Pinault’s Progress

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Robert Gober, "Untitled" (1991)

© Anselm Reyle

Anselm Reyle, "Harmony" (2006)

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Two years ago, 70-year-old, French luxury-goods magnate Francois Pinault—a self-made billionaire who owns the Gucci company and Christie’s auction house, and has built a $2 billion modern and contemporary art collection of some 2,000 blue-chip works—became fed up with years of bureaucratic entanglements over his plans to build a $200 million, Tadao Ando-designed museum on an island in the Seine, and shifted focus from France to Italy, acquiring Venice’s Palazzo Grassi. He purchased the 18th-century structure from the Fiat company reportedly for €29 million ($48 million), or roughly what he got from The Museum of Modern Art on the sale of Robert Rauschenberg’s 1955 piece Rebus last June. Ando quickly renovated the palazzo’s interior, and Pinault’s first exhibition in the new space—some 200 works from his collection—opened last May. Organized by 32-year-old Alison Gingeras, then an adjunct curator at the Guggenheim, it was a parade of Pop, post-Pop, and Minimalist masterworks by the likes of Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Jeff Koons, and Takashi Murakami, and was titled “Where Are We Going?” Given Pinault’s ambitions, that question had a coy rhetorical wink to it, as in: Where are we going? Straight to the top, of course.

Fast forward a year, and things are looking rosier than ever for Pinault. Last month he won a battle with the Guggenheim for the Punta della Dogana, a 38,000-square-foot, 17th-century customs house near the entrance to Venice’s Grand Canal. Both parties wanted to convert the space into a contemporary art museum, but Pinault, a private individual free of the hassles of boards and banks, was able to pony up the cash more quickly, and with greater assurance that the restoration of the building would come at zero cost to the city. His total bill, given the renovations (by Tadao Ando, of course) and operation costs over the course of his 30-year concession on the building, will come to some €85 million ($115 million). Having established “where are we going,” Pinault has now embarked on a series of shows for the Palazzo. Hence the exhibition that opened earlier this month, “Sequence I,” again curated by Gingeras, who now works for him full time. A follow-up, “Sequence II,” is already in the works, and in 2009, to coincide with the next Venice Biennale, he plans to swing open doors to the Punta della Dogana.

For a man who is rapidly conquering the Venice art world, Pinault is surprisingly shy of publicity. At the opening of “Sequence I”—at least the portions of it to which journalists were admitted—he was glimpsed only a few times. Much more visible were several artists in the exhibition, such as New Yorkers Kristin Baker and David Hammons. Venice Biennale directors past (Francesco Bonami) and present (Rob Storr) were also on hand. And everywhere at the various events were Gingeras and Pinault’s right-hand man, Palazzo Grassi director and former French minister of culture Jean-Jacques Aillagon. If Pinault is an elusive figure, Aillagon is a public one, and he moved through the crowded galleries with the social facility of a diplomat, then delivered an animated speech in Italian. To see him standing next to Gingeras on the show's opening day was to witness a study in contrasts, or, perhaps, the two sides of the Pinault art enterprise—the creative and the political. On the one hand, there was the petite Gingeras, with her floppy blonde hair, pixieish face, and shiny, flowing striped coat (it looked as though she’d draped herself in a painting by Daniel Buren, whose show she co-curated at the Guggenheim in spring 2005); and on the other hand, the regal Aillagon, in an impeccably tailored suit, equally impeccable coiffure, and a visage that wandered between expressions of concern and bemusement, depending on whether the topic of discussion happened to be weighty Pinault-related matters or Venice’s famous lagoon.

A fuller picture of Palazzo Grassi’s director emerged during a private audience in his office, an aerie on the Palazzo’s top floor, reachable via a back stairway redolent of court intrigue. Light flooded through clerestory-like windows, illuminating bookshelves and a few small drawings, one depicting Aillagon’s dog and another a whimsical sketch by video artist Bill Viola, with a personal inscription on the back.