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New Paris museum boosts city’s claim as global capital of modern art

One of the world's biggest art collectors unveiled Monday his plans for a spectacular new museum in Paris, cementing the city's claim to be a modern art capital.

Published: 26 June 2017 16:18 CEST
New Paris museum boosts city's claim as global capital of modern art
Photo: AFP
French billionaire Francois Pinault will show his $1.4 billion (€1.25 billion) collection of modern masters in the domed Bourse de Commerce, within a stone's throw of the Louvre, long the world's most visited museum.
 
The new gallery, which he said would open in early 2019, is also within sight of the Pompidou Centre, which houses Europe's largest modern art collection.
   
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo called the museum “an immense gift” to the French capital and told reporters that it would help put the city back at the top of the modern art tree.
   
Pinault, 80, holds an enormous trove of abstract and contemporary masterpieces in a 3,500-piece collection that goes from Mark Rothko to Damien Hirst.
   
He owns the auction house Christie's and built a fashion empire that contains labels like Gucci, Saint Laurent and Balenciaga, and already has his own private museum in Venice.
   
But he has been trying for decades to find a home for his collection in Paris.
   
That desire sharpened when his great business rival Bernard Arnault, who controls the LVMH luxury goods conglomerate, opened the Frank Gehry-designed Louis Vuitton Foundation for his art collection in 2014.
   
Pinault has commissioned another Pritzker-winning architect, the Japanese master Tadao Ando, to convert the magnificent 19th-century Bourse de Commerce, which sits on the edge of Paris's former central market district.
 
'Epicentre' of world culture
 
Ando compared the circular building to the ancient Pantheon in Rome. He said the concrete cylinder he plans for the inside of the building would be “the cultural epicentre of Paris which in turn is the epicentre of culture in the world.”
 
He said he would create three floors of galleries under the building's dome, whose spectacular frescos representing trade with the five continents are also being restored.
   
The former corn exchange is a part of a one-billion-euro urban renewal project to give what Hidalgo calls a “new beating heart” to the city's Les Halles district.
   
Paris's beautiful central market was bulldozed in the 1970s to make way for an airless underground shopping complex and transport hub which many Parisians loathe.
   
But a vast new steel-and-glass canopy unveiled last year to put a lid on the problem has also been derided, with one critic branding it a “custard-coloured flop”.
   
Asked earlier if he was going to his expand his collection to fill the new space, Pinault said, “When you see a new work you have to know when to jump on it. The big public institutions cannot do that.
   
“We are a museum in movement and (will be) very complementary to the existing institutions,” he added.
 
In 2001, Pinault handed the reins of his empire to his son Francois-Henri, who is married to the Mexican Hollywood star Salma Hayek.
 
Since then the man once described as “the most powerful in the art world” has mostly dedicated himself to his art collection, installing it in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice and two other historic buildings there.
   
The Venice venues will work in tandem with the new Paris gallery, sources close to the collector told AFP.

ART

African-born director’s new vision for Berlin cultural magnet

One of the rare African-born figures to head a German cultural institution, Bonaventure Ndikung is aiming to highlight post-colonial multiculturalism at a Berlin arts centre with its roots in Western hegemony.

Published: 8 July 2023 10:13 CEST
African-born director's new vision for Berlin cultural magnet

The “Haus der Kulturen der Welt” (House of World Cultures), or HKW, was built by the Americans in 1956 during the Cold War for propaganda purposes, at a time when Germany was still divided.

New director Ndikung said it had been located “strategically” so that people on the other side of the Berlin Wall, in the then-communist East, could see it.

This was “representing freedom” but “from the Western perspective”, the 46-year-old told AFP.

Now Ndikung, born in Cameroon before coming to study in Germany 26 years ago, wants to transform it into a place filled with “different cultures of the world”.

The centre, by the river Spree, is known locally as the “pregnant oyster” due to its sweeping, curved roof. It does not have its own collections but is home to exhibition rooms and a 1,000-seat auditorium.

It reopened in June after renovations, and Ndikung’s first project “Quilombismo” fits in with his aims of expanding the centre’s offerings.

The exhibition takes its name from the Brazilian term “Quilombo”, referring to the communities formed in the 17th century by African slaves, who fled to remote parts of the South American country.

Throughout the summer, there will also be performances, concerts, films, discussions and an exhibition of contemporary art from post-colonial societies across Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania.

‘Rethink the space’

“We have been trying to… rethink the space. We invited artists to paint walls… even the floor,” Ndikung said.

And part of the “Quilombismo” exhibition can be found glued to the floor -African braids laced together, a symbol of liberation for black people, which was created by Zimbabwean artist Nontsikelelo Mutiti.

According to Ndikung, African slaves on plantations sometimes plaited their hair in certain ways as a kind of coded message to those seeking to escape, showing them which direction to head.

READ ALSO: Germany hands back looted artefacts to Nigeria

His quest for aestheticism is reflected in his appearance: with a colourful suit and headgear, as well as huge rings on his fingers, he rarely goes unnoticed.

During his interview with AFP, Ndikung was wearing a green scarf and cap, a blue-ish jacket and big, sky-blue shoes.

With a doctorate in medical biology, he used to work as an engineer before devoting himself to art.

In 2010, he founded the Savvy Gallery in Berlin, bringing together art from the West and elsewhere, and in 2017 was one of the curators of Documenta, a prestigious contemporary art event in the German city of Kassel.

Convinced of the belief that history “has been written by a particular type of people, mostly white and men,” Ndikung has had all the rooms in the HKW renamed after women.

These are figures who have “done something important in the advancement of the world” but were “erased” from history, he added. Among them is Frenchwoman Paulette Nardal, born in Martinique in 1896.

She helped inspire the creation of the “negritude” movement, which aimed to develop black literary consciousness, and was the first black woman to study at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Reassessing history

Ndikung’s appointment at the HKW comes as awareness grows in Germany about its colonial past, which has long been overshadowed by the atrocities committed during the era of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis.

Berlin has in recent years started returning looted objects to African countries which it occupied in the early 20th century — Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Namibia and Cameroon.

“It’s long overdue,” said Ndikung.

He was born in Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde, into an anglophone family.

The country is majority francophone but also home to an anglophone minority and has faced deadly unrest in English-speaking areas, where armed insurgents are fighting to establish an independent homeland.

One of his dreams is to open a museum in Cameroon “bringing together historical and contemporary objects” from different countries, he said.

He would love to locate it in Bamenda, the capital of Cameroon’s restive Northwest region.

“But there is a war in Bamenda, so I can’t,” he says.

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