as the 1950s, the couple assembled approximately 200 selected works of classical modern art. The collection was transferred to their foundation in 1982 and is now exhibited in the museum in Riehen near Basel. The museum building was designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano.
    The collecting couple was also among the co-founders of the Art Basel fair in Basel.
    The Beyelers managed to assemble one of the highest-quality collections of Pablo Picasso and other famous painters such as Paul Cézanne, Henri Rousseau, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Henri Matisse, and Francis Bacon. The collection also includes art objects from Africa, Alaska, and Oceania.
    Beyeler, a trained art historian and economist, was the owner of an antiquarian bookshop after 1945 and became a gallerist and art dealer in 1951.
    According to the AP agency, which cites information from the Swiss financial magazine Bilanz, the value of Beyeler's collection amounts to at least two billion Swiss francs (around 35.5 billion Czech crowns).
    Beyeler was reportedly aided in his successful endeavors by good taste and personal contacts with painters like Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, and Alberto Giacometti. He was also friends with Picasso.