Paris museum to host Pinault collection
Print Edition
ONE of the world’s biggest private art collections is to be housed in a new Paris museum within a stone’s throw of the Louvre, a French billionaire said yesterday.
Francois Pinault, the luxury goods mogul who also owns the auction house Christie’s, is taking over the Bourse de Commerce in the center of the French capital to show his US$1.4-billion collection of modern masters.
The city’s mayor Anne Hidalgo, who negotiated the deal, described the museum as “an immense gift to the heart of Paris”.
Pinault, 79, has amassed an enormous trove of work from Mark Rothko to Damien Hirst, which he now shows at his private museums in Venice, Italy, after failing for decades to find a suitable home for them in Paris.
“I am delighted, it’s a big plus for the city,” Hidalgo said, pointing out that the new museum is also only a few hundred meters from the Pompidou Center, Europe’s biggest contemporary art collection.
She praised Pinault and his great business rival, France’s richest man Bernard Arnault — who opened his own Frank Gehry-designed Louis Vuitton Foundation for his art collection last year — for helping put Paris back on the modern art map.
“It is great to have our captains of industry helping to fly our colors. With this and the FIAC art fair, Paris is regaining its place in contemporary art,” she added.
The historic Parisian grain exchange which Pinault is taking over is part of a 1-billion euro (US$800 million) urban renewal project to give what Hidalgo calls a “new beating heart” to the city’s Les Halles district.
Paris’s magnificent 19th-century central market was bulldozed in the 1970s to make way for an airless underground shopping complex and transport hub which most of its residents loathe.
But a vast new steel-and-glass canopy unveiled this month by Hidalgo to put a lid on the problem has also been derided, branded a “custard-colored flop” by The Guardian daily.
Under terms of the deal, Pinault and his family will be given a 50-year lease on the building, which they must also renovate.
It was not revealed how much the work would cost or how much rent he will pay.
In 2001, Pinault handed the reins of his empire — which includes the Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Puma and Balenciaga brands — to his son Francois-Henri, who is married to the Mexican actress Salma Hayek.
Since then the man once described as “the most powerful in the art world”, has mostly dedicated himself to his art collection, installing it in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice and two other historic buildings there.
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