Fondation Cartier’s new home opens in Paris, in a prized spot facing the Louvre

Vivian Song

Paris, France (CNN) — After a years-long renovation project, the Fondation Cartier art museum will open its doors on Saturday to its new home, opposite the Louvre in Paris.

While little has changed externally, the stately 19th-century building, which was a former hotel and department store, has undergone a radical redesign within. The Haussmannian building has been transformed by Pritzker prize-winning architect Jean Nouvel, who describes his latest project as an “industrial cathedral” of modular spaces.

The dramatic 70,000-square-foot exhibition space features tall bay windows that create a sense of transparency, blurring the boundaries between the inside and outside world.

Pedestrians, bikers and the city’s traffic serve as complementary, theatrical background sets, while curious passersby can peek through the windows to catch glimpses of the artworks. High glass ceilings near the main entrance funnel in natural light.

Chris Dercon, the museum’s managing director, told CNN that the design “is a dialogue with the history and urban context of the city.”

But the most interesting design feature is no doubt the system of five steel, mobile platforms that can be raised and lowered in nearly a dozen ways to reconfigure the exhibition space, in order to “reinvent” the visitor experience.

“Nothing is permanent,” Mathieu Forest, director of production and architectural design at Ateliers Jean Nouvel studios, told journalists at Monday’s press preview.

“Not the floor, not the walls, not the ceiling…next time, maybe this platform will be higher or lower. You will have an entirely new perspective.”

Cables and pulleys have also been left deliberately exposed, he adds, as they are “live tools” for artists and curators.

The adjustable viewing platforms can also offer different perspectives – and experiences – of a single piece. Standing floor level and gazing head on at Colombian artist Olga de Amaral’s monumental textile work, “Muros en rojos,” reveals the fine details of the thousands of wool and horsehair mosaic-like strips.

Climbing up a few flights of stairs for a view from above and afar, however, changes the viewer’s relationship to the tapestry, as it becomes an autumnal, pixelated amber, red and burnt ochre backdrop that evokes the colors of Amaral’s native Bogota landscape.

“Contemporary art takes on extremely varied forms,” notes Emilie Besse, a French journalist who specializes in the intersection of art and luxury.

“And if we want to be able to present absolutely all forms of creative expression, you need a space that can adapt.”

The inaugural show “Exposition Générale,” is a nod to the building’s heritage as a former 19th century department store, the Grands Magasins du Louvre, which showcased the latest trends in fashion, technologies and household items in museum-like exhibits of the same name. Artworks, curated from the foundation’s existing collection, are categorized under four broad themes that explore architecture, the living world, techniques and materials, and the relationship between science and artistic creation.

Where the modular configuration may risk confusion, however, is in the absence of direction or clear signage that can help visitors make sense of the thematically grouped works.

Luxury brands’ influence on French art world

The innovative arts space, which cost more than an estimated 230 million euros ($267 million) to renovate, according to French media, follows in the foundation’s tradition of shaping the city’s the modern art scene.

When the museum first opened in 1984 in the Paris suburb of Jouy-en-Josas under the direction of Alain Dominique Perrin, it became the first corporate foundation in the country to promote contemporary art, paving the way for the likes of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, which opened in 2014, and the Bourse de Commerce, which houses the contemporary art collection of Kering founder François Pinault and opened in 2021.

“You have to understand that, unlike other countries, culture in France has been, for decades, and centuries even, something that was supported by the public sector and that belonged to the state,” explains Fabien Simode, president of the French chapter of the Association of International Art Critics.

“When Cartier arrived in the 1980s, they showed that another path was possible.”

While the relationship between luxury brands and cultural institutions is now firmly established in France, Besse acknowledges that it can still cause some discomfort among some critics.

Last year, when the Grand Palais, which has received tens of millions of euros in donations from Chanel, named one of its main entrance ways after the brand’s founder, Gabrielle Chanel, it raised concerns of commercial opportunism and appropriation of a heritage site, Besse said.

“But ultimately there are very strong affinities between luxury and art, as luxury brands have historically been houses of expertise and creation,” she adds. “So there’s a natural bridge between these two worlds.”

Public and private, luxury-branded institutions also have drastically different approaches that decrease the risk of overlap or competition, Simode points out. While public institutions can sometimes be scientific, encyclopedic, even cold in their faithfulness to detail, private institutions often have more freedom to take an aesthetic and dynamic approach, and have proven their legitimacy, Simode adds.

New visitors

For its opening exhibition the foundation has curated 600 works by 100 international artists including David Lynch, Patti Smith and Damien Hirst, to Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez and Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang.

For Jean-Christophe Castelain, director of the Le Journal des Arts, a bimonthly art publication, the Fondation Cartier’s strength is in scouting international, sometimes little known talents who fall somewhere between big commercial artists whose work appeals to the general public, such as Jeff Koons, and the more obscure, experimental artists who can be radically niche.

“The Fondation Cartier is somewhere in between, and that’s also what makes it so strong,” he says.

Castelain cites hyperrealist Australian sculptor Ron Mueck as an example of an artist who got a major boost from the foundation in France after becoming the first French institution to host a solo exhibition back in 2005, and then in 2013 and 2023.

Perhaps more than its initial programming, it’s the museum’s newly central location, increased space – five times the area of its former home – and proximity to the world’s most visited museum, the Louvre, that will attract new audiences, notably tourists.

Nouvel was also the architect behind the Fondation Cartier’s previous site, which opened in 1994 in a quieter neighborhood on the Left Bank.

“The foundation has been moving towards the center of Paris over the last 40 years,” says Simode, adding that the move is analogous to the city’s growing importance on the international art scene.

“Paris has returned to the center stage.”

“Exposition Générale” is on view until August 2026.

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