French luxury goods billionaire Bernard Arnault will open a new museum close to his ‘Foundation Louis Vuitton’ in Paris, which opened in 2014. The collector enlisted Frank Gehry to revamp the building that formerly housed the Museum of Arts and Popular Traditions.
In a presentation attended by French President François Hollande, culture minister Audrey Azoulay, and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, Bernard Arnault announced that he agreed to a 50-year lease at €150,000 ($158,000) annually for the 11-story building, which belongs to the city of Paris. Additionally, the city will receive a variable percentage of turnover between two and 10 percent depending on profitability.
As part of the deal, the museum will be renamed La Maison LVMH/Arts, Talents, Patrimonie. According to Le Parisien, renovation costs have been estimated at €158 million ($166 million).
The 15,100-square-meter building will include a traditional craft workshop, a 2,000-seat event hall, multiple gallery spaces, and a rooftop restaurant.
Renovation of the museum is expected to take at least five years, and the new institution is slated to open in 2022.
In fact, Bernard Arnault is one of the world’s richest man and his appetite for art grows continuously as he expands his museum empire.
In 2014, on the eve of the opening of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne park, the Financial Times‘s weekend “How to Spend It” section is led by a fascinating in-depth profile of the LVMH CEO and renowned art collector. The piece, penned by Nick Foulkes, breaks down everything, from the roots and the rise of his luxury goods empire to his love of art and history of collecting, as well as how the visionary leader views the integration of art and fashion his company has executed so successfully over the years.
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By turn fawning and insightful, Foulkes describes Arnault as “utterly charming” as they share a breakfast of “coffee, fruit, croissants, and crusty French bread.” He describes Arnault as “quietly spoken, tall, pale, and elegant…this is what a fortune of $33bn (give or take) looks like in human form.” What makes Arnault so intriguing as a collector, Foulkes opines, is the way that “he has blurred, if not erased, the line between art and commerce.”
According to the profile, Arnault values creativity most, in an attitude that borders on religious, changing the relationship between luxury, fashion, and art.
Arnault tells Foulkes about his first auction purchase, a Claude Monet early 20th-century depiction of Charing Cross Bridge. Arnault recounts his initial reaction upon seeing the work—”No it’s not possible, there is a Monet for sale”—and his pleasant surprise at being the winning bidder: “I was the only one to bid for it, and I got it for a relatively low amount.” He finds joy in being the first to discover things, at a time “when everyone wanted “unreadable, dramatic works dating from shortly before an artist’s suicide.” Arnault always stood firm and has total confidence in his artistic judgement.
Another major portion of the article is devoted to international starchitect Frank Gehry, designer of the Fondation building who again, will be designing for the upcoming museum project.
*extracted from artnet news