Category: Collector
Nationality: French
Last Year: 8

This is Pinault’s eighth straight year at the top end of the Power 100, and in each of these, the soft-spoken, self-made tycoon has managed, in one way or another, to have a colossal impact on the arc of contemporary art. Whether buying and opening the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 2006, upsetting the artworld with the purchase (through his auction house, Christie’s) and subsequent expansion from London and Zurich to Berlin and New York of the gallery Haunch of Venison in 2007 or partially bankrolling Koons’s occupation of the Château de Versailles in 2008, Pinault’s big-fish movements in the little pond of contemporary art are impossible to ignore. This last year was no exception, beginning with the Palazzo Grassi’s hosting of Italics, an unorthodox survey of Italian art from 1968 to 2008 curated by Francesco Bonami and featuring more than a hundred artists. The polemical exhibition sparked its fair share of controversy (for instance, Jannis Kounellis refused to participate because he thought it warped the history of Arte Povera) and cavalierly inconvenienced the history books. Meanwhile, after winning a bid on Venice’s Punta della Dogana in 2008 against the Guggenheim, Pinault had the seventeenth-century customs house restored and refurbished by Japanese starchitect Tadao Ando in 14 months. With great fanfare Pinault inaugurated this addition to his contemporary art empire during the opening of the biennial, with Mapping the Studio, curated by Bonami and Alison Gingeras. Although reviews of the show were certainly mixed, the utter magnificence of the third richest man in France’s gesture was, well, magnificent.