Features February 2022
The Maecenases
On the Pinault Collection at the Bourse de Commerce and the Morozov Collection at the Fondation Louis Vuitton.
The Marquis de Custine, in his great book Russia in 1839, remarks, in connection with the military parades of which Tsar Nicholas I was inordinately fond, that tyrannies command immense efforts to bring forth trifles. I confess that this remark was often uppermost in my mind as I toured the Pinault Collection in the restored Bourse de Commerce in Paris: not, of course, that billionaires such as M. Pinault can properly be called tyrants.
François Pinault is one of the richest men in France, even the world, with a fortune estimated at about $50 billion. No doubt it is difficult to know how to use such a fortune constructively (a problem that I have never had to face), but to the extent that M. Pinault has used it to collect contemporary art, I...
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