In the Palais de l’Élysée, the 300-year-old palace that is the official residence and office of the president of France, a conceptual work of art by the artist Benoît Pype is a recent addition to more than 5,000 arts décoratifs, 500 works of art, and 100 clocks from the collections of the Mobilier National. In one of the 365 gilded rooms once home to Madame de Pompadour, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Charles de Gaulle before Emmanuel Macron, Pype’s Le Sablier Millénaire (Millenium Hourglass) proposes a much longer potential history.

The hourglass is made from hand blown glass and filled with coal-tar pitch which is nearly—but not completely—solid. One drop will form and detach every decade, on average, taking 1,000 years to empty the hourglass. Pype notes that the material’s viscosity is sensitive to temperature, so global warming could accelerate its flow, perhaps transforming this object for measuring a millennium into an environmental countdown.

Le Sablier Millénaire is on loan from the Fondation Carmignac to the Palais de l’Élysée, under the aegis of the Mobilier National, for a period of 1,000 years. It is accompanied by a notebook in which each president will write a message to be revealed in the year 3,000.

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The art world’s newest biennale is also the smallest. On an uninhabited Caribbean island, works by 14 artists comprise In a Land of, the inaugural edition of the Biennale de La Biche.

La Biche is a tiny islet off the coast of Guadeloupe, an overseas department of France. On the north side of Guadeloupe, a broad lagoon forms the Grand Cul-de-sac Marin nature reserve and contains a number of islets marked by mangroves. Among them, La Biche actually has no land above water, but is home to a deserted wooden shack.

For now, the tiny island and its shack are also home to an exhibition of works by 14 artists. The Biennale de La Biche indicates with its title, In a Land of, its geographic isolation as well as its distance from the systems of the art world with 150 other biennales. It opened on January 6 without a press preview, private opening, or even an end date. The works are expected to stay and decay on the island, and it is unlikely that many visitors will see them in the meantime.

The founders and curators of the Biennale de La Biche are Alex Urso and Maess Anand, artists who both live and work in Warsaw. They enlisted 12 artists, in addition to themselves, to create works that respond to the transience of time and impermanence of the environment. Eight of the artists are Polish, and others are Finnish, French, Icelandic, and Italian. It’s broad representation on an island that is measured in meters and has a population of zero.

“Ilet La Biche is a place bound to disappear. Gradually submerging under the sea level, the island… is destined to become a memory of itself….
Inundated with water, by rain, ruined by time, each artwork will have a beginning, and an imperceptible ending. Within a few weeks, only a vestige of the works will most likely remain.”

It is unknown whether there will be a second edition of the biennale, due to the island’s slow but certain disappearance due to rising sea levels. Each of the art world’s biennales have some appeal, but none of them are more exclusive than the Biennale de La Biche.

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Five years after Maurizio Cattelan announced his retirement, following a 2011 retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York, a new exhibition at the Monnaie de Paris marks his return to the art world. Not Afraid of Love includes 44 artworks installed within the Monnaie’s 18th century salons and is Cattelan’s largest exhibition in Europe to date.

The Italian artist is known for incredibly realistic sculptures that are clever, satirical, and often irreverent. A primary example is La Nona Ora, a life-sized effigy of Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteor. The work has inspired controversy since it was first exhibited in 1999 at the Kunsthalle Basel, and is no less provocative today.

The current exhibition takes its title, Not Afraid of Love, from an elephant draped in a white cloth – a literal elephant in the room. Other works include Untitled, a resin and wax version of Cattelan that peeks out from a hole in the floor; All, an installation of nine draped bodies sculpted from Carrara marble; and Him, a diminutive and penitent-looking Adolf Hitler. Many of the installations are witty, but not superficial, with subversive and multiple potent social narratives.

“Humor is a way of communicating to overcome the barrier of shyness. It is a smoke signal to convey an important message that would actually be less effective if I expressed it literally. Irony often conceals a dramatic moment.”

Cattelan’s period of retirement ended in early 2016 with a site-specific work, America, at the Guggenheim. For what the museum calls a “participatory” and “ongoing project,” Cattelan replaced the toilet in a fourth floor restroom with a fully functioning version cast in 18-karat gold. It’s completely absurd, and it’s also a brilliant reference to the current state of politics, economics, and the excesses of the art world.

The aesthetics of Not Afraid of Love benefit from the Neoclassical architecture of the Monnaie de Paris, and the works develop other narratives, perhaps, within a currency-producing national mint. The exhibition opened on October 21 and continues through January 8, 2017.

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Each summer since 2008, the Château de Versailles presents a contemporary monographic exhibition by a guest artist. For the ninth edition in 2016, Ólafur Elíasson has installed a series of site-specific works – three in the gardens and six inside the palace – to produce new perceptions of the iconic site.

The grandeur of Versailles, with interiors by Charles Le Brun and gardens by André Le Nôtre, cannot be overstated. Louis XIII had constructed it as a lodge in 1623, and Louis XIV expanded it into a palace, moving the royal court there in 1682. Versailles was the seat of political power in France and a gilded symbol of the Ancien Régime and royal absolutism until 1789 when Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were forced by the Revolution to return to Paris. With its wealth of history and classical French art, the Château de Versailles remains an unmatched representation of sovereignty and patrimony.

With his installations at Versailles, Ólafur Elíasson directs visitors to have an experience that is separate from the site’s grand narratives:

“Historically, the royal court at Versailles was a place of constant observation – of oneself and of others; the strict social norms of the time were enforced through a web of gazes. The Baroque architecture of the palace served to heighten visibility, becoming a stunning instrument of power held exclusively by the king…. The Versailles that I have been dreaming up is a place that empowers everyone. It invites visitors to take control of the authorship of their experience instead of simply consuming and being dazzled by the grandeur. It asks them to exercise their senses, to embrace the unexpected, to drift through the gardens, and to feel the landscape take shape through their movement.”

The most visible of Elíasson’s interventions is Waterfall, a 40-meter cascade of water in the Grand Canal. Apparently Le Nôtre had plans for a waterfall that was never realized. Behind the Bassin d’Apollon, Elíasson’s Waterfall is visible from the palace and from a great distance beyond. Its incredible height is calculated so that on the summer solstice, June 21, it will obscure the sun from some viewpoints.

In the Bosquet de la Colonnade, Elíasson has covered the ground with 150 tons of glacial rock from Greenland for Glacial Rock Flour Garden. The powdered granite results from glacial erosion, and appears foreign in contrast with the surrounding colonnade of marble columns and a 17^th century sculpture of Persephone. The material may provide an extension of Elíasson’s 2015 Ice Watch installation, which melted glacial ice in Paris during the UN Climate Summit.

The Bosquet de l’Étoile contains water in another state: fog. Elíasson’s Fog Assembly emits fine mist that fills the grove with clouds. Naturally, the effects will change with weather conditions. Taken together, these three outdoor installations form a triptych on the theme of water.

Inside the palace, Elíasson’s installations of mirrors and lights are restrained within the ornate interiors. At the end of the Galerie des Glaces, Your Sense of Unity is an illuminated circle on the third side of a triangular vertical mirror, creating endless reflections in the famous Hall of Mirrors.

In the Salon de l’Œil de Bœuf, dual installations of Deep Mirror (Yellow) and Deep Mirror (Black) form the shape of a solar eclipse just outside the Sun King’s bedchamber. This symbol of Louis XIV is combined with the visitor’s own reflection, again repeated in other mirrors.

The Curious Museum, in the Salon d’Hercule, creates a trompe l’oeil with mirrors outside the palace’s windows. The viewer’s gaze out is reflected back in, confounded by the additional reflections of the exterior façade and the dramatic figures of an 18^th century allegorical painting inside.

Ólafur Elíasson opened at the Château de Versailles on June 7 and continues through October 30, 2016.

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In Paris, the iconic pyramid that serves as the main entrance to the Musée du Louvre seems to have temporarily disappeared. The illusion is the result of an anamorphic installation by the street artist JR.

JR is a French photographer and graffiti artist known for large photo installations in public places, typically as a form of activism or social critique. His Portrait of a Generation project documented residents of Paris suburbs during the 2005 riots. The first exhibition was illegally flyposted, but was later made official with an installation at Paris’ Hôtel de Ville. Subsequently, JR has developed several ongoing projects and dozens of international exhibitions.

At the Louvre, JR continues Unframed, a project that reinterprets archival images expanded onto buildings. He has covered the west side of the Pyramide du Louvre with a historical image of the Pavilion Sully behind it. From a viewpoint in the Cour Napoléon, the image covering the 70-foot pyramid aligns into an anamorphosis – a distortion of perspective – so that the pyramid disappears against the historic façade. The clever intervention may reignite a perennial debate on modernism and architecture in Paris.

The metal and glass pyramid became the main entrance to the museum in 1989 as part of a massive project, commissioned by François Mitterrand and designed by I.M. Pei, to renovate the Louvre and expand its capacity. The pyramid was incredibly controversial at the time, inspiring every kind of criticism before it was even built. A 1985 article in the New York Times labeled it “an architectural joke, an eyesore, an anachronistic intrusion of Egyptian death symbolism in the middle of Paris, and a megalomaniacal folly.” Ouch. It has, however, become one of the city’s most photographed monuments. Le Figaro reports that it is the Louvre’s third most popular work after the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo.

This is the first of JR’s public projects without portraits, but it does not preclude the interaction of people. In order to photograph the pyramid, or the illusion of no pyramid, visitors must observe and move around it. A particular spot in the Cour Napoléon now replicates the Salle des États, where selfie-taking tourists crowd to photograph the Louvre’s most popular artwork. This an active and participatory experience, or at least the Instagram hit of the summer.

JR au Louvre opened on May 25 and continues through June 27, 2016.

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Yoko Ono: Lumière de L’aube opens this week at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon. The exhibition follows One Woman Show at MoMA in New York, and is Yoko Ono’s first retrospective in France.

Ono was a significant influence on the Fluxus movement in the 1960s, and her work includes films, installations, performances, instruction-based texts, and participatory installations. Notwithstanding her international reputation, large exhibitions of Yoko Ono’s work were relatively infrequent until the last decade. Ono’s late husband, John Lennon, said that she is “the world’s most famous unknown artist: everyone knows her name, but no one knows what she actually does.”

MAC Lyon has a notable history of early solo exhibitions; Keith Haring, Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari, Cai Guo-Qiang, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Marina Abramović and Ulay are just a partial list. The museum’s Renzo Piano-designed building functions perfectly for its avant-garde exhibitions program. It presents a Neoclassical façade towards Lyon’s great Parc de la Tête d’Or, but otherwise fits neatly into Piano’s modern Cité Internationale. Inside, MAC features a changeable wall system that can accommodate any possible gallery configuration with 2,800 square meters across three floors.

For Lumière de l’Aube (Light of the Dawn), MAC has devoted the entire building to more than 100 works by Yoko Ono that span from 1952 to 2016. The title may seem generic, but in Lyon is specific as a reference to the Lumière Brothers, the city’s history, and perhaps the development of new artistic mediums.

The exhibition features an entire section of Ono’s conceptual “instruction paintings,” which include simple instructions for action to be taken by the reader. Painting to Be Stepped On, for example, becomes a completed artwork only after it is covered with footprints. These works can only be realized with participation from people other than the artist. They can be performed by different people in different ways, and are always transformed with the passage of time.

In addition to the instruction pieces, there are large sections for music, text works, peaceful activities, and interaction. WAR IS OVER!, Bed-In for Peace, and Wish Tree are highlights of the latter two sections and of Yoko Ono’s work as a peace activist. Wish Tree, in particular, is participatory beyond this exhibition as an ongoing installation and series since 1996.

“Make a wish. Write it down on a piece of paper. Fold it and tie it around a branch of a Wish Tree. Ask your friends to do the same. Keep wishing. Until the branches are covered with wishes.”

Wishes are collected and buried at the base of the Imagine Peace Tower on Viðey Island near Reykjavik, Iceland, and may also be mailed. At MAC Lyon, visitors are encouraged to create their own Wish Trees and share them online with #WishTrees and #YokoOnoLyon.

Yoko Ono: Lumière de L’aube opens on March 9 and continues through July 17, 2016.

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At the Place du Panthéon in Paris, twelve enormous blocks of ice are melting as world leaders are gathered nearby at Le Bourget for the UN Climate Summit. The ice is an installation by the Danish-Icelandic artist Ólafur Elíasson, whose work frequently joins nature and public installations to affect perceptions of the environment.

Ice Watch is composed of twelve blocks of ice, weighing 80 metric tons, arranged in a clock formation. The ice will melt away in the coming days, providing a glimpse of the effects of climate change. The neoclassical façade of the Panthéon provides a grand setting and perhaps some allegory. The installation opened on December 3 and is expected to melt by the conclusion of the Climate Summit on December 11.

The ice blocks were harvested from free-floating icebergs in the Nuup Kangerlua fjord near Nuuk, Greenland. They had already been lost from the Greenland ice sheet, which loses the equivalent of 1,000 such blocks of ice every second. That’s about 300 billion metric tons each year, so while Ice Watch is overt, it is also immensely understated.

Elíasson developed the project in collaboration with Minik Thorleif Rosing, Professor of Geology at the Natural History Museum of Denmark. Ice Watch is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, realized in partnership the creative sustainability charity Julie’s Bicycle, and is a core project of the Artists4ParisClimate2015 initiative which includes works by other major artists including Edward Burtynsky, Vera Lutter, Ernesto Neto, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Taryn Simon.

Follow the project with Studio Ólafur Elíasson at Ice Watch Paris.

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La Biennale de Lyon was launched in 1991 and has become one of the largest contemporary art events in the world, with greater attendance and broader representation than Manifesta and the Whitney Biennal. For its 13th edition in 2015, the Biennale de Lyon brings together 60 artists from 28 countries to explore the theme of La Vie Moderne.

The biennale was co-founded and is overseen by Thierry Raspail as Artistic Director. Raspail is also the Director of the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon (MAC Lyon) – a position he has held since the museum’s creation in 1984. The guest curator for the biennale’s 13th edition is Ralph Rugoff, the Director of London’s Hayward Gallery.

The Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon is the biennale’s primary site with installations by 34 artists on all three levels. The museum building was designed by Renzo Piano with the Cité Internationale and was inaugurated in 1995 during the 3rd Biennale de Lyon. MAC Lyon has a notable history of early exhibitions for a panoply of major contemporary artists.

Side note: We saw Keith Haring here in 2008 before hipsters wore Keith Haring t-shirts, and we’re excited for Lumière in 2016 – Yoko Ono’s first retrospective in France, closely following MoMA’s 2015 exhibition.

In addition to MAC Lyon, the biennale has four other exhibition sites in Lyon. There is a sculpture at Parc de la Tête d’Or and a video installation at l’Institut Lumière in Monplaisir. There are 35 artists at La Sucrière, a former sugar factory in the redeveloped southern quarter of Presqu’île. Nearby, there’s an installation at the new Musée des Confluences.

At MAC Lyon, T.J. Wilcox’s In the Air is a panoramic film installation made in 2013 in New York. Interestingly, it is not very far from the reproduction of a 1901 Photorama at the Musée Lumière. Wilcox’s contemporary view of Manhattan is separated from Louis Lumière’s panorama of the port of Marseille by an ocean and a century, but each represent a version of La Vie Moderne with particular technology and urban views.

At La Sucrière, Hicham Berrada’s Mesk-ellil is a dark, humid garden planted with night-blooming jasmine. The installation reverses the plant’s day/night cycle with artificial daylight at night and artificial twilight during the day. The mesk-ellil, “musk of the night” in Arabic, releases perfume during the day for a sensory experience that inverts a natural system.

Magdi Mostafa’s The Surface of Spectral Scattering provides an aerial night view of Cairo with 10,000 LED bulbs, 23,000 connections, and 15 power centers that react to sound waves on the periphery of the installation, visualizing globalization across the ancient metropolis.

La Vie Moderne is a relatively ambiguous title, but becomes a multifarious theme for a biennale with artists from 28 countries. Narratives expand from divergent concerns of everyday life, and La Vie Moderne brings them together into a larger, contemporary global culture. The Biennale de Lyon opened on September 10 and continues to January 3, 2016.

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Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners has been selected to construct a new storage and conservation center for the Musée du Louvre. The new facilities will be located in Liévin, 200 kilometers north of Paris near the Louvre-Lens. The center is expected to open in 2018, and moving the collections will take until 2023.

Collections at Risk

The Musée du Louvre has perhaps the world’s greatest collection, with 460,000 objects dated from 4,000 BC to 1838. Some 35,000 artworks are on display in the museum. The rest are stored in underground facilities which were built with the 1980s Grand Louvre project, and in off-site facilities which are not very accessible and which cost the museum at least €3 million annually to rent.

The 250,000 objects stored under the Louvre are increasingly at risk of a flood from the Seine. The river overflowed five times in the 20^th century, including the catastrophic flood of 1910. In 2003, a flood alert preempted the Louvre and other museums to move 100,000 artworks out of Paris – the largest relocation of art since World War II.

In 2008, the French Ministry of Culture proposed a new national center for conservation, restoration, and research with storage facilities for the Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, and Musée du Quai Branly. The project was planned for a site in Cergy-Pontoise, 30 kilometers northwest of Paris, but it never developed. In 2013, the Louvre launched a new proposal for facilities in Liévin, near the Louvre-Lens.

Regional Funding for the Liévin Site

The Louvre-Lens opened in 2012 (after the Centre Pompidou-Metz in 2010) with an initiative to decentralize French national cultural institutions beyond Paris. Lens was selected because it has quick TGV connections to Paris, Brussels, and London, and because the Nord-Pas-de-Calais regional government provided half the project’s €150 million budget in order to transform the former mining town into a cultural destination.

After the Louvre-Lens had 900,000 visitors in its first year, Nord-Pas-de-Calais is ready to expand its investment with the Louvre by providing 49 percent of the €60 million budget for the storage facilities in Liévin. The remaining 51 percent will be funded by Agence France-Muséums with the Louvre’s contract for the forthcoming museum in Abu Dhabi.

Opposition to the Move

The site in Liévin has support from the Ministry of Culture and both the former and current presidents of the Louvre, but otherwise there is great contention about its distance from Paris. A two-hour ride on the TGV (four hours roundtrip) will be prohibitive if not impossible for curators and researchers who assert that the museum’s scholarship and research activities will be paralyzed by the move. The art will have to travel 200 kilometers as well, by truck, which introduces costs and risks other than floods.

In October, 42 of the Louvre’s 45 curators signed a letter urging the Ministry of Culture and the museum’s president to reconsider the project. In February, 13 former curators and department heads appealed to the president of France with a letter that gained 3,000 signatures. The opposition has been well documented by La Tribune de l’Art.

RSHP Design

The project is moving forward, however, and a design was announced this month. Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners is the London-based firm founded by Richard Rogers, who designed with Renzo Piano and Gianfranco Franchini, Paris’ landmark Centre Pompidou. For the 20,000-square-meter facility in Liévin, RSHP have designed one of Europe’s largest facilities for study and research within a budget of €60 million.

The new Centre de Reserves du Musée du Louvre will be set into the natural environment, with a green landscaped roof and a glazed façade. The storage facilities, which will accommodate 250,000 artworks, will span a series of vaults across one floor. Research facilities and public spaces will face out onto the landscape to permit natural light.

RSHP will work in partnership with the landscape firm Mutabilis Paysage, technical consultants Egis Bâtiments Nord, environmental consultants Inddigo, and economists VPEAS. Construction is set to begin in 2017 and the facility will begin to receive art in late 2018.

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From June 9 through November 1, the Château de Versailles presents an exhibition of sculptural works by Anish Kapoor. It is the eighth exhibition of contemporary works at Versailles since 2008, and coincides with the tercentenary of the death of Louis XIV.

Anish Kapoor is known popularly for Cloud Gate, the 66-foot tall stainless steel sculpture that is emblematic of Chicago’s Millennium Park. In London’s Olympic Park, his 376-foot ArcelorMittal Orbit is Britain’s largest public artwork. He has been honored with the Turner Prize and with knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II. At the 300^th anniversary of the death of Louis XIV, Versailles has selected Kapoor to install works throughout the André Le Nôtre-designed gardens and the Royal Tennis Court.

Kapoor is the first contemporary artist to install a large work in the Jeu de Paume, where Shooting into the Corner has violently discharged red wax cannon shots. Kapoor described to Julia Kristeva of artpress that, “The gun and the corner are two unavoidable sides of the same equation. They need each other. Like the state and the citizen.” The Tennis Court Oath, which formed the National Assembly and gave birth to the Republic, was signed at the Jeu de Paume on June 20, 1789. Here, the installation is a site-specific narrative on the French Revolution.

In alignment with the Grand Canal and behind the recently restored Latona fountain, Dirty Corner is a 197-foot long tunnel of rusted Corten steel, surrounded by boulders and a red-painted ditch. It may suggest a battle site, especially after the scene in the Jeu de Paume, and the press offers more interpretations. Le Figaro describes the work as a contemporary romantic ruin, and BBC News is certain that it looks like a vagina.

Beyond the Apollo fountain and just before the Grand Canal, Descension opens a giant black whirlpool into the ground. It is nearly 30 feet in diameter, and the unseen turbine that swirls and churns the dark water produces a constant and ominous roar.

Sky Mirror is installed between the Latona fountain and the palace. The double-convex mirrors invert views of the sky above with upside-down views of the palace and Le Nôtre’s perfect gardens.

Between the palace and parterre, flanked by classical bronze statues of Antinous and Apollo, C-Curve inverts views of the palace and the viewers.

In the Bosquet de l’Etoile, adjacent to the Bosquet du Théâtre d’Eau, Sectional Body preparing for Monadic Singularity is a 23-foot tall black and red cube, pierced with wormhole pathways into its interior. Visitors who walk inside will experience a saturated interior that is reminiscent of Kapoor’s Leviathan at Monumenta in 2011.

Several of these works are re-appropriated at Versailles: Descension was first installed at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India earlier this year; Dirty Corner at the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan in 2011; Shooting into the Corner at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2009; C-Curve at Kensington Gardens in London in 2007; and the first of several versions of Sky Mirror was commissioned for the Nottingham Playhouse in England.

Anish Kapoor is the eighth contemporary artist to receive an exhibition at Versailles. The first was Jeff Koons in 2008, followed by Xavier Veilhan, Takashi Murakami, Bernar Venet, Joana Vasconcelos, Giuseppe Penone, and Lee Ufan. Anish Kapoor is the third artist selected by Catherine Pégard, President of Versailles since 2011, continuing a curatorial program of contemporary art in dialogue with the historical estate. Perhaps more than others, Kapoor disrupts the order and symmetry of Le Nôtre’s gardens.

In addition to Kapoor’s installations, the Château de Versailles has a full program this summer of festivals, concerts, fountain shows, and performances in celebration of Louis XIV. The most notable events will be the Grand Bal Masqué and a series of Grandes Eaux. On June 27, the Orangerie will host The Sun King Ball – a grand masked ball, designed on the theme of the Sun King, from 11:30 until sunrise. Each Saturday from June 20 to September 19, the gardens, groves, and fountains will be transformed with light installations and water shows that culminate with grand fireworks displays over the Grand Canal.

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The Centre Pompidou, France’s national museum of modern art, has opened a satellite location in Málaga, Spain. It is the museum’s first location outside of France, and it opened in the same week as an outpost of the State Russian Museum in Málaga. Together, the two satellite museums are expected to attract 400,000 visitors to the Andalusian city that has become established as a cultural destination.

Málaga is a coastal city of about 570,000 and is popularly known as the birthplace of Pablo Picasso. The city has about 30 museums including the Museo Picasso, which has a collection of 285 works from the artist’s family, and the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo (CAC), a contemporary kunsthalle museum, which both opened in 2003. The Museo Carmen Thyssen, a private collection of 19^th century Spanish paintings that was previously in Madrid’s Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, opened in 2011.

Francisco de la Torre, Málaga’s mayor since 2000, is credited for much of the city’s cultural expansion. Notwithstanding a debt of €600 million, Málaga has invested €100 million in arts and cultural developments in the past decade. The city has budgeted €4.2 million for the Pompidou this year, including an initial fee of €2.1 million and operational support that will total €5 million over a five-year term. The budget for the Russian museum, which has a ten-year agreement, is €3.7 million, including €500,000 for building renovations and €400,000 for exhibitions.

The Centre Pompidou Málaga is in a retrofitted building known as El Cubo. The harbor-front site was commissioned by the city and designed by the Spanish firm L35 as a commercial and cultural center. The project was completed in 2013, and a €6.7 million renovation converted it into 6,000 square meters of gallery space for the Pompidou with a large cube-shaped skylight as its most recognizable feature.

The State Russian Museum is in a 1927 building that was originally a tobacco factory. Part of the old factory became an automobile museum in 2010, and another 2,300 square meters will host exhibitions loaned from St. Petersburg for the next decade.

The CAC is similarly in a 1939 industrial building that has been repurposed. The Museo Picasso and the Museo Carmen Thyssen are each in palaces that date to the 16^th century. Málaga’s new museums in historic buildings are a notable contrast to Bilbao’s Guggenheim.

The Centre Pompidou Málaga is only the most recent development of the museum beyond Paris under initiatives to decentralize the national collections. Under the leadership of Alain Seban, whose term as President ended this month, the Pompidou launched a program of temporary museums to show its collection of more than 100,000 works.

The museum opened its first satellite in Metz, about 170 miles east of Paris, in 2010 with a €69 million building designed by Shigeru Ban.

From 2011 to 2013, the Pompidou hosted pop-up museums in six French cities that were attended by more than 275,000 visitors. Libourne, which hosted a pop-up in 2011, and Maubeuge, near the Belgian border, have each submitted proposals for satellite museums. Speculation about additional venues indicates Mexico and Brazil as frontrunners, but it is unknown whether Seban’s successor, Serge Lasvignes, will continue the Pompidou’s expansion concept.

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The Comité Colbert is an association of 78 luxury brands and 14 cultural institutions to promote the concept of luxury and the French art de vivre. The group was founded in 1954 and named for Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the politician who introduced economic reform under the rule of King Louis XIV and was a significant patron of literature and the arts.

The group is exclusive, with members from twelve métiers selected on criteria of international ambition and strong cultural identity, high quality standards, creativity, imagination, and ethical conduct. Members support research, education, and cultural projects with a tenet that the luxury industry is reciprocal to creativity, innovation, and national heritage.

This fall, a social campaign began with French luxury houses and cultural institutions posting cryptic messages with the hashtag #Rever2074. They also posted lexical videos with a countdown directing viewers to a website. On November 4, it was revealed that the Comité Colbert had designed the mysterious campaign to unveil a collective work entitled Rêver 2074, “Dreaming 2074: A Utopia Created by French Luxury.”

For its 60^th anniversary in 2014, the Comité Colbert had commissioned its member organizations to express a dream of the future with a short text, an image, and five words. The submissions were refined by science-fiction authors and a composer into a collective text, which imagines a utopian future of French luxury in 2074. It is fantastic and conceptual, beautifully promoting creativity and refinement. The future of luxury, dreamed by the Comité Colbert, is concerned with aesthetics as well as a manner of being. It is, bien sûr, very French!

Download Dreaming 2074 at www.dreaming2074.com

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On October 27, the new museum building for the Fondation Louis Vuitton will open in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. It was designed by the Los Angeles-based starchitect Frank Gehry with the patronage of the French businessman Bernard Arnault.

Bernard Arnault is the billionaire chairman and chief executive of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the largest luxury conglomerate in the world with brands including Louis Vuitton, Dior, Fendi, Givenchy, and Dom Pérignon. He is also a major art collector with a collection including works by Monet, Picasso, Henry Moore, and Yves Klein.

Arnault selected Frank Gehry to design his museum after a visit to Gehry’s best-known project, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which is archetypal of his deconstructivist style with striking (but functionless) exterior forms wrapped in metal. Other major projects by Ghery include the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and the forthcoming Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

For the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Gehry designed an assemblage of blocks, described as icebergs, surrounded by immense glass panels described as sails. The white iceberg blocks are clad in 19,000 individual panels of fiber-reinforced concrete, and twelve sails, on a frame of steel and wood beams, are comprised of 3,600 individual panels of glass. The building totals 126,000 square feet, containing eleven galleries, an auditorium, restaurant, and bookstore.

Construction began in 2008 and it is reported that costs have exceeded $135 million. The building has achieved a Haute Qualité Environmentale (HQE) certification of Très Performant, which is considered equivalent to LEED Gold. The ground-level entrance hall opens onto a water garden in the Jardin d’Acclimatation to create an active social space in the transition between the building and the landscape.

The building’s position in the Bois de Boulogne is noteworthy. At the western edge of the posh 16^th arrondissement of Paris, the Bois de Boulogne is the city’s second-largest public park and borders the Seine between central Paris and La Défense. Above the treetops, the Fondation gains views onto the city beyond. From afar, the shimmering glass building appears as an oversized and abstracted orangerie. The site remains a public park, and the Fondation has been granted a 55-year lease so that the building will revert to public ownership in 2062.

The museum’s first exhibitions will be announced only a few days in advance of the opening, but some speculations are on installations by Olafur Eliasson, Taryn Simon, and Sarah Morris. The Fondation’s permanent collection includes works by all three, and many others including Francis Bacon, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, and Richard Serra.

The museum for the Fondation Louis Vuitton is an expansion of LVMH and Arnault’s cultural patronage, which includes the Open Days initiative in which luxury brands open their ateliers to the public; the LVMH Young Fashion Designer Prize; a series of internships and degree programs with professional schools that aim to cultivate a new generation of designers and craftspeople; and a range of commissions and sponsorships. Much of this follows a philosophy that luxury brands, with an association of heritage and tradition, can ennoble themselves by supporting arts and culture.

Learn more at http://www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr/

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In Boulogne-Billancourt, a western suburb of Paris, an island in the Seine is being developed into an “artistic micro-city” designed by Jean Nouvel. The project for Île Seguin will create artists’ studios, commercial gallery and auction spaces, an exhibition hall, and a conference center to transform the island into a modern cultural hub.

Île Seguin has a long and varied history. It was owned by the Abbey of St. Victor from the mid-12th century, and a bridge across the island linked the primary route between Paris and Versailles in the 17th century when it was known as the Île de Sève. Louix XV acquired it in the 18th century, and it fell under state ownership after the revolution. The island was acquired by Armand Seguin, the eponymous industrialist, in 1794, and by Louis Renault in 1919. Renault built France’s largest factory there, employing more than 30,000 people, and Île Seguin produced cars until the great but antiquated factory closed in 1992. The buildings were razed by 2005, and the island in the Seine became an industrial wasteland.

In 2001, Tadao Ando was selected to design a museum for the Francois Pinault Foundation on Île Seguin. The project was abandoned, and Ando renovated the Punta della Dogana in Venice for the Pinault collection.

In 2011, the municipality of Boulogne-Billancourt launched a private cultural project with the Société Civile Immobilière R4 (SCI R4) to construct an artistic micro-city on Île Seguin as part of a larger urban development project, Trapèze. The Trapèze project, which extends onto the right bank of the Seine at Boulogne-Billancourt, aims to create an entire urban zone of mixed-use development centered on the cultural environment on Île Seguin. Jean Nouvel—the French architect whose projects include the Institut du Monde Arabe and Musée du quai Branly in Paris, and the forthcoming Louvre Abu Dhabi and National Museum of Qatar—was selected as the R4 project’s designer.

Also in 2011, the Fondation Cartier, the Paris-based contemporary art foundation, commissioned designs from Jean Nouvel for a new base on Île Seguin. In 2014, the Fondation announced that it would instead expand its current facilities on Boulevard Raspail, which Nouvel designed in 1994.

Notwithstanding the loss of the Fondation Cartier as an anchor institution, the R4 development will share Île Seguin with the Cité Musicale, a 36,000 square meter concert hall that will include facilities for the Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris. The hall was designed by Shigeru Ban, the Japanese architect whose projects include the Centre Pompidou-Metz and the very recently opened Aspen Art Museum. The Cité Musicale is backed by a partnership with the Hauts-de-Seine Conseil Général and is expected to open in 2016, with construction having already begun.

R4 is expected to open in late 2017 with more than 30,000 square meters of space to support a visual arts community. There will be dozens of artists’ studios and workshops, twenty commercial galleries, a multi-purpose exhibition hall, a conference center, auction salesrooms, and other spaces to create the infrastructure of an international cultural hub on Île Seguin. Further, R4 aims to develop teaching programs in partnership with universities, and the larger Trapèze development may include office towers, a hotel, and a center for cinema and digital arts.

In advance of construction, Boulogne-Billancourt and R4 have begun a program of cultural events to activate Île Seguin, attracting 500,000 visitors in three years. A temporary Pavillon sur l’île Seguin hosts exhibitions about the island’s evolution and a public garden was designed on the old Renault factory outlines. In 2012, Île Seguin was the site of an exhibition for FIAC, the Paris-based modern and contemporary art fair. The island has also hosted Cirque en Chantier and Cirque du Soleil, a performance by Bjork, and a video art festival.

While not publicly reported, the investment in R4 is estimated to be above €100 million. The project’s founder is the Swiss investor Yves Bouvier, whose company, Natural Le Coultre, specializes in the logistics and transport of art. He is also the founder and president of Singapore Freeport, a company that set up and manages the first Freeport in Asia, and a majority shareholder in freeports in Hong Kong and Luxembourg. The President of SCI R4, Nelly Wenger, is a civil engineer whose own company provides strategic management for urban and cultural development projects.

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This summer, André Le Nôtre’s 17^th-century Water Theater grove at Versailles has been restored by the landscape designer Louis Benech with contemporary sculptures by Jean-Michel Othoniel – the first new permanent artworks added the garden in over 300 years.

The Bosquet du Théâtre d’Eau, or Water Theater grove, was designed by André Le Nôtre and constructed between 1671 and 1674 during Louis XIV’s second building campaign of the gardens at the Château de Versailles. To the west of the Bosquet des Trois Fountaines, or Three Fountains grove, the Water Theater grove was originally one of the most complex and elaborate of the 15 groves in the gardens. It was enclosed by tree cover and trelliswork, designed as an outdoor salon and theater. Three tiers of grass formed an amphitheater facing a stage, which was surrounded by fountains and sculptures designed by Charles Le Brun.

The Water Theater was neglected through the 18^th century and in 1775, during the reign of Louis XVI, it was replaced with a simple lawn. The Bosquet du Rond-Vert, or Round Green grove, was damaged by storms in the 1990s and then closed to the public.

In 2003, Versailles began a major project to replant the park and trees on the perimeter of the Water Theater were replaced to match the earlier configuration. In 2011, Versailles launched an international competition to redesign the Water Theater. The commission was awarded to Louis Benech, a renowned landscape designer whose previous projects include a restoration of the Tuileries gardens in Paris. Benech’s plan for the four-acre Water Theater grove will restore much of Le Nôtre’s design, which included many multiples of the number three. The Water Theater will include three alleys, three round pools, 18 Irish yew trees, and 90 live oaks, with an inner square of 120 meters and an outer square of 180 meters. As intended by Le Nôtre, and to preserve views from the Palace, none of the trees will exceed 17 meters in height.

André Le Nôtre collaborated with then-contemporary artist Charles Le Brun to design sculptures for the 17^th-century Water Theater, and Louis Benech has commissioned three fountain sculptures by the contemporary French sculptor Jean-Michel Othoniel.  Othoniel is known for a pair of glass bead sculptures, Le Kiosque des Noctambules, that form cupolas above the Palais Royal – Musée du Louvre Métro station at Place Colette in Paris.

For Versailles, Othoniel’s sculptures are comprised of some 2,000 large glass spheres installed in the fountains and fitted with 17^th-century style water jets. The contemporary works, Les Belles Danses, are informed by the artist’s research of Louis XIV’s interest in dance. From a rare copy of L’Art de Décrire la Danse, a 1701 book of notations on baroque dances created for Louis XIV, Othoniel interpreted the form of his sculptures. He identified that the Sun King took his nickname, at age 14, after a ballet interpretation of Apollo. (The Bassin d’Apollon, or Apollo Fountain, forms a primary focal point before the garden’s Grand Canal). Gold glass spheres are another reference, and blue spheres will mark the locations of fountains in Le Nôtre’s original design. The blue glass is manufactured by a workshop in Murano, making a further historical connection with the Venetian glass in the Palace’s hall of mirrors.

Benech and Othoniel have made the contemporary installation with deference to the Water Theater’s history and a focus on restoration. The new project is entirely reversible and has preserved masonry and fountain hydraulics that exist on the site from Le Nôtre’s original construction. From September, the Water Theater grove will be open year-round to accommodate approximately six million annual visitors.

€1.4 million in project funding has been directed from a €5 million sponsorship from the late South Korean businessman Yoo Byung-eun, who was also a photographer known as Ahae and essentially rented the Orangerie for his 2013 exhibition, Fenêtre sur l’extraordinaire.

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