Vuitton Plans a Gehry-Designed Arts Center in Paris NYTimes

Having grown rich by selling ephemeral new looks in fashion, the French luxury goods company LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton has now opted for a more permanent place in the art world by unveiling a striking design by Frank Gehry for a glass-covered complex housing a new cultural foundation in western Paris.

The plans, outlined at a news conference Monday, call for the building, whose cost is estimated at around $127 million, to open in late 2009 or early 2010. It will be on the northern edge of the Bois de Bologne in the popular children’s park known as the Jardin d’Acclimatation.

Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH, which includes Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior and Givenchy among its many brands, said the institution would be known as the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation. He described it as a logical follow-up to LVMH’s extensive sponsorship of the arts. “Its aim is to underline French creativity in the world,” he said.

He said the foundation would have a permanent collection formed from his own and LVMH’s art collections and would organize temporary exhibitions of the work of established and contemporary artists like Jean Dubuffet and Jean-Michel Basquiat or Francis Bacon and Damien Hirst. “We want to link timelessness and extreme modernity,” he said.

Suzanne Pagé, the outgoing director of the Musée d’Art Moderne of the City of Paris, has been named the foundation’s artistic director and will take charge of developing its program over the next three years.

With the foundation’s specific mission still uncertain, the immediate focus of attention was Mr. Gehry’s design, which, with its multifaceted deconstructed exterior, recalls his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and his Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. The big difference is that the new building will be covered in glass, not titanium.

“The project is a dream, so the idea is to create a dream,” Mr. Gehry, 77, said at a crowded news conference at LVMH’s plush headquarters on the Avenue Montaigne. “The idea is of a cloud made of glass. The French are famous for their work in glass, so that’s exciting. It’s difficult to achieve in architecture, but we’re getting there.”

“I want everything to look like my drawings,” he went on, waving toward large reproductions of seemingly chaotic pen drawings. “The model is not quite there. We’ve built 30 or 40 models, and the design is still evolving. It’s not going to look exactly like this, so forgive me: I want the lines to look like the sketch.”

From the outside, the present design resembles a large transparent insect crawling through the park. Solid gallery spaces can also be seen, floating almost like organs, inside the building. The complex will also have an underground auditorium and a glass-covered roof and restaurant.

If completed, the complex may help Mr. Gehry dispel unhappy memories of his first experience of building in Paris. In the early 1990’s, he designed a new American Center here, but the center was forced to close by financial difficulties in 1996. The building remained empty and abandoned until last year, when it became the French Cinémathèque.

Mr. Gehry’s new building may also allow Mr. Arnault to score a publicity coup against his luxury goods rival, François Pinault, the owner of Christie’s, Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and three chains of department and media stores. Last spring, after five years of wrestling with red tape, Mr. Pinault abandoned plans to build a $195 million museum for his contemporary art collection outside Paris and acquired the Palazzo Grassi in Venice instead.

Attempts by reporters to draw Mr. Arnault into commenting on Mr. Pinault’s setbacks in Paris were unsuccessful. “I think that any comparison with other initiatives is not pertinent,” he responded sharply. “I’ll leave it at that.”

What is no secret, however, is that while Mr. Arnault heads the world’s largest luxury goods group, Mr. Pinault has a far richer contemporary-art collection, one that he has been building steadily that and numbers more than 2,500 objects, with works by all the best-known artists of the last 40 years.

In contrast, according to Le Monde, Mr. Arnault began by buying a Monet in 1980 and has only recently turned his attention to modern and contemporary art. He has since reportedly acquired works by Yves Klein, Chris Burden, Takashi Murakami, Doug Aitken and Matthew Barney, among others. A large iron sculpture by Richard Serra also stands in the lobby of the LVMH headquarters here.

A no less important difference between the two men is that Mr. Arnault’s museum project seems likely to be realized. On Monday he was accompanied by France’s culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, and by the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, who both enthusiastically endorsed the new Louis Vuitton Foundation as well as Mr. Gehry’s design.

The Jardin d’Acclimatation is owned by the City of Paris, but LVMH has a 20-year concession to operate the children’s park, which continues through 2015 and gives it the option of developing the site for cultural purposes. The new complex, which will require the razing of an abandoned bowling alley, must still be approved by the Paris city council.