The French gallerist Kamel Mennour announced on Thursday that he is making an expansive donation of 180 works by 45 artists to Paris’s Musée d’art moderne.
Among them, says the gallery in a statement, are works by leading interntional names such as Alicja Kwade, Zineb Sedira, Anish Kapoor, Daniel Buren, Ugo Rondinone and Lee Ufan. Other prominent artists represented in the donation include Douglas Gordon, Camille Henrot, Huang Yong Ping, Tadashi Kawamata and Philippe Parreno.
“Together, these artists reflect the diversity, vision and influence that have defined the gallery’s programme since its founding,” the statement said.
Kamel Mennour opened his first gallery in 1999 in Paris’s Saint Germain des Prés neighbourhood and went on to become one of the city’s most prominent dealers. He opened three more spaces on the Left Bank however, in contrast to many of his contemporaries, he did not establish any locations abroad. This is because, he tells The Art Newspaper, he “wanted to stay close to his family”.
On why he chose to part with such a large amount of works, Mennour says he was inspired the New York based German dealer Michael Werner, who gave 127 paintings and sculptures to the same museum in 2012.
“Last autumn, we were celebrating the gallery’s 25th anniversary and the idea took shape,” he says.
“When I was a student—in economics, destined to become quite a bad banker before I changed course—I would go to the [Musée d’art modern] and be thrilled by everything I saw.
“I am 59, and I thought: what will I do with all this stock we have got from the artists we loved?”, he continues. “I thought it would make sense to give something back to the museum, which has offered me and my city such great joys. I sat down with the [museum’s] director, Fabrice Hergott, to make a first selection and everything went quite smoothly. It was all very natural. He offered me a 1,700 sq m space to stage an exhibition around the donation in 2027”.
The donation list, which including works from both the gallery and Kamel’s personal collections, is not complete and may be subject to changes before being submitted to the official commissions.
“This donation will considerably strengthen the contemporary section of our galleries”, Fabrice Hergott told Le Figaro. He adds that the museum was able to open, in 1961, thanks to the dealer Maurice Girardin’s bequest of 533 works by Picasso, Derain, Matisse and more. Girardin was a long-standing arts patron who, when he first proposed a donation to the city of Paris, in 1926, was gently turned down because his collection was deemed “too modern”.
Signs of change
Private donations to museums are not very common in France, where the state is heavily involved in cultural matters. There are signs, however, that things are changing.
The Musée d’art moderne says it has received more than 800 works since 2007. These have included gifts from the estates of artists such as Josef Albers and Zao Wou Ki.
The gallery owner Emmanuel Perrotin, meanwhile, has recently given Paris’s Pompidou Centre—currently closed for the next five years—23 works from artists including Maurizio Cattelan, Laurent Grasso and Takashi Murakami.
The billionaire collectors Bernard Arnault and François Pinault also changed the modern and contemporary art landscape in Paris by opening private museums there—the Fondation Louis Vuitton and Bourse de Commerce respectively.
