A GLASS SHIP FOR ART

The prestigious building rises above the Jardin d'Acclimatation in the west of Paris like an enormous ship. Large glass elements reminiscent of sails and filigree strips of steel play around the structure. There are planted observation platforms underneath the delicate shell that visitors can access via stairs and bridges. A terraced fountain below the building creates the impression that the Fondation Louis Vuitton could set sail at any moment.

Works from the collection of Louis Vuitton have been on display here on eleven thousand square meters since late October, including site-specific works by artists such as Olafur Eliasson and Ellsworth Kelly. The luxury goods group Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton (LVMH), which also owns the famous fashion label Louis Vuitton, has rejuvenated Paris with the magnificent postmodern building and raised a monument to itself. Bernard Arnault, the majority shareholder and chairman of the group for decades, financed the project out of his own pocket. He remains silent about the associated costs. President François Hollande even attended the opening in order to bathe in the luster of the building.

Nearly fifteen years elapsed between the first design and the completed museum. An entire army of engineers—said to have totaled two hundred—had to fall into line in order to realize the technically bold undertaking. Frank Gehry, one of whose most illustrious projects is the Guggenheim Museum in the Spanish city of Bilbao, is renowned for his deconstructivist buildings. The Los Angeles-based architect received the prestigious Pritzker Prize for its design in the late 1980s. With the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the more than eighty-year-old genius strikes out with yet another lofty gesture. He says that he wanted to create a ship for the cultural nation of France.

With its cubist construction, the museum has the appearance of a work by Picasso that has been transformed into a building. It is not easy for the works on display in this monumental late work by Gehry to assert themselves. It is presumably for this reason that the labyrinthine and consecutively numbered galleries distributed throughout the structure are so low-key: cubical, white, with gray flooring and simple spotlights. Rectangles that seem to have been cut out of a sheet of ice let light into several of the galleries from above.

One of the highlights is, for example, a film by the French shooting star Pierre Huyghe. For "A Journey That Wasn't" (2005) he traveled to the Antarctic accompanied by a group of artists and scientists. They filmed albino penguins and captured fascinating images and sounds of the landscape, which is changing due to global warming. For a second part of the work, Huyghe restaged the landscape for the public in New York's Central Park: a mystical spectacle with artificial ice, billows of water vapor, flickering floodlights, and a futuristic soundscape composed by Joshua Cody and Elliott Sharp and performed by a symphony orchestra.

Christian Boltanski's "6. September" (2005) also leaves a lasting impression. News images from each sixth of September--Boltanski's birthday--between 1944 and 2004 that were collected in international television archives flash across three screens at a dizzying pace. Wars, natural disasters, and major social events become a torrent of images of mediatized history accompanied by squealing sounds that visitors can halt by pressing red buzzers for the purpose of looking at individual images, and then let back into the river of time.

The up-and-coming talent Oliver Beer fills a space with the performative sound installation "Composition for a New Museum" (2014): a male or female singer stands with his or her face to the wall in one of each of the corners, singing and producing sounds that interact with the architecture. The artist Cerith Wyn Evans also works with sound and space: his sound sculpture "A=F=L=O=A=T" (2014) hangs at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, an octopus comprised of about twenty glass flutes into which air is blown through transparent tubes, filling the space with a vague carpet of sound

One of the largest galleries is devoted to Gerhard Richter. Besides several late, abstract works, his painting "Hirsch" (Deer, 1963) is also on display. Two further German artists supplied monumental works: Thomas Schütte presents his monstrous sculpture "Mann im Matsch" (Man in Mud, 2009), and one of Isa Genzken's gigantic roses, "Rose II," greets visitors in the foyer.

Arnault's collection includes even more works, of course, which will be exhibited in the future. Special exhibitions with contemporary works are furthermore planned. A presentation on the building itself can still be viewed on the ground floor. It includes, among other things, the notebook Gehry filled with spontaneous sketches after his first meeting with Arnault while flying back to Los Angeles, as well as models and fast-motion films made of the construction process. After all, the building does have to celebrate itself a little bit.