Art Collections Fight For Prime Gallery Site On The Grand Canal

The American Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which has a global network of galleries from New York to Bil-bao and Berlin, is competing with François Pinault, the French luxury-goods billion-aire, who has one of the world’s finest collections of modern art.

Both already have a foothold on the Grand Canal. The Peggy Guggenheim museum, a treasure trove of Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, is housed in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni. Last year Mr Pinault — frustrated at bureaucratic obstacles to his dream of a state-of-the-art gallery at the Île Seguin on the Seine near Paris — took over the Palazzo Grassi from the Agnelli family, the owners of Fiat, to show his collection of works by Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and Maurizio Cattelan, among others.

Both have their eye on the ultimate prize, the Punta della Dogana, a Renaissance customs warehouse on Dorsoduro island, adjoining the church of Santa Maria della Salute, across the water from St Mark’s Square and the Doge’s Palace.

Both have commissioned prominent architects — Tandao Ando of Japan for Mr Pinault and the Anglo-Iranian Zaha Hadid for the Guggenheim Foundation — to redesign the 2,500 sq m (3,000 sq yards) site.

A committee of experts advising Massimo Cacciari, the Mayor of Venice, ruled this week that it could not decide between the two. They were given equal points for design, management plans and “the richness and importance of their art collections”.

Achille Bonito Oliva, the art historian who is chairman of the committee, appealed to the two contenders to share the prize by collaborating. Both understood the idea of “marrying the contemporary to the historical past”, he said. The strength of the Guggenheim collection was in the period before the 1980s; the Pinault more recent, focusing on the period after 1980.

Jean Jacques Aillagon, a former French culture minister and director of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, who now runs the Palazzo Grassi for Mr Pinault, said that this was out of the question. There was not enough room, he said. The collection would need “three Punta della Doganas to show it all”.

A spokesman for Giancarlo Galan, president of the Veneto region, agreed that sharing was impossible. It was truly bizarre that the committee had found “not the slightest discrepancy” between the two schemes, he said. “It is back to square one,” the Corriere della Sera said.

Venice City Council said that it would seek mediation in an attempt to find common ground but Professor Bonito Oliva said that the tussle over the site was “not just an artistic or architectural issue but also a political one”.

Reports suggest that Mr Pinault is supported by Mr Cacciari, who is on the centre Left, whereas the Guggenheim Foundation has the backing of Mr Galan, who is on the centre Right.

Mr Pinault, one of France’s richest men and a close friend of President Chirac, owns Yves St Laurent, Gucci, Christie’s and the Printemps department stores.

Peggy (Marguerite) Guggenheim, the niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, lived a bohemian life in Paris in the 1920s. and opened her first art galleries in London and New York, acquiring works by Picasso, Max Ernst — to whom she was married briefly — Magritte, Man Ray, Dalm, Klee, Chagall and Jackson Pollock. After the Second World War she moved with her collection to Venice, donating it, and her palazzo, to the Guggenheim Foundation on her death in 1979. She is buried in the sculpture garden, next to her dogs.

Tag Cloud

External Information

Additional Information

Where Am I?