A New Paris Museum Shows the Best in Cutting-Edge Art

The Pinault Collection at the Bourse offers provocative art — minus the usual lectures on guilt and grievance.

I n the past month, I’ve been hither and yon, two or three days here and then two or three days there, and have two meaty Paris topics left. Today I’ll write about the Bourse de Commerce, or the Bourse, for the sake of economy. It’s the new museum of contemporary art in Paris’s impressively renovated and repurposed old commodities-exchange hub. It’s now the Paris home for the collection of luxury mogul François Pinault (b. 1936). It’s bleeding-edge and very good. Originally from rural Brittany, Pinault moved from his father’s timber business to owning prestige vineyards, Gucci, high-end cruise lines, and Hollywood talent agencies. His holding company bought Christie’s in 1998. He’s a billionaire many times over.

Pinault first collected blue-chip French modern artists such as Picasso, Rothko, Miro, and Mondrian but soon went now, first with Jeff Koons and then to Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, Donald Judd, Cindy Sherman, and many more big names as well as many new artists I didn’t know.

Le Monde comme il va, or The World As It Goes, is the title and general theme of the part of the Pinault collection on view when I visited. The title draws from a character in a story by Voltaire written in 1748. “How can you hold so much lowliness and so much grandeur, so much virtue and so much crime?” he asks of humanity. It’s an apt question for any age, and the art prompts us to think about it in the context of today. It might as well be called “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” There’s comfort to be had in parlous times. For better or worse, things stay more or less the same.

I’d never heard of Sun Yuan (b. 1972) and Peng Yu (b. 1974), two Chinese artists. I’ll not forget either them or their collaborative installation Old People’s Home, from 2007. It’s a defining work in the Bourse’s show. In a big gallery, 13 life-size sculptures of old men, each in a wheelchair, slowly, strangely move and sometimes gently collide. Some are bearded, some doze, some wear military uniforms, some are in ceremonial tails. It looks like a session of the U.S. Senate, or a G-20 emirati bash. Each figure might have been a president or general or minister or religious leader. Visitors walk among them, not dodging them, since they’re moving at far less than 1 mph. They’re half dead. All might have done some good. Many might have meant well. Some — and we might conjure an aged Arafat or a Jimmy Carter or a Hugo Chávez — were once havoc-wreakers. Now they’re just idle droolers. The piece is a vanitas on wheels.

Old People’s Home is grand, pungent, charming, weird, and cryptic. Pinault’s taste allows for all of the above.

Pinault’s two art spaces were, until the Bourse, in Venice, and what locations. He displays his art at the Palazzo Grassi, the classical-inspired Grand Canal palace built in the mid 1700s, and, since 2007, at the Punta della Dogana, among the most fabulous bits of real estate on land or, in this case, sea. His museum there is on the tip of Dorsoduro, by Santa Maria della Salute, and was Venice’s main customs house when the Republic of Venice — La Serenissima — was the point of entry from the Near East, India, and China for much of what made a hedonist’s life worth living. Standing on the edge of the Dogana, looking at St. Mark’s, the Doge’s Palace, San Giorgio Maggiore, and the bustle of boats in the Grand Canal, we can still catch the scents of ducats, silk, spice, and power, fortified by sea breezes, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese.

But for Pinault, Venice is an ornament. It might be a fine Champagne Jacquesson, a pleated Yves Saint Laurent turban, with a sequined palm leaf, or a diamond roundell by Boucheron, each a brand Pinault owns. Paris, though, is Paris, the City of Light, the City of Love, the city, in Casablanca, we’ll always have. It’s where Pinault wanted his art shown, and shown in splendor, in, as Cole Porter wrote, winter, spring, summer, fall, when it sizzles and drizzles.

It took Pinault 20 years and $191 million to find, develop, and open a Paris showplace for his art, but money, grit, charm, and cases of Château Latour won over the characteristic intransigence of French pencil pushers. The Bourse premiered in late 2021. It was worth the wait.

In American contemporary-art shows, we’re often slathered with left-wing tripe from curatorial pharisees. It’s earnest, dull finger-wagging over woes gone by, all in the cause of making us feel guilty. It’s an unusual way to engage visitors. The French don’t try to guillotine visitor curiosity or high spirits. They ask questions. They let people think for themselves. It’s the permanent collection, too, so its theme can be broader and looser. There wasn’t a temporary traveling exhibition on view, so I could focus on Pinault’s building and art.

Some things work and some don’t, but that’s fine. I’ll go back again. With the Hôtel de la Marine, it’s a vibrant new player in Paris’s art scene.

A sensual people, the French like looking at art. As the world turns, the show asks, is it the automated robots of Sun Yuan and Peng Su, Salman Toor’s ghosts, or Cindy Sherman’s disguises? Or something else? Yes, the world is anxious, conflicted, and turbulent, but the art on view doesn’t depress. It makes us feel more alive and more aware. There’s no set route through the galleries, which is very good and very French. Most American museums would have gone command-and-control, but I rambled in and out, soupçon style.

Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) is, a gallery label tells us, the queen of metamorphoses. She’s a favorite of mine and Pinault’s. Untitled could be Norma Desmond waiting for her close-up, though Sherman also can present herself as a monster, a flapper, a clown, or the snakebit Marion in Psycho. Untitled, from 2016, depicts a woman who’s modern in that she looks freed from a corset, but her gestures are obsolete. Her hat, gloves, boa, and arch expression date her to the years between the two world wars. Another, also from 2016, depicts a woman dressed in elegant 1920s seaside attire, her gestures mannered. She’s set against a faux-Mediterranean landscape. Both look like they’re posing for a Vogue fashion shoot. In a gallery off the rotunda, Untitled also tells us, since it’s Sherman, that nothing is what it seems in today’s world. Codes are obscure. The in-the-know elite is tiny and warped. Transparency is prized, but hidden agendas rule.

One Thousand and One Nights is grand and perverse. It’s by Mohammed Sami (b. 1984), who lives in London now but, until 2007, lived in beautiful downtown Baghdad. It’s also 18 feet wide and a sweeping nocturne with a title that evokes magic and mystery, Arabian style. I’m a sucker for nocturnes big and small. This one, from 2022, proves that the nocturne genre, dating from Giorgione, has plenty of kick left. It’s lovely and, with a plush sofa near it, begs to be perused. Sami, in painting his nocturne, used night-vision goggles, and the bursts of light could suggest Van Gogh’s Starry Night or George W. Bush’s shock and awe. Or, for me, an immersive night sky that Frederic Church would have envied. Or all of the above.

Salman Toor (b. 1983) is a wonderful, Lahore-born-and-bred painter who now lives in New York City. I wish I’d bought his work when he was an unknown. Ghost Ball, from 2023, is one of his harlequin scenes, bohemian with a green, nightmare palette, as if a Fragonard romp scene collided with a Goya Capricho.

I’d never heard of Peter Fischli (b. 1952) and David Weiss (1946–2012), two Swiss artists who worked together. Suddenly This Overview is a group of 76 small hand-molded clay sculptures they made between 1981 and 2012 described as a “partial history of humanity through numerous snippets.” Some of the sculptures are absurdist snapshots like Mr. And Mrs. Einstein Shortly after the Conception of Their Son, the Genius Albert or Panic in the Audience When Lumière Shows His Film. Others, such as The Nerd, depict types.

This Overview works via the individual sculptures, which are independent works of art, or a collective, which is the artists’ take on humanity as a proposition. Pinault isn’t much for the small, intimate work of art. Rather, he likes the big statement and the ensemble. I saw F***ing Hell, by the Chapman Brothers, a two-brother pair of British artists, right after Pinault’s Dogana museum opened. I’ll never forget it. It’s nine cases laid out in a swastika form and displaying 30,000 tiny fiberglass and plastic skeletons of Nazi soldiers fighting in the style of Fibber McGee’s cascading closet. It’s crazy, and Pinault has a taste for crazy that defines both our world today and our species through time.

Some of the art works less well. Hole in the Wall, by British conceptual artist Ryan Gander (b. 1976), from 2019, is a tiny hole in a gallery wall by the floor through which a mechanical mouse protrudes, stammering and babbling in the voice of a little girl. It’s “surprising,” as the label notes. The mouse sounds eerily like Christine Blasey Ford. Blasey Ford meets Topo Gigio from the Ed Sullivan Show. What an unsettling combo. That mouse is followed by another, different mouse, saying, “You can be anything you want if you put your mind to it.” The voice isn’t Blasey Ford’s but Gander’s little daughter so at least I knew I wasn’t listening to a fruitcake. A third mouse tells us that humans have the gift of language, which means we can tell stories and assemble knowledge. It’s too cute by half, and too weird.

Anne Imhof’s Untitled is a punching bag hanging from a rack. Imhof (b. 1978) is German. The object “conveys a kind of violence that testifies to our contemporary malaise,” the label reads. Donnez-moi un break. There’s a punching bag that looks just like this in my fitness center. There’s no malaise to be found when I’m using it, thinking as I do of bosses I didn’t like. Work by bores like Christopher Wool and Damian Hirst were on display somewhere at the Bourse, but I didn’t look for them. It’s a big place.

The Japanese architect Tadao Ando renovated the Bourse as well as Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi and Dogana locations. As in the two Venice locations, Ando and Pinault together created a perfect space. The Bourse was built in 1767 as the corn exchange, and an elegant corn exchange it was. It’s round, quoting the Pantheon in Rome. An 1886 overhaul added a fancy façade and interior Corinthian columns as well as a ceiling mural in high French Academic style depicting trade among the five inhabited continents. Ando inserted a handsome 90-foot-wide concrete drum of a space within the central rotunda. This houses galleries and a performance space. Ando did a great job creating a beautiful, comfortable, and practical new museum.

Outside, Horse and Rider signals to visitors that they’ve arrived. It’s a stainless-steel equestrian statue by Charles Ray (b. 1953). Ray says he subverts the heroic equestrian statues of the past by depicting a rider who looks more like Watteau’s comic, pathetic, disenchanted Pierrot than St. Gaudens’s General Sherman. I’m not overwhelmed by it as a work of art, but it’s big and shiny and marks the spot. Climate kooks have already attacked it.

The Bourse’s panoramic ceiling murals are about 350 feet long and 25 feet high, so the program is a big stretch of art. Five painters labored to create not merely an ode to international trade but an opera, with France’s business prowess and reach as the stars. Finished in 1889, it was among the off-site attractions of Paris’s Exposition Universelle, or world’s fair, along with the Eiffel Tower. The fair celebrated France as the supreme flower of human creativity but also marked the 100th anniversary of the start of the French Revolution and the birth of liberté, égalité, and fraternité.

Yes, the panorama is Eurocentric, and there are some racial and ethnic stereotypes, but the French don’t turn flagellant over them, as would Americans, and there are no trigger warnings to be found. France’s colonial history, especially in Africa, was the French not at their best but rather nearly at their worst, which, since they’re French, is high-test malignant. Still, the murals are about business, and Pinault is a businessman, and, overall, free enterprise brings wealth, comfort, and opportunity for a broad swath of humanity. That’s nothing to cry about.

I saw this iteration of the Bourse in progress. Some of the galleries weren’t installed yet. I looked at the objects list, though, and, between what I saw in mid March and the finished installation, I’m happy to see that the place isn’t a den of woe, guilt, and grievance.

I’m writing this on Easter, which in the United States is, sayeth the White House, the annual Day of Transgender Visibility. There are no transgender-art gymnastics at the Bourse, no racism art, no climate hysteria, and no genocide hallucinations. It’s not that race, gender, sexuality, class, history, and the weather don’t make for good art. Putting aside the punching bag, Pinault collects art that’s enigmatic, various, and nuanced, even when it’s bold. There’s work by Jeff Koons, which looks like a balloon toy as well as a Trojan Horse packed with the deceits shiny things hide. Luc Tuymans’s Eternity, from 2021, looks like a beautiful abstract painting, but it’s modeled after a photograph of a glass dome that a German physicist made in 1937 to model a hydrogen bomb explosion. Pinault doesn’t collect billboard art or grudge art or hoax art. The worm’s almost never one-dimensional. What a joy, and how rare it is for me to like something that’s un-American, or at least unlike the contemporary art in many American museums.

The Bourse does ambitious loan shows. I’d just missed a Mike Kelley retrospective, which wasn’t the end of my world. This fall, the Bourse is doing a survey of the Arte Povera movement, whose peak was in Italy in the late 1960s and early ’70s. “Arte povera” means “poor art,” and it’s not art about the poor but, rather, concept art made from rags, soil, junk, straw, twigs, coal, sacks of potatoes, and whatever else that seemed to present an aesthetic opportunity.

American contemporary-art curators would benefit from a visit to the Bourse, especially those who are prone to that weird American complex blending neurasthenia and spleen. Visitors to the Bourse might not like everything, but it’s provocative, packed with surprises, serious, and fun.