Paris Makes a Bid to Steal Art Spotlight From London
With a major new fair, a growing number of important galleries and museums, and grants for artists to live and make work, the City of Light is reclaiming its place at the top of the European art scene.
(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Paris was crowned Europe’s preeminent contemporary art capital in October, when the international jet set descended for the inaugural edition of the inelegantly named Paris+ par Art Basel fair. (In a coup, Art Basel took the slot at the Grand Palais from FIAC, the International Contemporary Art Fair, which used to occur at the same time in the same place.) Rich collectors, museum curators, journalists and the usual chic hangers-on swanned from gallery openings to museums in a (visual) orgy of cutting-edge exhibits that would’ve been unheard of just a decade ago.
“People used to think of Paris as an old lady—a museum city only, with no blood in its veins,” says Kamel Mennour, whose gallery has four spaces in the city. “Now there’s a lot of energy and people and collectors.” This year, Paris is beefing up a combination of public and private contemporary institutions and expanding the growing network of artists living in the city. “All of the actors—the private foundations and museums and galleries and collectors—are extremely conscious of this golden age we’re living in,” Mennour says. “But we need to work hard to keep people coming to Paris, to keep it vibrant.”
Paris’s rise is often couched in the fall of post-Brexit London, but most art world denizens say it’s not a zero-sum game. London’s art market is still robust. (The UK has the third-largest behind the US and China, with France a distant fourth, according to UBS Group AG.) And recent museum shows in the British capital have been outstanding, including the Serpentine’s exhibition of sculptor and poet Barbara Chase-Riboud’s work (closing this month) and the National Gallery’s Lucian Freud retrospective.
Instead, more seems to be more. Paris’s renewal is largely the result of a massive capital injection from its luxury barons. It dates to the Cartier Foundation’s Jean Nouvel-designed home, which opened in 1994, but kicked into high gear in 2014 when LVMH Moët Hennessy Chairman Bernard Arnault, now the world’s richest person, inaugurated the Fondation Louis Vuitton, a shiplike Frank Gehry building that floats among the trees of the Bois de Boulogne. The FLV, as it’s known, was soon putting on world-class exhibits whose scope (and budgets) topped those of most public institutions.
The FLV was followed in 2018 by the opening of Lafayette Anticipations, a multistory contemporary art space designed by Rem Koolhaas’s OMA and backed by the Galeries Lafayette Group and its stakeholder family, the Moulins. Three years later, Kering SA founder François Pinault opened his own starchitect-renovated space in the former Bourse de Commerce; reimagined by Tadao Ando, the building’s massive domed atrium has quickly become an art world temple.
France’s government tops its European peers in arts funding by a considerable margin. Last year it devoted more than €4 billion ($4.2 billion) to culture; Germany spent €2.3 billion. Taken together, the new private museums have poured money into Paris’s art scene, acquiring works from gallery shows large and small. “All of them are doing exhibitions with our artists and buying our artists,” says Alexander Hertling, a co-founder of the contemporary gallery Balice Hertling. He notes that the private museums’ curators and directors “come into the gallery all the time, and they follow what’s going on here.”
That support has helped bolster and expand the gallery scene; nearly a dozen have opened outposts in Paris in the past few years. And more are coming, including megagallery Hauser & Wirth, which plans to open an 8,600-square-foot space in the 8th arrondissement this year.
All of these interconnected spaces and institutions help feed the city’s art trade. Paris was the top international tourist destination in 2022, according to a report by Euromonitor International Plc—and its art world, with new fairs and myriad shows, is happy to lure more visitors. Last year, the Louvre received 7.8 million visitors, just 19% less than its pre-covid numbers.
Dealers plan to make the buzzy state of affairs permanent, starting with turning Paris—not a cheap city—into a home for great artists again, not just great art. “We welcome and help artists establish themselves,” Mennour says, checking off subsidized housing and studios as part of the efforts. “It’s important to always be at the heart of creation.”
The moves are paying off. “What’s happening in Paris is that the art scene is becoming a part of the everyday,” says Hertling. “Artists are beginning to feel comfortable actually living in Paris” for the first time in decades, which in turn feeds museums with fresh material while drawing more galleries and collectors into its ecosystem. “All of it, together, gives a whole new energy to the city,” he says. “It’s just the beginning.”
(Corrects role of François Pinault in the fifth paragraph. Adds new data about visitors to the Louvre in the eighth paragraph.)
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.