The Cartier jewellery house is a champion of les beaux arts with a foundation devoted to contemporary art based in a purpose-built glass and steel building on Paris’s Left Bank.
Now, though, Fondation Cartier hopes to expand its activities and raise its public profile by moving to a larger, 19th-century building opposite the Louvre.
Béatrice Grenier, the foundation’s director of curatorial affairs, said: “It’s not just a move, it’s a transformation into a different historical context.”
Muro en rojos, by Olga de Amaral, a key figure of the Colombian art scene
La Grande Vallée by Joan Mitchell
The new site, formerly known as the Louvre des antiquaire because it housed more than 200 antiques shops, has been redeveloped by Jean Nouvel, the internationally acclaimed French architect.
The site is five times bigger than the foundation’s previous building and is within walking distance of several other museums, including the Museum of Decorative Arts and the Pinault Collection at the Bourse de Commerce. The foundation hopes to triple the number of visitors to more than a million a year.
Nouvel, 80, has reimagined the interior of the historic listed building to be a fluid environment in which artists and curators are free to alter the exhibition spaces and experiment with different formats.
Jean Nouvel
LUC CASTEL/GETTY IMAGES
Chris Dercon, director of the Fondation Cartier, said: “We had a superb building but we were limited by space. I’m sure many people who visit the Louvre will now take the opportunity to come to the foundation.”
On Saturday, the inaugural show, Exposition Générale, will feature about 600 works including those by David Lynch, the filmmaker and artist, Patti Smith, the singer-songwriter and photographer, and Claudia Andujar, who chronicled the lives of the Yanomami people in the Amazon rainforest.
The show will also feature works by Olga de Amaral, the Colombian textile artist, paintings by Chéri Samba, the Congolese artist, and glass sculptures by Jean-Michel Othoniel, the French artist who designed the entrance of the Palais Royal-Musée du Louvre Métro station opposite the foundation’s building.
Fondation Cartier’s new headquarters in Paris
MARTIN ARGYROGLO
“Our approach is interdisciplinary, between design and architecture, between plastic arts and cinema,” Dercon told Le Monde. “We are committed to bringing this to the widest possible public. Exposition Générale will run until August 2026 but the works will be rotated in April. We will also be more ambitious in our educational programmes.”
The Fondation Cartier, established in 1984, began in Jouy-en-Josas, near Versailles, before moving to an ultra-modern glass and steel building designed by Nouvel in the Montparnasse district in 1994.