Cartier Has Opened A Museum-Scale Contemporary Art Foundation In The Heart Of Paris

Art Basel Paris, and the week around it, is a highlight of the city’s cultural calendar, playing host to a dizzying array of events and exhibition openings. This year, though, there was one opening that trumped them all – after all, we’re not talking merely about the opening of a show, rather an entire, museum-scale institution smack dab in the heart of Paris: the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain.

Occupying a zinc-roofed Haussmannian city block on Place du Palais Royal – a literal stone’s throw (even by the feeblest of shots) from the Louvre – the building has, in former lives, served as a stately department store (one that, famously, inspired Émile Zola to pen his fin-de-siecle masterpiece The Ladies’ Paradise) and a grand hotel. Its original purpose, though, invokes a poetic sense of kismet – it was first built in 1855 for the very first Exposition Universelle, a predecessor to today’s World Expos that “broadened the urban cultural field and heralded a new era for the circulation of knowledge”, a wall text in the sprawling space’s colonnade-fronted foyer reads.

Read more:https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/fondation-cartier-paris