Billionaire Mega-Collector François Pinault’s $170 Million Art Museum in Paris Has Finally Got an Opening Date. Here’s a Sneak Peek Inside the Former Stock Exchange

The French mega-collector
François Pinault has announced that his $170 million museum in
Paris will open next June, but he is keeping everyone guessing what
will be on show.

Highlights of his contemporary
art collection will be housed in Paris’s former stock exchange,
which is being converted by the luxury goods billionaire’s go-to
architect, Tadao Ando. It will be called the Bourse de
Commerce—Pinault Collection. Around ten special exhibitions a year
will draw on his blue-chip art collection, as well as feature star
loans.

The new museum will be near the
Louvre and the Pompidou Center. Pinault told the New York
Times earlier this
year that he wants his contemporary art collection to “complement”
Paris’s existing institutions. He also told the Times that
he is planning a collaborative exhibition with the Centre
Pompidou, which will take place in both venues in late 2020. He
hinted that it would feature a “world-famous” male artist, fueling
speculation about who might get such a special
honor. 

It will be Pinault’s third
museum. He has two magnificent spaces in Venice, the
18th-century Palazzo Grassi, and a
former customs building, the Punta della
Dogana, but neither are
as ambitious as his Paris project. Two decades ago he tried
unsuccessfully to build a home for his collection on the Île Seguin
on the outskirts of Paris. The project on an island in the Seine
was scrapped in 2005, prompting the collector to focus on
Venice.  

Pinault’s museum in central
Paris will mean he will be going head to head with France’s other
luxury goods billionaire collector, Bernard Arnaud. His Frank
Gehry-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton has pulled in blue-chip
loans from major institutions since it opened in 2014. Lenders have
included New York’s MoMA, the Tate in London, as well as the
Pushkin Museum in Moscow, for shows that are beyond the resources
of most public museums.

Pinault spoke of the hurdles
faced by French museums, which are often too slow to make
acquisitions while the prices of contemporary art escalates out of
their reach. “Only a madman like me can decide to buy [contemporary
art] that fast,” Pinault said. He is, of course, a major player in
the art market helping to launch Damien Hirst’s spectacular
sculpture show, “Treasures from the Wreck of the
Unbelievable” for example.  

Pinault founded the luxury
conglomerate Kering, which owns brands including Balenciaga and
Alexander McQueen. The family’s holding company, Artemis S.A, also
owns Christie’s auction house. The 83-year-old has been collecting
for more than 40 years, and while it is yet to be announced what
will be on display in the museum’s inaugural exhibition, his
collection comprises some 5,000 works by artists including Cindy
Sherman, Albert Oehlen, Jeff
Koons, Damien Hirst, and Louise Bourgeois. 

The 19th-century, glass-domed
building is owned by the city of Paris, but Pinault has paid more
than €15 million ($16 million) for a 50-year lease on the
130-year-old venue. He has also promised the city a percentage of
the museum’s turnover in its first two years of operation. Pinault
will bankroll the running costs of the museum, which will boast
some 30,000-square-feet of exhibition space. There will be seven
exhibition galleries on the first floor, and a black-box space for
experimental visual and sound works. It will also house a 300-seat
auditorium, according to the French magazine Le Quotidien de
l’Art.

The Bourse de Commerce has been
painstakingly restored and modernized by Ando. It is the Pritzker
prize-winning Japanese architect’s largest project in France so
far. Unlike the ill-fated Île Seguin project, work began quickly,
on the former stock exchange. It is due to be completed in January,
just over two years since it began in 2017. 

Here are more images of the new museum:

The post Billionaire Mega-Collector François Pinault’s $170
Million Art Museum in Paris Has Finally Got an Opening Date. Here’s
a Sneak Peek Inside the Former Stock Exchange appeared first on
artnet News.