Seine site earmarked for modern art museum

The new art museum on the Seine could rival Bilbao's Guggenheim

In this story: A new avant-garde powerhouse? An eye for the eclectic RELATED STORIES, SITES

By Douglas Herbert, CNN.com writer

The Germans seized it. The Allies bombed it. And workers at its long-dormant Renault car plant once squared off with riot police in bloody skirmishes that triggered some of France's worst street riots of the 20th Century.

Now, a French billionaire whose acumen for corporate makeovers is matched only by his love of a good Mondrian, has secured the Ile Seguin, a 23-acre island in the middle of the Seine, as the future site of a massive modern art museum that is tipped to rival Bilbao's Guggenheim centre and London's Tate Modern.

François Pinault, a one-time timber merchant whose portfolio includes France's flagship Printemps department stores and Christie's auction houses, envisions the planned 30,000-square-metre museum as a public repository for a personal collection that embraces hundreds of paintings, sculptures and video installations.

Renault, which produced its last car at the factory in 1992, has agreed to sell 3.2 of its 11 acres on the Ile Seguin for an unspecified sum to the Fondation Pinault.

The agreement was formally announced Monday to the French Culture Minister, Catherine Tasca.

It is the outcome of talks, begun earlier this year between Pinault, Renault's President, Louis Schweitzer and Jean-Pierre Fourcade, the mayor of the industrial western Parisian suburb in which the island is situated. The museum could open as early as 2004, though Pinault, who is financing the project from his personal funds, must first appoint an architect.

Fourcade told CNN.com that the new museum marked a watershed for Boulogne-Billancourt, which had been vying with Paris for the honour of housing a collection that some art historians say could soon usurp the title of France's most avant-garde art collection.

Pinault's eclectic tastes, observers say, may also help France recoup its reputation as a European powerhouse of cutting-edge art.

Works by masters such as Picasso will be displayed along with those of contemporary American and British artists

The recent openings of the futuristic Guggenheim in Bilbao and the Cathedral-like Tate Modern on London's Southbank have stolen much of the thunder from the French modern-art scene, dominated until now by the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris.

"The interest in this for us is that Pinault purchased many contemporary works that aren't really acceptable to many traditional museums," Fourcade said.

Among the masters to be displayed are some of the leading luminaries of the 20th Century such as Picasso, Modigliani and Rothko and more contemporary works by more controversial artists such as British "brat-pack" guru Damien Hirst -- most of which were purchased by Pinault over the past decade.

The focal point of the collection is likely to be Split Rocker -- a towering half-horse, half dinosaur sculpture by the contemporary American artist Jeff Koons, acquired by Pinault in Avignon, France last year.

Nine years earlier, in 1990, Pinault had launched himself as a serious art connoisseur when he purchased a 1925 work by Mondrian, Tableau Losangique II, for a reported £5.7 million ($8.1 million) -- double the annual procurement budget of the Pompidou center.

He further exhibited his unorthodox streak with his purchase, in 1995, of Rebus, an early work by Robert Rauschenberg, followed a year later by his acquisition at an auction of an Andy Warhol painting of the late Chinese leader, Mao Tse-tung, for 6 million francs ($814,810).

Pierre Daix, an art historian who wrote the authorised biography of Pinault said the business tycoon considered his involvement with art an extension of his business horizons -- and a way of making one enhance his experience with the other.

"In the interview he gave me, Pinault said: 'What I ask of art is that it opens my mind.' He wants artists to say and express things that are ahead of their time, who penetrate the essence of things."

Daix said Pinault viewed his museum as a sort of cultural insurance policy against the dispersal of his collection.

"His idea was to take what he had collected and make sure it wasn't scattered, and that it was transmitted. He had a strong sense that the collection he had built was unique in France."

The museum will mark a major metamorphosis for Ile Seguin itself after a century playing host to the now defunct Renault plant.

The last car rolled off the plant's production lines in 1992, capping an often turbulent history during which the island provided a dramatic floating venue for bloody showdowns between militant union workers and their bosses.

The arrival of Pinault, whose business empire also includes ski slopes in Vail, Colorado and the Chateau Latour vineyard in the Bordeaux region of France, may mark a turning point for the island after a decade of industrial decline.

Massive makeover begins at MoMA
August 11, 2000
Rauschenberg's collaborative artwork unveiled at Whitney
June 27, 2000

Boulogne-Billancourt web site
French Culture Ministry
Guggenheim Bilbao Museum
Tate Modern

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