186 APRIL 2020 VOGUE.COM
are still to arrive or are still percolating in
the minds of artists—an art of the pres-
ent and of the future.
François Pinault, the prime mover
behind this latest assault on the art
world’s summits, greets me that after-
noon at the offices of Artémis, his fam-
ily’s holding company. (Among its many
assets are the auction house Christie’s
and the fashion brands Saint Laurent,
Balenciaga, and Gucci.) The graceful
19th-century mansion on the Right
Bank, within walking distance of the
Élysée Palace, is studded with blue-chip
contemporary art. French artist Dan-
iel Buren has striped and colored the
mansion’s delicate ironwork awning at
its entrance and lined the walls of the
grand staircase with striped and col-
ored squares; upstairs hang canvases
by Pierre Soulages (the 100-year-old
French artist whose retrospective at the
Louvre closed in March), Cy Twombly,
and Sherrie Levine.
At 83, Pinault radiates surprising ener-
gy. He grew up in Brittany, left school at
16, and first set foot in Paris a short time
later, en route to complete his military
service during France’s colonial war in
Algeria. “I didn’t see much of the city
then,” he admits ruefully, but he returned
to Paris when building his company in the
1960s, and he remembers the old food
market of Les Halles, whose destruc-
tion in the ’70s left a gaping hole for a
long time—“an architectural disaster,”
he says—in the city’s center.
“Respect for the architecture and the
art of the past is important,” he says
over espresso served in 18th-century
Sèvres porcelain cups. “It’s not back-
ward-looking; on the contrary—it can
lead you toward the future, in surprising
directions. That’s what we’re doing with
the Bourse.” (It’s also part of his phil-
anthropic mission—during the night of
April 15, 2019, while the world watched
in horror as fire engulfed the Cathedral
of Notre-Dame de Paris, Pinault and his
son François-Henri Pinault, the current
chairman and CEO of Kering, were the
first to announce a donation of 100 mil-
lion euros for the cathedral’s restoration.)
Pinault was around 30 when he started
going to galleries and museums, encour-
aged by a friend who was a Sunday paint-
er. He bought his first work, a canvas
by Paul Sérusier—an artist of the Pont-
Aven school—depicting a Breton woman
in a farmyard, because, Pinault says, it
reminded him of his grandmother. But
his tastes soon evolved.
“When I started collecting in earnest, it
was already a bit late for the art of the 20th
century,” he tells me. “I was running after
things that were more and more expen-
sive, and the masterpieces were already
in museums.” So he decided to focus his
energies on the contemporary realm.
In an email, François-Henri Pinault,
recalls his father’s early acquisition of
a canvas by the long-neglected French
New Realist painter Martial Raysse—
depicting an Adam and Eve–like couple
in neon-bright colors—as giving rise to
“lively debates within the family about
the work’s meaning and more broadly
about the role of art. Direct contact
with these works helped shape my own
convictions regarding the importance
of creative audacity and freedom; they
inspire me to this day.”
Plans are afoot for a dinner in July,
well after the museum’s opening, to be
held in the rotunda, celebrating “the
return of Balenciaga to haute couture,”
François-Henri adds. “In this new space
dedicated to art and artists, it will be a
little wink to other forms of creation.”
For his father, business and collecting
art are entirely separate enterprises. “In
business, one must be pragmatic, but in
art collecting, when I see a work that I
consider very beautiful, a masterwork,
I often say to the artist that I’m caught.
Well, in business, one must never be
caught,” Pinault explains. “The vulnera-
bility that can be perceived as weakness in
business is a strength in the world of art.”
I’m surprised by the depth and the
personal nature of his commitment to
art, even more so when he tells me that he
has taken the lead among his curators in
choosing works for the Bourse’s opening
exhibition. For the moment, he declines
to reveal its complete contents, though he
cites a few names, including Kerry James
Marshall, the Chicago-based chronicler
of African American life in large-scale
paintings and collages, and Xinyi Cheng,
a young Chinese painter living in Paris.
I’m also struck by Pinault’s attraction to
outsiders, iconoclastic artists who refused
to play by the art market’s rules, such as
David Hammons, the pioneering, poetic,
African American Conceptualist, and
Lee Lozano, perhaps best known for her
1971 “boycott of women,” a life-as-art
performance piece lasting some 27 years.
Pinault owns work by both artists.
Los Angeles–based sculptor Charles
Ray, who once parked a giant replica
of a toy fire truck outside the Whitney
Museum on Madison Avenue, is another
artist’s artist in Pinault’s collection. The
Bourse’s first monographic exhibition, in
September, will be devoted to recent work
by Ray, while at the same time the Centre
Pompidou, drawing upon loans from the
Pinault Collection, will be giving Ray his
first French retrospective, and the Musée
Picasso will exhibit a single work by the
artist, also loaned by Pinault.
That level of collaboration, between
iconic art institutions and a newcomer
in the same city, is rare. Serge Lasvignes,
president of the Centre Pompidou, is
careful to underline his museum’s schol-
arly approach. “But the first time we
welcomed the Pinault Collection to Par-
is,” he says, “was when we included the
maquette for the Bourse de Commerce in
our exhibition on Tadao Ando, in 2018.
That was our way of waving hello to the
new neighbors. And now, with the two
exhibitions devoted to Charles Ray, and
our collaboration on the show’s catalog,
we’re going to have coffee together.”
The opening of the Bourse also
coincides with a moment when the art
world—propelled in part by a post-Brexit
London exodus—is elevating Paris, once
again, as a major international destina-
tion. Important galleries, such as David
Zwirner and White Cube, have suddenly
ramped up their presence in the City of
Light or announced their intention to
do so. FIAC, the international art fair
unfolding every October in the Grand
Palais, has taken on a new allure.
Yet for more than a year, France, a
country with a grand revolutionary tra-
dition, has been roiled by widespread
strikes and the sometimes violent demon-
strations of the yellow vest movement,
all protests against social and economic
inequality. Some might say there couldn’t
be a worse time to display the art of a
billionaire megacollector.
“But culture doesn’t exist in order to
camouflage things,” Aillagon had told
me when I raised the question earlier
that morning. “It’s not a curtain we
put up to hide the problems in society.
On the contrary, I believe that culture,
and especially the sharing of culture, is
one response to a society that is out of
whack. By taking the side of creation
rather than destruction, and making it
so that what belongs to one person is ren-
dered accessible to everyone, in sharing
culture through education, exhibitions,
music, I believe we render society more
just and better as a whole.”
As for François Pinault, he is keeping
his cards close to his chest. “I’d like to dis-
guise myself on opening night and walk
around, to hear what people in the art
world are really thinking,” he says as he
ushers me out the door of his office. Will
his giant gamble succeed with them, and
with a broader public? Right now, perhaps
only Queen Catherine de’ Medici’s favorite
astrologer would know for sure. @
