For 40 years, the Fondation Cartier has been moving closer to the heart of Paris. Its first home was in the south-western suburb of Jouy-en-Josas, in a 19th-century chateau set in a 14-hectare park. In 1994 it moved to a glass and steel monolith designed by the architect Jean Nouvel on Boulevard Raspail in the 14th arrondissement. This year, the foundation has outgrown its home yet again and has moved into the centre of the snail’s shell of a map of the city’s arrondissements, where the Louvre is its closest neighbour. Its new site is a vast Haussmannian building that used to be a shopping centre, flanked by the five-star Hôtel du Louvre and France’s Supreme Court. Gold lettering above the elegant limestone arcades spells out the name of the institution, with the word ‘Cartier’ in the brand’s curling serif. When it opens at the end of this month, the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain will undoubtedly be a central part of the city’s cultural landscape.
The Fondation Cartier came into being in 1984 with an unprecedented funding model and an experimental, anything-goes approach to exhibitions. It was the brainchild of Cartier’s president, Alain Dominique Perrin, who wanted to create a hub for contemporary art that would support emerging artists. At the time, Le Monde called its creation ‘an event’, adding wryly that the project lacked neither ambition nor capital. At the opening night, the sculptor César unveiled a series of welded iron pieces, including a colossal abstract work-in-progress, Hommage à Eiffel, alongside works by the Canadian-British artist Lisa Milroy and the British artist Julian Opie; for both it was their first time exhibiting abroad.
‘The foundation’s opening was a defining moment in France’s artistic and intellectual life,’ says Jack Lang, who was the French culture minister at the time and present at the opening. ‘There have been similar initiatives since, but [Perrin] had the audacity, the courage and the imagination to create it.’
Private art collections being exhibited in public is, and was, nothing new in France. Wealthy individuals have long bequeathed their collections to the state, resulting in house museums such as the Musée Jacquemart-André and the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris. But this was the first time a private company – a luxury brand, no less – decided to inject its own money into contemporary art, nine years before the Fondazione Prada in Milan, 22 years before the French billionaire François Pinault presented his collection in Venice (after failing to secure a venue in France), and 30 years before the Fondation Louis Vuitton opened its Frank Gehry-designed temple of modern art on the fringes of Paris.
‘There was to be no confusion between pure and generous artistic action and commercial activity. This was, and remains, the very cornerstone of the Fondation’s credibility,’ wrote Perrin in Voir Venir, Venir Voir, a book published for the 40th anniversary. The Fondation Cartier does not publish operating figures and declined to give details of its financial activity for this article. Although the Fondation Cartier is careful to make the distinction between the company’s commercial activities and its cultural arm, it is evident that the financial backing of the Maison Cartier has allowed it to take more risks and be ambitious in its choice of artists and artworks – such as choosing two unknown British artists for its inaugural show, or putting on the first large retrospective of the Colombian artist Olga de Amaral in Europe in 2024.
‘Museums didn’t do what we were doing at the time,’ Jean de Loisy, a curator at the Fondation Cartier in the early 1990s, told me. ‘There is no comparison with other foundations like Louis Vuitton, Pernod Ricard and Luma… The Fondation Cartier has a very unique model. It has always weaved together worlds that traditionally don’t belong to the world of contemporary art and included fields that aren’t considered “high art”.’
That mixing of different fields is how a fleet of shiny red Ferraris decorated the lawns of the foundation in Jouy-en-Josas in 1987 in the show ‘Hommage à Ferrari’, each car standing in as the basket of a hot-air balloon, the billowing white canvases looking like mushrooms poking up through the trees. It was also the setting for a long-awaited reunion of the original line-up of the Velvet Underground, on 15 June 1990, when they performed at the opening of an Andy Warhol exhibition. ‘It was an extraordinary moment,’ de Loisy says. ‘They hadn’t played together in 15 years. They were staring stonily at each other the whole time. But it was an amazing event for anyone who had lived through the Warhol era, the modern American era.’ In 2004, the fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier transformed the Fondation’s glass tower into a sort of sartorial bakery for the exhibition ‘Pain Couture’, creating a series of his corseted silhouettes entirely out of baguettes and loaves of bread.
The Fondation Cartier also looked beyond established names. Its artist’s residency programme in Jouy-en-Josas was a finishing school for artists such as Fabrice Hyber, Huang Yong Ping – a dissident artist who left China after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 – and the Congolese artist Chéri Samba, all of whom continued to produce works for the Fondation afterwards. However, it wasn’t always easy to convince artists to work with a foundation linked to a luxury brand. ‘It was very different to now,’ de Loisy explains. ‘The art world was suspicious about private patrons. At the time, artists were a lot more concerned about ethics, and more distrustful of capitalism. Nowadays, artists are used to the world of business, where capitalism plays a powerful role.’
When the work of a young artist is bought by one of France’s billionaire collectors – François Pinault for his collection at the Bourse de Commerce, or Bernard Arnault for the Fondation Louis Vuitton – the star of its maker rises, and the value of their work with it. But the relationship between the brand and the artist goes both ways.
‘Luxury needs this link to the world of culture, because that is what gives it its nobility, its legitimacy, its roots,’ says Jean-Michel Tobelem, a professor of management at the Sorbonne and expert in cultural policy. French luxury brands earn their value because of the indelible association consumers make between their products and a romantic vision of the French capital and its art de vivre. ‘Louis Vuitton and Cartier need their brand to be associated with contemporary creators, to show that the brand is alive – it’s not just products from the past.’
A consequence of private entities dipping their toes into the art world is that public museums simply can’t compete with the cheque book of Arnault or Pinault. ‘For the Musée d’Orsay or the Centre Pompidou to do the same kinds of exhibitions as the Fondation Louis Vuitton, they would need to be able to put more than €10 million on the table, which French public institutions aren’t able to do,’ Tobelem says. Many private institutions tread the same ground as their public counterparts – and often make a bigger splash. The David Hockney retrospective, which has just ended at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, is the artist’s largest ever, but it comes eight years after a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou (at the time the fullest to date) that was financially feasible because it was a collaboration with Tate Britain and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The phenomenon of blockbuster exhibitions of work by the world’s most famous living artists is a fairly new one. The French state was not always so welcoming to private interlopers – so much so that the Fondation Cartier was effectively operating outside a legal framework when it first opened, initially financing shows by dipping into the Maison Cartier’s advertising budget and risking a slap on the wrist from France’s corporate tax authorities. After the publication of a report extolling the virtues of private patronage – financed by the Maison Cartier – the government adopted a law creating a legal framework for private foundations. But despite this, Pinault’s original plan to situate his collection in Boulogne-Billancourt, just outside of Paris, was stymied by red tape and a lack of enthusiasm from local authorities. Miffed, he packed up his idea and took it to Venice, where he bought the Palazzo Grassi for the display of his collection in 2005 and the Punta della Dogana two years later.
French attitudes have certainly changed since then. In 2003, the former culture minister – and first director of the Palazzo Grassi – Jean-Jacques Aillagon lent his name to a law that boosted private funding of cultural activities by offering generous tax breaks of up to 75 per cent for individuals and 60 per cent for companies that support the arts. That paved the way for the flourishing of private foundations.
‘Often in France, we go from one extreme to the other. It’s the enthusiasm of the newly converted,’ Tobelem says. ‘France has gone very far with offering fiscal advantages, which are now more than what you get in the United States. And paradoxically, the public sector is shooting itself in the foot, because people think private sponsorship is great, but actually this private funding is being partially paid for by the taxpayer.’ A stark illustration of this is the tax break that the LVMH group got for building the Fondation Louis Vuitton. The building cost a staggering €790 million – but, thanks to its creation, the group managed to reduce its taxes by €518.1 million between 2007 and 2017.
Not only are private foundations fiscally advantageous, but they are also a promotional tool for the brands behind them. There’s another layer to the arrangement: whereas luxury brands may make philanthropic donations to public museums, often that money is now diverted to their own foundations, where they can get a bigger return.
The Louvre, meanwhile, is nervously eyeing up its new neighbour. In a leaked letter from the Louvre’s director Laurence des Cars to the culture ministry in January, she highlighted the ‘success’ of the Bourse de Commerce and the opening of the Fondation Cartier’s new site, which have ‘profoundly changed the appearance, appeal and perception of the area’. Next to the grandeur of the Fondation Cartier’s new building (once again designed by Jean Nouvel), the Louvre’s dilapidated, peeling walls, leaks and temperature-control issues that put artworks at risk of serious damage are in even starker contrast.
The Fondation Cartier declined to talk about its competitors. ‘Visitors don’t think about competition. There’s a richer cultural offer in this area, which is good for visitors and artists alike,’ said the foundation’s collections director Grazia Quaroni. ‘The most important thing is that now contemporary art is everywhere in Paris – it’s in museums, it’s in the street, and that’s what’s exciting.’
The Fondation Cartier in Paris reopens on 25 October.