Architect Tadao Ando breathes life into new museum for Gucci’s billionaire boss
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Architect Tadao Ando breathes life into new museum for Gucci's billionaire dominate
French billionaire entrepreneur Francois Pinault, head of luxury goods group Kering, which owns Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, recently unveiled his 10,000-stiff individual art collection in Paris, close to the Louvre.
Located a short walk from Paris's temples to culture – the Louvre and Middle Pompidou – the venue adds to the French capital's already rich offerings in art. (Photo: Bourse de Commerce)
When billionaire entrepreneur Francois Pinault showtime tried to build a museum in Paris to display his gimmicky art collection two decades agone, bureaucratic infighting and delays sank the project. In an emotional article in French newspaper Le Monde, he wrote at the time of his "immense disappointment" and announced that he would renovate the Palazzo Grassi in Venice instead.
"I practise not like to submit or quit," said the self-fabricated man whose fortune Forbes now values at US$55 billion (S$72.8 billion), to explain his reasons for decamping to Italy. "Later on Venice, I would similar to add other cities in Europe, and i twenty-four hours I hope, French republic."
The 84-year-onetime, who started in the wood concern in his native Brittany and went on to build the luxury goods group Kering, which owns Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, has finally achieved his ambition.
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On May 22, Pinault presided over the opening of his museum at the meticulously renovated Bourse de Commerce, a pale stone rotunda in the eye of Paris. Located a short walk from the city's temples to culture of the Louvre and Middle Pompidou, the venue adds to the French capital's already rich offerings in fine art.
It too caps the ongoing rejuvenation of the Les Halles area, which had fallen into disrepair since a tacky shopping mall and transport hub replaced the city'due south open-air food market in the 1970s. The museum now anchors the west side of a leafy park ringed past cafes – the area was humming on a recent visit just after French republic'south half dozen-month lockdown had eased.
Pinault has said he hopes the vii,000 sqm exhibition space, which volition feature rotating exhibitions fatigued from his collection of 10,000 works and from other institutions, can attract a broad audition and even win over contemporary art sceptics who prefer the classics.
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"Art from the past is interesting, but we must also pay attention to what is happening in the earth today and also the future," he said in a recent radio interview.
The new museum for the Pinault Collection is housed in a structure that has had several incarnations since the 16th century, all of which are still visible. There is the then-chosen Medici column that the French queen consort Catherine de' Medici had built to detect the stars. A round stone floor dates from when the city used to shop grain here to feed the population before the revolution.
Then in 1889 for the World's Fair in Paris, the edifice was rebuilt with a cast iron dome and drinking glass ceiling. It was a dramatic backdrop for the business carried out hither by commodities traders who hawked the sugar, coffee and cocoa that built France'south wealth during the colonial era.
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Now with a four-yr, €160 million (S$258 million) makeover, Japanese builder Tadao Ando has injected a dash of minimalist cool to the construction by adding a 9-metre-loftier concrete cylinder under its lite-filled cupola. It was the tertiary commission Pinault has given to the Pritzker prize winner, following the Palazzo Grassi in 2006, and a 2d museum in Venice located in an old maritime customs building on Punta Della Dogana in 2009.
Ando's missions for Pinault have all refitted historical spaces with modern elements of cement, glass and low-cal. At the Bourse de Commerce, his artful effortlessly complements the site'southward rich history.
When you walk into the Bourse de Commerce, it does not feel like a typical museum. The ticket counter has been relocated outside the edifice, so y'all pace into the key exhibition infinite with little transition, and no ornate lobby. The galleries are not the customary square, featureless white cubes; they loop around the central rotunda, and are punctuated with windows on both the inside and outside walls, assuasive in a soft natural light. The windows also create a delicious interplay between the artworks and the building itself.
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Every bit a condition of the 50-year lease that Pinault signed with the urban center of Paris, he had to restore the Bourse de Commerce without wholesale changes since it is classified every bit a historical monument. That included restoring the panoramic oil painting, "Triumphal France", that adorns the cupola. It depicts the glories of colonisation and technological progress – consummate with stereotypical images of African warriors and Japanese geishas.
The fine art on brandish counters the landscape's racism of another era. On the second floor, a full-length portrait of a immature black adult female by British-Ghanaian painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye hangs next to an interior window through which the colonialist landscape is visible. It serves almost as a subtle visual rebuke, explained Martin Bethenod, managing director of the Bourse de Commerce'southward Pinault drove. "The art can assist u.s. contextualise the past of the building," he said.
Another example of the dialogue between the building and the art can exist seen at a display of virtually 30 works from David Hammons, a prominent African-American artist whose work excavates the black experience in the US. Hammons asked for his installation, "Minimum Security", to exist placed in front of a landscape depicting a map of the 19th-century maritime routes that generated the wealth of Europe.
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The work resembles a rusty metal cage inspired by a jail cell at San Quentin State Prison in California, complete with a rusty metal bed and menacingly creaking door. "Hammons wanted to dissimilarity his piece of work with the map, and for information technology to be dark in here to convey fear," said Bethenod.
Many of the exhibits that Pinault has chosen for the opening carry such political messages, subtle or otherwise. (It was Pinault himself who chose the pieces, said Bethenod. "He was hither every twenty-four hour period during the renovation. Every detail, every artist is a reflection of his taste and his vision.")
Such an overtly activist choice of works was an unexpected plow for the wealthy arts patron, especially in French republic where conversations about race remain taboo and complicated. France has long cast itself as color-blind because it is a then-called "universal" democracy where everyone is equal nether the police force. People are supposed to exist citizens offset, and not place likewise much accent on their ethnic, religious or sexual identities. When Blackness Lives Matters protests spread to Paris last year, they were greeted with defoliation by the political form, and President Emmanuel Macron urged protesters not to knock over statues of slavers and colonialists equally in other countries.
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But at the Bourse de Commerce, Pinault is chez lui (at dwelling) and then he is gratis to provoke. "It was necessary for the selection of works to exist serious, an echo of what the world has been through after more than a twelvemonth of pandemic and protest movements," said Jean-Jacques Aillagon, master executive of the Pinault Collection.
The projection is likewise a sign of how private money is irresolute a French cultural scene in which the state has long been the primary backer of museums, and is likewise a major funder of theatre and film. Several wealthy French families have created new arts institutions in Paris in recent years, and such foundations have an increasing influence over French arts. It remains to be seen how they volition collaborate and compete with government-funded museums that oft take budget constraints.
The nearly monumental of them was commissioned by Bernard Arnault, the billionaire founder of luxury group LVMH, who in 2022 opened the Fondation Louis Vuitton on the western border of Paris in a dramatic edifice designed past Frank Gehry.
Arnault and Pinault, longtime business rivals, set aside that contest recently, albeit temporarily. Pinault invited Arnault to bout the Bourse de Commerce before the official opening, and the prominent collectors spent two hours visiting it together. Only as they had done in Arnault's place before information technology opened.
By Leila Abboud © 2022 The Financial Times
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