French tycoon’s Louvre rival to display £1bn art collection in Paris
IT IS not a problem faced by many mere mortals: how to find a gallery large enough to house one’s £1 billion art collection.
But a suitably well-heeled Frenchman has come up with the solution by opening a museum that could rival the Louvre.
François Pinault will show off his collection of modern masters at his own gallery in the centre of Paris after failing to find a suitable home for them elsewhere.
A stone’s throw from the city’s bestloved galleries, the new venue will provide an alternative for tourists queuing to see the Mona Lisa.
Anne Hidalgo, the city’s mayor, who negotiated the deal, described the museum as “an immense gift to the heart of Paris” and a cultural coup.
The new museum is also only a few hundred yards from the Pompidou Centre, Europe’s biggest contemporary art collection.
Mr Pinault, 79, a selfmade billionaire who describes himself as once a “poor peasant from Brittany”, has been called “the world’s most powerful art collector”, owning almost 4,000 works by artists such as Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Mark Rothko and Takashi Murakami. But France’s eighth-richest man, who holds a controlling stake in Christie’s, the auction house, had trouble finding a base in Paris for his vast collection. A decade ago, Mr Pinault tried to build a museum on the site of an old Renault car factory on the Ile Seguin in the Seine west of Paris, but gave up in despair in 2005 over red tape restrictions. Instead, he took his collection to Venice, buying the Palazzo Grassi for £25 million. But the palace could show only a fraction of his collection, so he added two other historic sites. Meanwhile, he could only look on two years ago when his arch-rival Bernard Arnaud, France’s richest man who owns rival luxury conglomerate LVMH, realised his own dream of opening an art museum outside Paris, the Louis Vuitton Foundation, designed by Frank Gehry. The pair’s enmity runs deep, dating from when Mr Pinault wrested control of Gucci from Mr Arnaud in 1999 in a battle dubbed “the handbag war”. Both also bought controlling stakes in auction houses and purchased huge luxury properties in the same Parcs de Saint-Tropez domain.
Mr Pinault, whose family luxury goods empire stretches from Gucci and Stella McCartney to Château Latour, will now take over the Bourse de Commerce.
Ms Hidalgo yesterday put a positive spin on their notorious rivalry by thanking both of them for helping to raise the profile of Paris in the modern art world.
“It is great to have our captains of in- dustry helping to fly our colours. Paris is regaining its place in contemporary art,” she said.
The historic Parisian grain exchange which Mr Pinault is taking over is part of a €1 billion urban renewal project that will give what Ms Hidalgo calls a “new beating heart” to the city’s Les Halles district.
Paris’s renowned 19th-century central market was razed in the Seventies to make way for an underground shopping complex and Europe’s biggest transport hub, regarded as an embarrassing eyesore.
To make amends, Ms Hidalgo unveiled a vast new steel-and-glass “canopy” covering the complex this month, but this has already been branded by one critic as a “custard-coloured flop”.
Under the terms of the deal, Mr Pinault and his family will be given a 50-year lease on the museum building, which they must also renovate.
French media say the price tag will run to around €100 million (£79 million).
Mr Pinault started out with a timbertrading firm, then invested in African distribution and shipping, Paris’s Printemps department stores and a home electronics chain.
He then focused on luxury, buying up the Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Puma and Balenciaga brands.
In 2003, Mr Pinault handed the reins of his empire, now called Kering, to his son François-Henri, who is married to the Mexican Hollywood star Salma Hayek.
Since then, he has dedicated much of his time to collecting art and meeting artists. He told Le Monde: “I will personally preside over this museum. It’s a commitment of passion for me.”
But he said he would hang on to his Venice museums as part of a “Europewide project”, and didn’t rule out opening other museums, “perhaps in Los Angeles”.