Arts and Design

Billionaire François Pinault fulfils Paris art gallery dream


For 20 years, the French billionaire François Pinault has dreamed of opening a museum to display his renowned contemporary art collection in Paris.

The original plan was to build a massive concrete and glass structure on an abandoned island in the River Seine three miles from the Eiffel Tower. When that sparked planning and legal rows and proved impossible, the tycoon moved his collection to Venice, where it seemed destined to remain.

On Saturday Pinault will realise his original ambition and open a private museum in a former 18th-century grain exchange near Les Halles in central Paris.

In 2004, when Pinault announced his original plans for a private museum on the Île Seguin in Paris, designed by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando, the Guardian labelled him the Saatchi of the Seine and asked: does Paris need another contemporary art gallery?

Since then the French capital has seen the addition of the spectacular cloud of glass, nicknamed “the Iceberg” and designed by the American architect Frank Gehry, in the Bois de Boulogne. Since 2017 that building has housed the contemporary art collection of Pinault’s business rival Bernard Arnault and his Louis Vuitton Foundation.

Pinault’s ambition took longer to realise. In 2004, bulldozers were ready to clear the derelict Renault plant on the Île Seguin to construct the museum. A year later, he was forced to abandon the project after complaints from an environmental association, rows over planning permission and threats of legal action. Instead, Pinault moved his collection to the Palazzo Grassi on the Grand Canal in Venice, opening in 2006, and a second museum, the Punta della Dogana in 2009, with both premises designed by Ando.

The Japanese architect is also responsible for the €160m (£140m) transformation of the Bourse de Commerce, which has been rented from Paris City Hall on a 50-year lease costing €15m upfront plus another €60,000 annually and a share of ticket sales.

Visitors will enter a nine-metre-high, 33-metre-diameter concrete cylinder installed in the central rotunda inside the original 35-metre dome. It creates a large central display area without destroying the fabric of the original heritage-listed structure.

The building’s cupola, created in 1838 and inspired by the Pantheon in Rome – at the base of which are murals representing French trade across the continents – replaced an iron and copper dome dismissed by Victor Hugo as resembling “an oversized English jockey’s cap”. This in turn had replaced an earlier construction admired by the then American ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson, but which was destroyed by fire.

As well as central staircases, the galleries are linked by a double-helix staircase originally built to enable porters to carry large sacks of grain up and down to storerooms without bumping into each other.

On a pre-opening tour, Martin Béthenod, the director of the new museum, said: “François Pinault is not the owner of this building, he is the tenant for 50 years, so he was subject to very strict rules from the historic buildings and heritage authorities. The reversibility of the work was a condition.”

Béthenod said up to 90% of the works to be displayed in the atrium and upper exhibition spaces that are part of the 7,000 square metres open to the public had “never been seen before”.

Art exhibits
Pinault’s collection, exclusively devoted to art from the 1960s to the present, contains more than 10,000 works. Photograph: Aurélien Mole

The opening of the Bourse de Commerce, delayed for a year by the coronavirus, is not only the realisation of a personal ambition for Pinault, 84, head of Kering and Christie’s and worth €35.3bn. It is also the fruit of a longstanding collecting rivalry with Arnault, 72, the president of Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy and France’s richest person, worth €127.2bn, occasionally dubbed the “battle of the billionaires”.

Pinault is keen to emphasise the philanthropic nature of the Bourse de Commerce project. “I want to share my passion for contemporary art with as many people as possible,” he wrote. “I want the museum to be a place where people feel better at the exit than they did at the entrance.”

He added: “For years I have longed to be able to show my collection in Paris, the city I love. This is why the inauguration of the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection is of such special and symbolic importance for me. Paris is not only the city of passion, first and foremost, it is the natural home of artists, of their creative genius and their beliefs.”

Pinault’s collection, exclusively devoted to art from the 1960s to the present, contains more than 10,000 works by around 380 artists, including Charles Ray, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and Marlene Dumas. It consists of paintings, sculptures, videos, photographs, sound installations and performances. The Bourse de Commerce has a restaurant overseen by the Michelin-starred chef Michel Bras on an upper level and a 284-seat auditorium in the basement.

At the museum entrance, a large frieze by Martial Raysse called La Plage, created in 2012, leads into the atrium, at the centre of which a perfect wax replica of the 16th-century Abduction of the Sabine Women by the Flemish sculptor Giambologna is installed. The four-metre-high statue is a giant candle, created by the Swiss sculptor Urs Fischer, which will be set alight on Saturday and burn for the six months of the opening exhibition.

Béthenod insisted the destruction of this impressive work was not to be regretted. “It is a monument to the impermanence and fragility of things and the passage of time,” he said. “After six months, there will be nothing left of the original work, but there is nothing melancholic or negative about this. Something is destroyed but the object is transformed into something else.”

Asked recently why he had focused on contemporary art, Pinault, who personally chose all the works for the opening, said it was a simple question of economics. “When I began to collect art,” he said, “the masterpieces from the past were already in the museums and I didn’t have the means to buy them.”



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