Louis Vuitton Foundation * All PYRENEES

The Louis Vuitton foundation is a corporate foundation created by the LVMH group and its brances. Its objective is to perpetuate the sponsorship actions undertaken since 1990 by the group.

The building that is the subject of the foundation is a museum, designed by the American-Canadian architect Frank Gehry, located in the Jardin d’Acclimatation, in the 16th arrondissement in the Bois de Boulogne of Paris (France).

It is particularly devoted to modern and contemporary art. This project, which was intended to be a response to the Pinault foundation established in Venice, is the media expression of the competition between the boss of the world number one luxury company Bernard Arnault and his rival François Pinault.

The inauguration of the building took place on October 20, 2014 in the presence of François Hollande, President of the Republic.

The significant multiplication of the cost initially planned for the construction of the building, a cost which is subject to tax deductions (up to three quarters of the expenses), led to a complaint being filed by an anti-corruption association in November 2018 against the Louis Vuitton foundation and the LVMH group for tax fraud and laundering. The complaint was dismissed in September 2019.

Museum

The two-story structure has 11 galleries of different sizes (in total 41,441 square feet), a voluminous 350-seat auditorium on the lower-ground floor and multilevel roof terraces for events and art installations.

Gehry had to build within the square footage and two-story volume of a bowling alley that previously stood on the site; anything higher had to be glass. The resulting glass building takes the form of a sailboat’s sails inflated by the wind. These glass sails envelop the “iceberg”, a series of shapes with white, flowery terraces.

The museum’s collection, believed to be a combination of works owned by LVMH and Bernard Arnault, include works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Gilbert & George, and Jeff Koons.

For site-specific installations, under the curatorship of Francesca Pietropaolo, the foundation commissioned works by Ellsworth Kelly, Olafur Eliasson, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (starring Scott Tixier and Tony Tixier), Sarah Morris, Taryn Simon, Cerith Wyn Evans, and Adrián Villar Rojas.