The Louvre might be the biggest tourist draw in Paris, but it’s far from the most engaging. The comparatively new Fondation Louis Vuitton – opened in 2014 – is an extravagant, ultra-modern complex designed by the late Frank Gehry on the west side of Paris in the Bois du Bologne.
Fondation Louis Vuitton is a celebrity museum, a forum for the art elite and a stage for one man’s collection. This 800 million euro project doesn’t belong to Paris. It belongs to Bernard Arnaud, CEO of LVMH. In turn, LVMH is Europe’s most valuable company, owning luxury brands Louis Vuitton, Hennessy cognac, Dior, Celine, Tiffany, Moët & Chandon champagne, Sephora and all the rest.
The new museum is so dramatic I felt a certain discomfort walking 30 minutes from the FLV to the quaint Marmottan Musée Monet on the edge of timeless Passy, pondering how the classical age has surrendered once and for all to modernity. The Louis Vuitton is exactly what you’d expect with Europe’s richest man and tastemaker pulling the strings – an understated monument to contemporary art, designed by the same architect who designed the Guggenheim in Bilbao.
When I asked about the museum’s permanent collection, I got a sigh from the young woman at the reception desk and one of those “oh, you poor simple soul” looks. There is no permanent collection. It’s all Arnaud’s personal collection, along with shows featuring the star-powered exhibitions by Ellsworth Kelly, Rothko, Warhol, Hockney, Basquiat, Cindy Sherman, Joan Mitchell and the show I saw, German artist Gerhard Richter.
Open galleries compared to the Louvre
The Louvre got about 10 million visitors in 2023, the FLV got about 1.5 million, so on quiet days like the one I visited before Christmas, Fondation Louis Vuitton feels quite empty. The Richter show was in galleries on the ground floor as well as on the first floor, so I saw a lot of the building. But there are also halls for talks, concerts and meeting spaces. When you go up the back stairs, there’s a room with a video overview of the museum’s construction. But there’s so much more … public spaces and water features.
Even a scene from the most recent season “Emily in Paris” was shot in an auditorium at the Louis Vuitton.
The exterior is a Gehry-esque rambling, shapeless jumble of glass structures. Inside, it’s vast and open until you move into the galleries, some oddly cramped and dark.
No ‘style’ but his own compulsions
To be honest, I didn’t particularly go to see the building. I went to see a retrospective of one of my favorite contemporary artists, the German chameleon Gerhard Richter, an artist who is, as far as I can determine, still working at 93.
Here’s the thing about Richter: he’s the most influential artist of the 21st century, yet no one can get a bead on him. He’s all over the place. Read anything about him, and all the would-be biographers and critics draw different and contradictory conclusions.
What we can say without fear of contradiction is this is a highly skilled technical painter, scarred by German Cold War chaos, viewing the world without emotion. The Louis Vuitton retrospective ran the gamut from paintings of dead Baader-Meinhof Red Army Faction terrorists to room-long meditations on color.
My theory is, Richter paints pictures of nothing. Well, not nothing, but paints without prejudice whatever pops into his chaotic mind.
He’s so talented that he’s been able to support himself while switching back and forth between abstract projects only he understands and vivid, inexplicably accessible and wonderous paintings.
His “style” ranges from the mundane to the wildly conventional. Studies of the color gray … literally, gray paint on a canvas give way without explanation to incredibly detailed photo-realism. By far, though, most of his work looks like photos shot through a 120mm lens at f2.0, dreamlike and blurry with narrow focal planes. And he also enjoys scraping painted surfaces something fierce.
My favorite painting of the exhibit was his 1972 copy of a Titian painting, “Annunciation,” displayed in the same gallery as his deconstruction of “Annunciation” into its essential colors and shapes. This is a guy who’s always puzzling past what he is seeing to what he could be seeing.
Brilliant. A fitting exhibition for one of Europe’s most avant-garde museums.
The details:
The Richter exhibition runs through 2 March 2026.
Fondation Louis Vuitton is at 8 Avenue du Mahatma Ghandi in the 18th arrondissement next to Jardin d’Acclimatation park.
Admission to the museum is 14 euros. There’s a café, Restaurant Frank, with a range of offerings and prices. I had the duck confiture and a coke for about 30 euros.
Co-CEO of Dispatches Europe. A former military reporter, I'm a serial expat who has lived in France, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands.
