Three things are important in real estate, according to the classic dictum: location, location, and location. Consider the newly reinstalled Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, which places contemporary art, animated by philosophical and scientific inquiry, smack in the middle of the historic center of Paris. It’s a daring gesture and a fresh start for this 41-year-old foundation, one that first lured art-world insiders to a 19th-century mansion in a village near Versailles, and then an expanded public to a seemingly weightless glass structure designed for it by the French star architect Jean Nouvel in Montparnasse, before moving into its new home.
Though it was “the first of the three biggies,” says Chris Dercon, the Fondation Cartier’s new director (comparing it to both the Fondation Louis Vuitton and the Bourse de Commerce Pinault Collection, two major, privately funded Parisian museums of contemporary art), “in fact, we feel much closer to the little foundations that are truly experimental, such as Lafayette Anticipation, Fondation Pernod Ricard, or Fondation-H.” These and other smaller non-profits—including MAGMA, a three-year-old, multi-disciplinary cultural platform whose print publications are accompanied by related exhibitions—testify to Paris’s growing vibrancy as an international contemporary art destination.
We were sitting in Dercon’s luminous office on the second floor of the Fondation’s new building at number 2, Place du Palais-Royal—an address that represents, on its own, a significant cultural flex. Catty-corner to the Comédie Française (the national theater, located on that plaza since 1799), it’s also so close to the Louvre Museum that some upper-floor windows offer glimpses of the marble sculptures on display there.
Dercon arrived at the Fondation in 2022, having just overseen the five-year renovation of the Grand Palais, a glorious, Belle Époque structure that now hosts temporary exhibitions, including its current Mickalene Thomas retrospective. He has, he says, “a certain experience with difficult architecture”; he’d also directed the Haus der Kunst, an art museum in Munich, situated in a 1933 building whose foundation stone was laid by Adolf Hitler.
In Paris, he is tasked with managing both a 19th-century building suddenly jolted into the future, via a bottom-to-top renovation by Jean Nouvel, and an institution with a long history of disrupting conventions and challenging established aesthetic hierarchies. The Fondation Cartier made its name with groundbreaking exhibitions that embraced design, photography, video, and installation art alongside more traditional media, introducing scores of artists from indigenous and underserved communities and engaging with a global community of thinkers and creators. How this avant-garde enterprise will adapt over the long term, as its program unfolds before a still broader public (including the tourists and office workers thronging its new neighborhood), is anyone’s guess.
The building itself, which occupies an entire city block, confounds expectations. Constructed in 1855 as a luxury hotel, it became, a few decades later, Les Grands Magasins du Louvre, a chic department store offering Second Empire Parisian society the latest innovations in fashion, housewares, and toys. But by the 1970s, having changed hands again, it became a dark warren of tiny antique shops.
For its new life as the Fondation Cartier, Nouvel, now 80, has restored the building’s sober, white limestone façade while gutting its interior, installing a supremely mobile, flexible design whose Piranesian sight lines extend across three floors in multiple directions. His signature architectural innovation here consists of five motorized steel platforms that can be hoisted or lowered, reconfiguring the almost 70,000 square feet of gallery space for each exhibition.
If all the platforms are lowered to basement level, a soaring, 36-foot-tall atrium will open above them. When their positions are staggered, as they are for “Exposition Général” (the inaugural show at the Fondation’s new venue), the resulting space encourages a kaleidoscopic play of gazes, encompassing both art and people—and making it, according to Chris Dercon, “an ideal place for dating.”
Light pours in through three adjustable skylights with views of planted roofs, and through two rows of huge bay windows stretching almost 500 feet along the rue de Rivoli and the rue Saint Honoré, legacies of the building’s department store past. These give pedestrians bustling along those busy streets the opportunity to “window shop” the art inside. One afternoon, out on the sidewalk, I noticed a trio of young Parisians gazing through a vitrine at a giant “necklace” of blood-red and pale blue Murano glass beads, its delicate traceries looping against a white wall and pooling on the floor inside. (French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel created this work in 1997, in homage to the artist Félix González-Torres, who had died the year before of AIDS-related complications.) The bay windows are, in that way, a form of community outreach, like the Fondation’s bookstore, its café, and the restaurant and education center that are scheduled to open next year.
On display in “Exposition Général” are some 600 works by artists from 50 countries and five continents, drawn from the vast collection of art the Fondation has showcased (often acquired directly from creators, and supporting work that at the time had no confirmed value on the international art market). It’s a kaleidoscopic portrait of an institution attuned for four decades to profound shifts in culture and society.
There is no single, explanatory path through the exhibition, which is loosely organized by theme. Visitors are encouraged instead to flâner, like 19th-century Parisian dandies: to wander through the galleries as through a storehouse or an Aladdin’s cave, in a state of heightened attention.
My momentary confusion upon entering soon gave way to some startling encounters. Ascending a staircase, for example, I suddenly found myself face-to-face with a tortoise that appeared to be making its way up a nearby column. (A caption on a lower floor identifies this stuffed creature as part of an installation by the Italian artist Mario Merz, an avatar of Arte Povera.) Later, while traversing an upper-level walkway, my eyes were drawn to a canvas hanging one floor below–a lyrical abstraction of layered brushstrokes in vibrant cobalt, marigold, and emerald, which I immediately recognized as the work of the expatriate American Joan Mitchell.
Around the theme of “architecture,” I was delighted to find a large-scale maquette by the late Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez, whose model cities, assembled from paper, glue, foam board, and other humble materials, express unfettered optimism about Africa’s future. His Kinshasa: Project for the Third Millennium (1997) transforms that once war-torn capital into a utopian paradise of urban planning.
Around the theme of “nature,” I was transfixed by a series of highly detailed, black-and-white, ink and ballpoint pen drawings by more than a dozen indigenous artists living in the Gran Chaco region of northern Paraguay, an area subject to extreme deforestation. Like messages in a bottle thrown by environmental castaways, the drawings bear witness to a rich diversity of plant and animal life, delicately cohabitating with humans and now threatened with extinction.
While gazing at these drawings, I seemed to hear birds chirping. The chirps were emerging from a nearby, site-specific installation: a long, dark corridor filled with polyphonic sounds of nature. This collaboration, between the bioacoustician Bernie Krause and Soundwalk Collective, draws on the archive of field recordings that Krause has assembled over the course of 50 years in forests around the world. Many of these wild voices, a wall text informed me, have since fallen silent, their forest’s music irrevocably altered by human activity.
Other works in this section—a monumental “woven wall” by the pioneering Columbian textile artist Olga de Amaral, or a 29-foot-high “tree” by Brazilian artist Solange Pessoa, its vast canopy composed of thousands of bird feathers—added to my sense of uncanniness and wonder.
Downstairs, a more mournful tone was struck by the late philosopher Paul Virilio, whose voice boomed, Cassandra-like, from a mesmerizing short video shot in 2009, in which he prophesied the start of a “century of mass migrations.” The video introduces “Exit,” an immersive installation by the architectural team Diller Scofidio + Renfro with multiple researchers, in which data about migrants compelled to leave their home countries by climate change or by political conflict, or tables charting the risks to both endangered languages and biodiversity, are mapped and projected onto the walls of a circular room.
The work was brainy, heady, and unnerving. It was a relief to find, nearby, imaginary refuge from 21st-century disasters in a sculpture by the late Belgian artist Panamarenko (a pseudonym for Henri Van Herwegen): a life-size, working submarine, created with do-it-yourself, patched-together engineering. This fantastic vessel, which seems to have emerged from a novel by Jules Verne or The Adventures of Tintin, appeared cozily outfitted for survival in the ocean’s depths, or any number of adverse conditions.
What is an art institution, after all, but a fragile vessel in which to navigate the choppy waters of life and society today? With the Centre Georges Pompidou—the major public museum in Paris dedicated to contemporary art—currently closed for a five-year renovation, the Fondation Cartier has taken up this challenge. I plan to keep climbing aboard for what I hope will be a wild ride.