Artprice lifts the veil on the new Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris - Seite 2

The United States, the UK and Germany will be generously represented, as will many other nationalities. Among the Europeans there will be Alighiero Boetti, Maurizio Cattelan, Ugo Rondinone and Bas Jan Ader. From the more distant cultures we should see works by the Canadian artist Agnes Martin and the Lebanese artists Mona Hatoum and Akraam Zaatari.

From Asia we expect to find works by the prolific Takashi Murakami (Japan), Zhang Huan (China) and Nam June Paik (South Korea).

Indeed, the Louis Vuitton Foundation has clearly demonstrated its desire to build bridges between East and West and it was probably no coincidence when it chose Hong Kong to unveil part of his collection in 2009 with a show that included works by Richard Prince, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Gilbert & George... alongside works by a number of young artists.

This recipe will be reiterated in the new building with, for the first exhibition, works by artists Atoui Tarek (1980), Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (1965) and Olafur Eliasson (1967) exhibited alongside one of the grand masters of minimalism, Ellsworth Kelly, and his superb hard-edge paintings.

Three generations of artists side by side: audio performances, videos, photography and gigantic pieces integrated into the building's structure will all resonate around the work of the American painter born in 1923.

There will also be a large space dedicated to the building's architect, Frank Gehry, with drawings and models presented in a delightful mise-en-abyme of his work.

The strength of the Louis Vuitton Foundation is underpinned by its dynamism and its inspiration. In the first place there is Bernard Arnault himself. But there is also his entire team headed by his  Artistic Director, Suzanne Pagé, who perfectly understands the power of art and of discretion.

Bringing the works together, appreciating their relationship and imagining the overall coherence of an exhibition is a daunting challenge that the former director of the Museum of Modern Art of Paris - considered one of the most gifted curators of our time - meets with brio.

Avant-gardiste, she has built up a private collection focusing on the works of art themselves, their quality and their place in the collection, rather than on their value and profitability as investments. Any collection worthy of the name has intrinsic value... it participates in the history of the works within it.

Isn't it precisely what the great collectors of the 19th and 20th century taught us?

And this is exactly the tradition that the Louis Vuitton Foundation promises to pursue with the opening of this new space dedicated to Contemporary art in the French capital. Focusing on what is happening today and the best works created in the recent past, the space will continually seek to identify the links between young artists and their peers, between those we are slowly starting to be recognized and the grand masters who inspired them.