Two Shows for Frank Gehry, as His Vuitton Foundation Opens
PARIS — In a cultural twofer that makes it Frank Gehry week here, the Louis Vuitton Foundation, a private cultural center and contemporary-art museum designed by Mr. Gehry, had its official inaugural ceremony on Monday, attended by the French president, François Hollande. At the same time, the Pompidou Center across town is giving Mr. Gehry, based in Los Angeles, a major career retrospective, his first in Europe.
The Pompidou exhibition, “Frank Gehry,” establishes a narrative arc for a career that effectively started with small-scale, experimental wood-frame studios and houses in Southern California and culminates in the Vuitton Foundation in the Bois de Boulogne, which some critics have called one of the most technologically sophisticated, artistically motivated buildings of his oeuvre. A 126,000-square-foot, $135 million structure that formally opens to the public next Monday, it promises to add a major contemporary monument to Paris’s long list of historic architecture.
At the end of the ceremony, President Hollande described the building as a “cathedral of light” that was “a miracle of intelligence, creativity and technology.”
Frédéric Migayrou, the deputy director of the Pompidou, organized the full retrospective and a smaller boutique show of Mr. Gehry’s development drawings that will be on view at the Foundation. “This building doesn’t reveal itself at once, but over many encounters,” he said. “It’s a provocation for the viewer; you have to be part of it, as with an artwork where you make your own experience.”
Claude Parent, France’s 91-year-old éminence grise in architecture whose work in the 1950s and ’60s anticipated deconstructivism, said that when he first saw the Foundation building, “I was seized by an emotion so strong that it seemed to come from something other than architecture.” He called Mr. Gehry’s design “an act of unbridled imagination.”
Others describe the building less favorably. The architecture critic of The Guardian, Rohan Moore, known for his Spartan architectural attitudes, wrote dismissively, “Everything that is good about the Fondation could have been achieved, and better, without the sails.” Denis Lafay, writing in the online financial newspaper La Tribune, did not criticize the architecture but called the building the ostentatious result of an oligarch’s commodifying of artistic creation to burnish his own brand.
At the Foundation, Mr. Migayrou’s immersive show, “Voyage of Creation,” explains the building, with large-screen videos filmed from overhead cranes and drones that flew over and through the building.